Frequently Asked Questions

What is Literatu?
What don't we do?
Who is Literatu?  what’s the background of the company?
What are the core capabilities of Literatu? What are the 4 most important teacher 
features delivered by Literatu?

What is the most important outcome Literatu delivers for Teachers?
What market does Literatu focus on?
Who gets the most out of Literatu?
How does Literatu , better engage student attention and focus?
Is Literatu just another Learning Management System (LMS)?
How is Literatu delivered to schools and colleges?
Environment – where is the site – where is the data?
What level of staff resources do I need as a school to run Literatu?
How does marking work? We have a mix of multiple choice, short form questions and long form essay type questions that we have to mark every week.

What is Literatu?

Literatu lets teachers deliver any activity onto any device, in minutes.  Literatu delivers a unique capability for schools and teachers to transform any paper-based or digital teaching materials, from any source, into powerful, online interactive activities that engage students across web, tablets and iPad.

What don't we do?

Literatu never dictates to a teacher what application they must use to develop their learning intention, interactions and pedagogy. Just the thought of content transposition and re-creation is a waste of time. Add value to content but don't re-write it. The last thing this world needs is more Maths questions in new content formats. Maths is but one example of the global over supply of materials, interacive and static. Right now, ( too late) Google holds links to 11,700,000 Year 7 maths questions. Do you think we need more Maths questions or more students better at Maths?

The value of learning a new "authoring" and presentation system for content, we believe is a moot point.  If a teacher is comfortable using Word, so be it. If a teacher wants to use Power Point or One Note to create something for the class, go right ahead. You see Literatu is not out to command how teachers work, we are here to support any way they want to work. Systems that command the content and then regiment the delivery, once thay have your content, are opportunistic and not platform based. Literatu is passionate about the openess of teaching, the ability of  teachers to do good for students any way they can and the efficiences teachers can achieve in so doing. 

Who is Literatu?  what’s the background of the company?

Literatu was created with a single mission, to let teachers create any type of student learning activity, from any source and deploy instantly to any device students had access to.

Prior to the release of the Literatu platform the core product was known as Makebook, an award winning educational platform. Makebook won two major international awards for providing an innovative platform for teachers to improve a student’s writing abilities.

Today, Literatu delivers a digital platform for schools and colleges to better engage and measure their students using their own content and assessment practices, across any subject, language and level.

Literatu is fully integrated with Google Apps and Edmodo, allowing teachers to seamlessly integrate interactive activities across any device. User management and content is completely integrated making Literatu a platform, within a platform.

Literatu is working with many teachers and K-12 content publishers, who are transferring paper-based texts into digital curriculum activities and assessments.

What are the core capabilities of Literatu?

Literatu delivers unique capabilities to schools, teachers and students, simply and quickly.

1. The ability to transform current paper based assessments, review / class practice work, homework or any other digital or paper file formats into interactive activities / assessments, quickly and easily.
    
2. Literatu allows teachers to build multiple levels of interactivity over base content, defining the answers, providing helpful guidance, describing how marking works and other pedagogical links to assist students as they answer.
    
3. Literatu allows Teachers to quickly assign activities to students for completion. Students can complete activities on web, iPad or Android tablets. Teachers have a streamlined marking process that gives them much more time for feedback.
    
4. Online marking capabilities are extremely efficient. Teachers auto or manually mark activities across the entire class quicker and more effectively than ever before. Both long form written compositions and short form marking is supported complete with rubric scores and text annotation.
    
5. Interactive dashboards capture and report live results at many levels of assessment. Because Literatu holds the questions, answers and curriculums against which the questions are tagged, Literatu reports instant, meaningful metrics at many levels. Much of this information is unique to Literatu because so much detail is recorded about the student interaction.

What are the 4 most important teacher 
features delivered by Literatu?


1. Teachers easily transform their paper or digital activity content into interactive digital learning activities, in minutes. BYOD is fully supported, allowing every teacher to reach any student, on any device. There are no access barriers with Literatu. Literatu is cloud based, giving teachers and students anywhere, anytime access.
    
2. Literatu tracks student activity, progress and results, to better measure against school and community learning standards. Teachers have live dashboards that dynamically report and  track student interaction as they complete activities.
    
3. Literatu helps teachers adapt and personalise interactions with students, parents and other community stakeholders. Everyone is on the same page with the same set of results.
    
4. Literatu helps teachers better monitor and manage the specific needs of individual students, quickly responding to their needs. Activities can be shared across communities.

What is the most important outcome Literatu delivers for Teachers?

Using Literatu, teachers have complete content control over the devices students love to learn with. It’s that simple.

Across multiple devices, for any subject, for any level, in any language, teachers have a single platform to command the screens of their students. Teachers create and deliver many types of interactive student engagements using any familiar application.

Be it One Note, PowerPoint, Word or Google Apps, whatever teachers are familiar with, Literatu caters for all base content sources. With no technical knowledge required, Literatu allows teachers to transform the creation and delivery of authentic learning activities.

What market does Literatu focus on?

Literatu is focused on the K- 12 and higher education marketplace. 

Who are the people who get the most from Literatu?

Teachers and students are the two stakeholders who get the most benefit from Literatu. Teachers extend their personal and adaptive relationship with students; students have new ways to closely engage with activities and be individually monitored by their teachers and mentors.

Principals can look across the school at any level, curriculum, teacher or student.

How does Literatu , better engage student attention and focus?

In 2001, Mark Prensky coined the term “digital native”. As you would expect, Wikipedia now holds the definition. “ A digital native is a young person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technology, and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts.”

Prensky went on to say, Digital Natives “are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” The Education system lags behind. Literatu has set out to help close this gap.

We designed Literatu to better join teachers with Digital Natives. At the simplest level, Literatu allows teachers to transform any type of source content into rich interactive materials for Digital Natives, on any device they want to use. The first step is to give teachers the tools and confidence to engage and connect with the Digital Natives.

Is Literatu just another Learning Management System (LMS)?

No, Literatu is not an LMS. We have gone to a lot of trouble to stay away from building another LMS. Literatu software can be run stand-alone mode  by any school or college and with the added advantage of being delivered in the cloud, which is something that many LMS systems do not do well, or at all.

We believe LMS systems have been inefficient for many years, consuming valuable resources that should have been deployed to give teachers more flexibility, tools and options.

Literatu focuses on improving the assessment process, rather than the delivery of chat, blog, file-upload, and large volumes of multi-layered courseware. Literatu allows teachers to deploy activities that support their teaching.

Literatu fully integrates with Google Apps and is an approved Google Education App. Literatu also fully integrates with Edmodo

How is Literatu delivered to schools and colleges?

Literatu is a cloud-based application that requires no school infrastructure other than an Internet WiFi connection. Teachers and students can interact with Literatu via web, Android tablets and iPad. The iPad application is available in the App store, Android applications are available via Google Play and Samsung stores.

Literatu is fully integrated with Google App domains used by schools. Literatu is available for installation from the Google Apps for Education store. Literatu also fully integrates with Edmodo.

Environment – where is the site – where is the data?

All Literatu school communities are internet cloud-based. All access is via Internet browser based. Literatu is hosted on Amazon EC2 cloud servers delivering 99.9% uptime.

Most data in Literatu can be downloaded into Excel spread sheets via Teacher and Community Administrator functionality.

Each school community is unique and available only to members of the community as invited by teachers and community administrators.

What level of staff resources do I need as a school to run Literatu?

Every community needs a Community Administrator, who is responsible to ultimately manage the access granted to teachers and students.

Once the platform is in place, teachers invite students to classes via a simple class access key. On entry of the access key, the student is admitted to the class and is ready for action. Teachers can manage classes flexibly and very simply.

School administrators invite teachers to be involved in the school via entry of a teacher access key.

How does marking work? We have a mix of multiple choice, short form questions and long form essay type questions that we have to mark every week.

Marking is one of the best features in Literatu. It is designed to be efficient and ergonomic, minimising teacher-marking fatigue. Questions can be set to auto-mark, be teacher marked, or not marked.

Literatu automatically marks questions. The recorded correct answer is analysed and feedback given immediately when the activity is submitted.

Manually marked questions are aggregated for the teachers across each activity. Teachers mark each question across the class in a single marking interface. For example, all student answers to question 12, across the class, can be shown to the teacher. The marking capabilities include flexible marking criteria, annotation and highlighting.

Long form writing compositions can be annotated and marked against a marking rubric.