Mega Seating Plan: more than just a seating chart
It has been suggested that making seating plans is the bane of many educators’ existence, which is why educator turned entrepreneur, Rob Cowen, created Mega Seating Plan, a digital tool that instantly generates classroom seating plans, giving teachers more time to be teachers.
Having built the app and company from scratch in 2015, Mega Seating Plan joins Skolon’s international library of more than 5,500 digital tools, resources, services and apps for education. We caught up with Rob as he shares his insights, describing the tool and why it’s available through Skolon.
Let’s explore more about Mega Seating Plan!
Rob, what is Mega Seating Plan and how does it work?
Mega Seating Plan is a fantastically useful tool that helps teachers in more ways than one. With our tool, teachers can import classes either manually or automatically via Skolon and design the layout of their classrooms. With just a few clicks, they have a seating plan, including student data together with photos of each individual. Students can be automatically sorted based on their data, and the teacher can then drag and drop to fine-tune or create the entire seating arrangement from scratch.
What are the opportunities and who can use Mega Seating Plan?
Mega Seating Plan saves time for teachers. On average, it takes 182 seconds to perfect a seating plan.
Teachers around the world are using Mega Seating Plan to arrange students in their classrooms in the most effective ways for learning, including using Kagan seating plans. The smart tools for arranging classrooms automatically, can group or separate students by attainment, allowing students to support or challenge each other.
Mega Seating Plan also includes extra tools to make teachers’ lives even easier. The name learning tool (and accompanying iOS/Android app) uses low-stakes quizzing to help teachers learn their students’ names rapidly at the start of the year. Magic Reports uses AI to help teachers write reports and references for their students.
The behaviour management tools allow teachers to effortlessly add achievement/behaviour points to their students, and allow administrators to monitor conduct across their school.
The latest addition to Mega Seating Plans classroom management tools is a comprehensive homework management system. Teachers can assign homework tasks to their classes and share with students either offline, by email or via Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams. This will soon by complemented by an AI-powered homework resource generator.
Addressing the Time-Sink: Beyond Seating Plans
Rob’s goal for Mega Seating Plan has always been to tackle the ‘tedious, time-consuming tasks’ that get in the way of teaching. He set out to save teachers hours by reducing the time needed to create a seating chart from potentially an hour per class down to seconds.
This mission has since expanded to addressing other administrative burdens. The current priority is homework management, a task Rob remembers as sucking time out of a lesson.
“You want to go and check they’ve done the homework… you spend five minutes at least walking around the room checking they’ve done it, making a note of it, recording that somewhere,” he explains.
Mega Seating Plan is developing a system to remove these barriers, allowing teachers to efficiently check homework and record completion without taking valuable time away from instruction. The goal is to continuously provide tools that chip away at the non-teaching tasks that dominate a teacher’s time, making their professional lives easier.
The Future Focus: Making Teachers’ Lives Easier
For Rob, the core purpose of Mega Seating Plan is to remove barriers so teachers can focus on making an impact in their own classrooms. He believes the most valuable tech supports the educator rather than trying to directly teach the student.
Looking ahead, Rob highlights two areas of focus:
Why is Mega Seating Plan a part of Skolon?
In the last couple of years, Mega Seating Plan has really taken off in Sweden, with thousands of teachers and their schools embedding it into their work. Skolon makes integration even easier, by automatically importing staff, classes and students.
Niclas Olsson from Ystad Gymnasium says that “the accessibility and simplicity is the big gain of Skolon integration”, particularly through the SSO and the automatic synchronisation of all teaching groups. ”Everything the teacher needs is already in place.”
See more of Mega Seating Plan:
This is Skolon – we gather the best digital educational tools and make them work in the classroom.
Skolon is an independent platform for digital educational tools and learning resources, created for both teachers and students. With Skolon, accessing and using your digital educational tools is easy – security increases, administration decreases, and there’s more time for learning.
The digital educational tools come from both small and large providers, all of whom have one thing in common – they create digital educational tools that are beneficial for the school environment.
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It has been suggested that making seating plans is the bane of many educators’ existence, which is why educator turned entrepreneur, Rob Cowen, created Mega Seating Plan, a digital tool that instantly generates classroom seating plans, giving teachers more time to be teachers.
Having built the app and company from scratch in 2015, Mega Seating Plan joins Skolon’s international library of more than 5,500 digital tools, resources, services and apps for education. We caught up with Rob as he shares his insights, describing the tool and why it’s available through Skolon.
Let’s explore more about Mega Seating Plan!
Rob, what is Mega Seating Plan and how does it work?
Mega Seating Plan is a fantastically useful tool that helps teachers in more ways than one. With our tool, teachers can import classes either manually or automatically via Skolon and design the layout of their classrooms. With just a few clicks, they have a seating plan, including student data together with photos of each individual. Students can be automatically sorted based on their data, and the teacher can then drag and drop to fine-tune or create the entire seating arrangement from scratch.
What are the opportunities and who can use Mega Seating Plan?
Mega Seating Plan saves time for teachers. On average, it takes 182 seconds to perfect a seating plan.
Teachers around the world are using Mega Seating Plan to arrange students in their classrooms in the most effective ways for learning, including using Kagan seating plans. The smart tools for arranging classrooms automatically, can group or separate students by attainment, allowing students to support or challenge each other.
Mega Seating Plan also includes extra tools to make teachers’ lives even easier. The name learning tool (and accompanying iOS/Android app) uses low-stakes quizzing to help teachers learn their students’ names rapidly at the start of the year. Magic Reports uses AI to help teachers write reports and references for their students.
The behaviour management tools allow teachers to effortlessly add achievement/behaviour points to their students, and allow administrators to monitor conduct across their school.
The latest addition to Mega Seating Plans classroom management tools is a comprehensive homework management system. Teachers can assign homework tasks to their classes and share with students either offline, by email or via Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams. This will soon by complemented by an AI-powered homework resource generator.
Addressing the Time-Sink: Beyond Seating Plans
Rob’s goal for Mega Seating Plan has always been to tackle the ‘tedious, time-consuming tasks’ that get in the way of teaching. He set out to save teachers hours by reducing the time needed to create a seating chart from potentially an hour per class down to seconds.
This mission has since expanded to addressing other administrative burdens. The current priority is homework management, a task Rob remembers as sucking time out of a lesson.
“You want to go and check they’ve done the homework… you spend five minutes at least walking around the room checking they’ve done it, making a note of it, recording that somewhere,” he explains.
Mega Seating Plan is developing a system to remove these barriers, allowing teachers to efficiently check homework and record completion without taking valuable time away from instruction. The goal is to continuously provide tools that chip away at the non-teaching tasks that dominate a teacher’s time, making their professional lives easier.
The Future Focus: Making Teachers’ Lives Easier
For Rob, the core purpose of Mega Seating Plan is to remove barriers so teachers can focus on making an impact in their own classrooms. He believes the most valuable tech supports the educator rather than trying to directly teach the student.
Looking ahead, Rob highlights two areas of focus:
Why is Mega Seating Plan a part of Skolon?
In the last couple of years, Mega Seating Plan has really taken off in Sweden, with thousands of teachers and their schools embedding it into their work. Skolon makes integration even easier, by automatically importing staff, classes and students.
Niclas Olsson from Ystad Gymnasium says that “the accessibility and simplicity is the big gain of Skolon integration”, particularly through the SSO and the automatic synchronisation of all teaching groups. ”Everything the teacher needs is already in place.”
See more of Mega Seating Plan:
This is Skolon – we gather the best digital educational tools and make them work in the classroom.
Skolon is an independent platform for digital educational tools and learning resources, created for both teachers and students. With Skolon, accessing and using your digital educational tools is easy – security increases, administration decreases, and there’s more time for learning.
The digital educational tools come from both small and large providers, all of whom have one thing in common – they create digital educational tools that are beneficial for the school environment.
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