Purple Mash
1. What is Purple Mash?
Purple Mash is a subscription-based well-established learning platform for primary schools that has been developed with teachers over many years by the British software company 2 Simple. Alongside innovative creative apps and tools, it contains a large range of ready-made and customisable educational content and activities as well as systems and tools to help teachers with assigning and managing student work. It can be used alongside other tools and platforms but is designed to be an all-in-one platform for schools, with ready-made editable long-term, medium-term and individual lesson plans, assessment framework and built-in CPD and free CPD events currently included. Most areas of the UK curriculum are included with specific strengths in Computing, Maths and English.
2. How can Purple Mash make learning more personalized?
Several features for teachers make varying degrees of personalisation possible. Teachers can assign tasks to students on an individual, group, class or even whole school basis either for synchronous delivery or for asynchronous uses such as homework. Tasks using Purple Mash lesson activities and apps can be edited and personalised in terms of content or layout and degree of support available to the student. Additional content and files such as images, sounds, videos and documents can be uploaded to the platform and used with some of the teacher tools.
Teachers can give individual feedback and support to a student in a number of ways including audio, text or emoji-style icons. Several features enable a student potentially to make choices within an activity. Students can browse and select the activities within Purple Mash and freely choose to use tools beyond what has been formally allocated. Many of these tools are open ended and within boundaries students can explore and creatively incorporate their own ideas. The platform has built in blogging, virtual display board and email simulation systems that can be configured to needs by the teacher and items can be shared by embedding and the generation of QR codes.
3. What to consider when implementing Purple Mash?
Purple Mash has been successfully developed over a number of years incorporating feedback from many teachers and schools. The period 2020-2021 has seen many additional features and enhancements. Each user has their own account and individual storage area, with teachers and administrators having additional access to student, group and class setup. Within the platform there are many features to help teachers and students quickly become familiar with how the platform operates. These include teacher guides online and in pdf format, short explanatory videos suitable for adult or student use, simple design and layout so that even the youngest students will find it accessible whether using the specific MiniMash tools aimed at the youngest age range or the tools and content for primary aged pupils. Schools can allow home access and there are tools for limited interaction with parents.
4. Where can I get started with Purple Mash?
2Simple offers schools the opportunity for a free trial. This offer alongside further information can be found at the 2Simple website: https://2simple.com/purple-mash/