Dear Club and County Officials
Further to our letter during July, I’m writing to tell you the exciting news that EBED is launching the English Bridge School (“EBS”) today.
EBS is a new and fresh way of teaching bridge to students online. Our aim is to develop EBS into a one- stop learning portal where everything a bridge teacher could possibly want is readily available and just a click away. It has been designed so that, even if you have never taught online before, you should find everything straight forward.
The EBS learning portal is being made available at no cost to all EBTA teachers as one of the EBTA membership benefits. Students will be asked to pay a small monthly fee of £5 to use the school (which, over the first-year course, will amount to not much more than buying one of our books). As an incentive to sign your pupils up to the school, we will rebate the first month’s fee a student pays to EBS, either to the teacher or your club once they have paid their first quarter’s subscriptions.
The EBS curriculum is divided into individual lessons which will complement the BfA teaching method you are all familiar with. Each lesson contains a variety of learning materials including lesson plan, presentations, summary notes for students, sample deals (with deal files) and commentaries together with interactive quizzes. We’ll be adding in some accompanying videos too as we develop the school.
We have accelerated our launch plans because of the Covid-19 crisis and to help you be ready to resume courses at the start of the academic year in September as usual. We are therefore launching EBS with the first ten (a term’s worth) of the planned 30 modules for the Beginners’ course. If you are a teacher you will have access to EBS from today, so you should have plenty of time to familiarise yourself with the learning portal and the teaching materials available before term starts. Teachers will be able to enrol their students in EBS from Monday, 24 August.
EBS’s content will be delivered in phases and we are already working on the materials for the rest of the first-year course. We plan to add a second-year course next and, after that, to add additional learning materials to allow intermediate students to take their bridge to the next level covering areas such as improving their card-play and defence. Eventually, we will build a modular library of resources that will enable teachers to tailor make their own courses to their students’ needs with all courses being available in online and face-to-face versions. Until then, all current material on our Teacher Zone will still be available. We will keep you posted as new lessons and materials become available.
EBS is built on Google Classroom and incorporates the easy-to-use G Suite of products, designed by Google. G Suite is a cloud-based product which contains everything you need to deliver lessons by video conferencing. Teachers will be able to access a personalised classroom for their students where they can not only use our materials but also have the option to add their own customised slides, documents, handouts and quizzes. Teachers will have access to email and shared calendars which will enable them to schedule their lessons and communicate directly with their students to share news, learning material or set homework. A bonus of using EBS is the fact teachers will have access to Google Meet video conferencing software for free. There are no time restrictions and you can invite up to 250 students per meeting. It works in a very similar way to Zoom or Skype but won’t cost a penny and is all included in the annual EBTA membership fee. Teachers will also have their own online storage space.
Instructions for teachers on how to access EBS are here where they will find full instructions for how to use EBS, invite their students and access all the teaching materials. We have also put together a number of instructional videos on how to use EBS the first of which is available here. The whole suite of instructional videos are here.
As always, EBED will be here to support teachers and get them started on EBS. Once teachers are up and running, we would love to hear stories from them about how EBS has helped them restart their teaching and please do give us feedback on EBS so we can continue developing it to meet your needs.
We look forward to meeting you in the English Bridge School.
Yours faithfully
The EBED team
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