A look back at 2020 - Lyfta Blog

Saying goodbye to 2020

Starting on a high

Paulina and Serdar, Co-Founders of Lyfta

We certainly started the year off on the right foot having been crowned Overall Edtech Winner at the Reimagine Education Awards in Dec 2019, pipping to the post esteemed colleagues from Harvard University, The Open University, Imperial College and Century Tech. Our passionate desire to inspire and empower teachers and children to grasp their role in building a fairer, more sustainable world was front of mind, and we had clear goals for the year ahead. Then March arrived and the world turned upside down. Schools closed, our team went home to work remotely, manage home-schooling, lockdown, illness and more.

Lockdown

Lyfta on laptop

Fortunately for us, the amazing teacher communities in the UK and in Finland, already busy pivoting to home learning, supporting vulnerable children and managing their own lockdown life chaos, maintained their desire to keep up with their professional development and explore ways to continue to broaden horizons of their students. Interest in our CPD training and free trial was at an all time high.

Over the course of 2020, Leah, our amazing Training Lead, ran 87 training webinars and trained over 1000 teachers to teach sustainable development goals, skills and values with Lyfta. Despite much larger cohorts than we had been used to, we managed to maintain the high quality of our training and over the year we are proud to say that over 90% of participants rated our training as either extremely or very valuable.

Pivoting to home learning

As soon as schools closed we started working on new projects to help teachers and parents facilitate impactful, engaging and exciting learning experiences children could enjoy from home. We quickly made Lyfta learning resources suitable for home learning, and in April we launched Lyfta at Home for parents and carers. These new initiatives meant Lyfta's unique immersive learning experiences were available to thousands of children, inviting them to continue to see and experience new realities while they were largely confined to home.

New term - new Lyfta

In September, we were excited to launch Lyfta 2.0 - a brand new Lyfta platform with an array of amazing new storyworlds, new lesson and assembly plans, and great new features like the student quest tracker, a powerful search function, and a brand new lesson builder tool.

We released nine new storyworlds, with 70 pieces of new content and 30 new lesson and assembly plans. New content included a powerful series of four storyworlds around sustainability which were made in collaboration with the Finnish National Agency for Education and have been highly recommended to schools across Finland.

Another five storyworlds will be released next month with new human stories and experiences from Hong Kong, Afghanistan and the USA - so watch this space…

Searching for more voices

Neighbourhood Docs

In November we launched Neighbourhood Docs, a new annual call for films from around the world, challenging storytellers to find real-life stories from their own community which we can share with learners through the Lyfta platform. This will help give students access to even more different perspectives from around the world over the coming year.

We've been delighted to welcome some new colleagues and add to our small team over the year, and now have 20 members of the team working in Finland, the UK and France - you can meet some of them through our new Meet the Team series which we will continue to build on next year. We are also on the lookout for new colleagues so if you'd like to join us on our mission, keep an eye on our jobs page.

Supporting the Lyfta community

Throughout 2020, our engagement team has been busy supporting Lyfta users to get the most from the platform with valuable weekly content and resources around key dates such as Storytelling Week, Fairtrade Fortnight, Earth Day and Anti-bullying week as well as around important themes across the year like remote learning, diversity, equity and inclusion, the recovery curriculum and how to bring PSHE and RSHE to life. We are delighted with the feedback we have on these resources and are glad to be able to support teachers to use Lyfta to engage meaningfully with important topics across the whole year.

Looking back on 2020

We are proud of how we moved through the difficulties and uncertainty of 2020, but the thing that we are proudest of, that makes us want to strive for more in 2021, is the wonderful feedback we receive from teachers telling us what a difference Lyfta is making. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to our wonderful Lyfta community and for the passion and energy you bring to your work. Educators really are special. We know this already of course, but 2020 really highlighted what an incredible job educators do each and every day, helping to support and nurture the citizens of the future. There is genuinely no other community we would rather be working with.

"Lyfta opens children's eyes to a more balanced view of the world and the people within it. It helps join together the curriculum with global issues and lifts learning past the text books."

Grace Garvey

Egerton Primary School

Here's to 2021

Happy new year

Our desire to inspire and empower teachers and children to grasp their role in building a fairer, more sustainable world is stronger than ever as we enter 2021. Our dream is that by the time a child completes their education, they will have been to every country in the world, having experienced real human stories in each place they visited. They'll have seen numerous life situations, jobs, skills, values, perspectives - all at play in the real world. We've made large strides towards our mission in this strangest of all years, and we are excited to see what 2021 brings.

Wishing each and every one of you a happy, healthy and enjoyable new year.

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