Digital Leaders – Reviewing Autology

LLS trialled the original Autology with our sixth form a couple of years ago.

It was too expensive, and although the intelligent search engine is a great feature, the product did not have enough good content and all the pictures were blurred out due to copyright.Fast forward a couple of years, and Autology are now under new management, and have a much more inviting vision for schools IMO. Fast forward a couple of months from BETT 2012, and LLS digital leaders have the opportunity to trial the new beta version. Mrs St John arranged for our DLs to have logins and we had half an hour to see what we thought. I had given the original memory stick with the beta version to Matthew, and he gave a brief overview to the group. The DLs then set about searching for relevant content for what they have been doing the last few weeks.

The significant outcome was the general opinion of the students that Autology gave them much better quality results than Google. For example, for “Much ado about nothing” they struggled to find anything relevant on Google, but several resources were straight in front of them with Autology. There were several glitches and these have been fed back to Autology ready for their launch on 5th of March.The DLs are continuing to trial Autology during half term. For example, today’s e-mail brought:

“I have been given a massive piece of geography homework about China, I have been to the local library but there was only 1 book on china and that wasn’t very informative, only very brief. I thought of using autology today and I am certain im going to finish it, YEY! In this case, the age thing is very useful because you can get more detailed stuff in the higher ages and the biggest advantage of using autology is that you can choose the subject you want, I definatley favour autology over google!”