Today the very popular website wordle, was not available. Some bloke decided that using the name was a copyright infringement see freetech4teachers , #savewordle and pheinblog: Wordle is in Trouble to see the back story. Now, I like using wordle, it has created some excellent posters for my class. However, the world of twitter seems very quick to react to events now rather than reflect. I remember a ‘reaction’ a while ago about the injustice of a chap who got arrested for handing in a gun to the police that he had ‘found’. Twitter was in uproar, tweets were flying all over the place about how ridiculous that was… eventually the full facts came out and they weren’t as they were first portrayed. The same, albeit less dramatic happened with wordle. As you can see from the #savewordle link people (even now – 21.20) are tweeting about saving wordle, when if you click on this link you’ll see it is back up and running.
Now don’t get me wrong, I applaud the support that has been given to Jonathan Feinberg in supporting wordle, but aren’t we in danger of jumping on bandwagons too quickly without a bit of reflection first. Twitter, is very instantaneous, and when you have tweeted, it is very difficult to ‘untweet’. Maybe its just me, but a little reflection is probably worth it in the long run.
This link (ICT Strategy) is my quick thoughts on what Moodle, Mahara and SLG gives our school. This is stage 1 of sorting out a strategy to present to SLT to try and get the ball rolling again. If you have a look at it and think there are any obvious mistakes, omissions or you have any thing else to add, please do so via comments. Many thanks in advance.
Have spent the morning creating a simple(ish) tutorial, showing the basics of Mahara. Have used wink, because it is easy to use. Still not 100% happy with result, but think it will suffice for now. Found out a few interesting things whilst making the tutorial. The main one being that you need to be careful in the type of group you create. The one I created for the iMedia course was open access. This meant that anyone who joined the group had the ability to edit and delete the views I had created….ouch. So have now changed it so that I have to add the users to the group. This gives me to great features:
1. The students can only ‘view’ the content
2. They can submit their own views to the group for assessment.
The second option is great, although I now have to work out how work will be assessed. Do I continue to use moodle or change to mahara? I think I am more likely to stick with moodle for assessing key components of their coursework and get them (students) to submit ‘views’ of completed pieces of coursework. This work would be the final piece of work, after it had been assessed in moodle. Students would also be able to showcase key pieces of work as well.
I have finally got Moodle and Mahara working at school. (When I say ‘I’, what I actually mean is a very clever technician has got it working for me). I have been wanting Mahara ever since I first saw it years ago, but there have always been issues getting it to work. The newest version of Mahara and moodle seem to like each other a lot more and with some techy magic we have it. Now I need to decide what I want to do with it?
will it be for e-portfolios?
a school based social network?
a user friendly front end to moodle?
a web based and slimlined version of our shared network?
a staffpool of non-sensitive material?
web-based departmental areas?
or all of the above?
Personally, I want all of the above. But to achieve that needs a cunning plan. I need to sell this better than I did Moodle. However, Mahara looks and feels a lot better than Moodle. It has a certain ‘facebook’ look that quite a few staff are familiar with. Pupils should also feel more comfortable. So what to do….
Firstly, I have had a quick play and also downloaded the Mahara book from Packtpress. It is a good starting point. I have so far:
created an ICT Dept page for staff only - this will hopefully be a place to share resources, teaching ideas and also a sandbox to test different Mahara things.
created a front end to a moodle course – All the resources, videos etc are now in a ‘view’ with links to moodle to allow students to submit their work. This seems a tidier way of doing it and the pupils/staff will hopefully find it easier
saved key files to the site area rather than my user area. – I didn’t do this to begin with and was filling my personal Mahara user area up quickly. Have now created a simple file structure in the site area to enable me to save course based resources there. Getting other staff to do this will be tricky, and mat require some liaison with either me or the technicians.
added various artifacts including; RSS feeds, youtube videos, mp4s, slideshare presentations, files. folders and images. So far the main issues has been with RSS feeds and it may be related to our SWGFL filter (more investigating needed!)
So now what?
I need to get a select group of pupils using it and once I have some live data I then need to ‘sell’ it to SLT. The added functionality of goals, skills, resume as well as the plugin to enable students to find out about their learning styles will also be a good selling point. I also need to sort out our school ‘shared area’…talk about a dumping ground for crap! If Departments can create topic based groups on Mahara and link resources to it and also create a ‘staff only’ area for more sensitive info, then the shared/staff areas on our network may well become surplus to requirements. But that is way in the future.
To develop the social side of mahara, will requre the Heads of Year to think about how they can use Mahara from a pastoral point of view. This can include year ‘groups’ and tutor ‘groups’ within Mahara as well as a student led pupil voice.
So once all of the above is done, I will be a happy man and can then think about the next challenge….. SIMS integration????
We are currently about finishing Unit 1 and Unit 20 with our first cohort of students on the OCR Nationals L2 ICT course. As it is our first full year through we have been a bit traditional and all their work is being printed out and to be honest I am shocked at the amount of paper we are getting through. So with a new scheme of learning created for the current Y9 and Y10 I am hoping to do away with paper versions of their work and instead create e-portfolios. My original idea was to do this using Mediator. It is a fantastic bit of software and all the kids can use it quite easily. However, storage is an issue at our school and the kids are forever running out of space. So I wanted a ‘cloud’ option. I thought Mahara would be an excellent option, but we are still having teething problems with getting it networked. All their work is currently being uploaded to moodle, where we can easily assess it but it’s not really an ‘e-portfolio’. So I am now at cunning plan number 3…Prezi.
Prezi has become available free for all educational establishments. It is a fun and unique way of doing presentations. But what it also does is allow you to upload work in the form of pdfs, images and videos(flv). Now I have a means for all the students to create funky , individual e-portfolios which are stored online, but which can also be downloaded as a flash presentation when completed.
The issues:
All students work needs to be converted to pdf. Not a problem if you have office 2007.
All videos need to be converted to flv. Youconvertit seems to work wonders
A 30 slide presentation on internet research takes a while to arrange in prezi.
Using the path tool in prezi to create a journey through the work is also time consuming
Here is an example of a Unit 1 e-portfolio prezi.
As you can see, it takes a while to go through all the evidence. However, I think I have a cunning plan for that as well…use something like wink to record the evidence rather than loads of screenshots. This can then be converted to an FLV and then uploaded. This way, the Prezi e-portfolio solution could be used for a variety of different units. So far I have managed to get my Y10 class to create the layout and design for their e-portfolios. Once all their work has been signed off and they are happy, I hope to get all of their work uploaded.