Twenty Ten

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????

misterel Teaching & Learning mahara, mahoodle, moodle