Twenty Ten

#GTAUK has hit my twitter feed massively over the last couple of days.  Originally I wondered why a lot of the people I followed were so excited about Grand theft Auto (http://gtauk.com/), it was the first hit when I first googled it…it is now the second.  So I have been avidly reading tweets and then more detailed blogs on all things google.  It seems that sliced bread has been reinvented for the 21st century learner and the door wedge shaped software/solutions of the past have been superseded.

Now I love google apps, hane used them loads on a personal basis, the mail is great, the docs embed well into moodle and I have worked collaboratively with my dept. So, so far so good.  However, taking that next step and rolling it out into the school environment needs a bit of contemplation. Our school network offers pupils/staff the following:

• email (accessible at school and at home via web, plus ability to incorporate it into outlook at home via exchange)
• Moodle
• SIMs Learning Gateway – access to their timetable, their my docs, the shared area, their attendance, their reports, their assessments
• Mahara – the ability to build portfolios of work and export if and when they need to

So if I were to go to GApps , what would I gain?

• cloud storage
• collaboration
• Google Marketplace
• GApps

But what would I need to do?  and this is where I am a tad confused.  The kids have email.  They have access to their work from home.  We will increase pupil capacity as and when it is needed.  They can use many other web based tools for collaborative work and to be honest, in my personal experience, they are not that good at working collaboratively.  Our pupils aren’t the pioneers that the GTAUK crowd are… they don’t like change.  They just want to get in, get their work done and get home and socialise with their friends.  Staff won’t like change, they are still slowly coming round to the idea that moodle will save them time and be beneficial to their teaching.

Then there is live@edu which to be honest I haven’t looked at in much detail, but from other blogs that I have read, it seems that collaboration is an issue, but according to others it isn’t!

To be honest, reading what I am writing worries me a tad. I like new things, I jump on pretty much every new bandwagon that’s going, unless it is ridiculously expensive.  But I just don’t know enough to make a clear decision.  Even if I did, it wouldn’t be up to me.  I would then have to prove it to SLT and Governors.  I would have to present to staff and pupils and explain this new world of ICT collaboration and google branding. Parents would need to be aware of this new system.  It’s a big job and it needs to be thought out carefully.   I think I am going to sit back and see what happens.  Carrying on developing moodle and mahara and get my head round teaching OCR Nationals L3 in September.

If GApps is the way forward then I may well revisit it, if Live@edu is a success I may well go there. But for now I will read all the tweets and blogs and see how it all progresses.  Maybe sometimes it is best to sit back and watch other people lead the way and jump on board when it has fully been tested.

misterel Teaching & Learning Gapps, GTAUK, live@edu, mahara, microsoft, moodle

Having got Mahara installed on the network I needed to find something to use it for that would work quickly and effectively. I decided to use it to create eportfolios for the OCR Nationals. I had been concerned about the amount of printing we were doing for the OCR Nationals especially the Unit 1. Eportfolios seemed to be the obvious choice, but there were still issues:

• Pupils all handed work into moodle for assessment
• Would pupils/staff be able to work out how to use mahara e-portfolios?
• Would our moderator like the new format

To address these we firstly continued to assess work and give feedback via moodle. The e-portfolio was only created once they had finished all work and it had been assessed. When the moderator came in to assess this years cohort we showed him mahara, he was well impressed and actually made it one of our action plans, so that all OCR units are submitted via mahara.

Once we worked out a system for submitting work – students took to it very easily and are now producing portfolios of work for each unit. The process is reasonably simple:

1. As a teacher you need to create a group for each of your classes.
2. In that group you then create a ‘view’ for each of the portfolios you want the student to create. Unit 1, Unit 20, Unit 21 etc. You also need to make sure that group is copiable.
3. Students are then invite themselves to your group and you accept. It seems the easiest way to get the right kids into the right group.
4. Once they are members of your ‘group’ they can go into their ‘my portfolio’ section and copy a view – the ones you have already created are now available for selection as they are part of your group.
5. Students now need to upload their work to their ‘my files’ area in Mahara.
6. In the ‘my files’ section they need to create a decent folder structure for each unit.
7. Once all work has been uploaded they can now edit the ‘view’ that they copied and add their work to it.
8. Editing views is easy once you get the hang of it. It is simply a drag and drop exercise. In this case all they are doing is dragging folders into the ‘view’ and choosing the correct folder from their ‘my files’ to add to their view
9. Once the portfolio(view) is complete the students can then submit the view. This now appears in the group which you as a teacher created and you have access to all their work in one portfolio.
10. I am now working with our technician to sort out submitting views to moodle. This will enable me to set up a course and user for our moderator and then the chosen sample can be submitted to moodle and the moderator has easy access to the necessary work. It can even be accessed by the moderator from home if needed.  Hopefully by installing this on moodle.

Below are some screenshots of some of the processes mentioned above.

Teacher OCR Group

Unit 1 – ‘view’ that can be copied by students. Info just explains the folder they need to complete in their ‘my folders’

Student portfolio for Unit 20 – all you need to do is click on any of the files and they will open. This works exceptionally well for swf animations.

You can give feedback and can also attach the official marksheet so everything is ready for the moderator.

Have added the screenshots to issuu so that you can see them better.  Hopefully if you click here they should appear

misterel Teaching & Learning eportfolio, mahara, OCR Nationals

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.

misterel Resources, Teaching & Learning ICT, mahara, moodle, SLG, strategy

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.

The tutorial

misterel Resources, Teaching & Learning mahara, tutorial

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