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has been reinvented for the 21st century learner and the door wedge shaped software/solutions of the past have been superseded.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

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

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

Having read Tomaz Lasic’s blog post on ‘Grow a moodle‘  I decided to have a go myself with Year 12 students who are back in school preparing to start their Y13 Applied ICT course.  However, due to the fact that I didn’t think my kids would leap at the chance to teach teachers straight away  I decided to adopt a slightly different tactic.

The students are following the OCR Applied ICT course and will be doing the Publishing Unit, the Web Design unit and the compulsory Working to a Brief unit.  Due to a cut in teaching time this year I had decided to combine the Web design and Brief units. The students, were slightly aprehensive and also seem to have a ‘fear’ of web design.  This is due to the fact that their experience of web design so far has been a tad hit and miss and their knowledge of the mechanics behind webpages was lacking. (As ICT Coordinator, I hold my hands up and admit that this shouldn’t have been the case!).  

I therefore needed a way to get the students understanding of web design, xhtml and css up to a higher enough standard to enable them to confidently complete the course.  They also needed to learn how to use Openmind BE (matchwares fantastic project management software).  So I decided to set them a task that would meet all their needs.

The task I devised was quite simple:

‘You need to design a course(topic) in moodle for year 7 students to show them how to create a website using html.

You will need to do the following:

1. understand moodle (youtube has loads of tutorials)
2. understand html (there are loads of great websites)
3. Project manage this task
   1. mind map
   2. gantt chart
4. create course
5. test course
6. evaluate course

You are in the ideal position to create a course that will work as you experience lots of different types of lessons….

Have fun, enjoy yourself and don’t be afraid to experiment.‘

Once the task was introduced I gave them all teacher status in a moodle course. They were then all told that they had control of one topic box and were shown some of the basics in moodle – how to turn editing on, the resources and the activities menus.  (Handy tip – assign the topic boxes to students first before they overwrite each others and my topic box).  Once they get over the joy of typing silly comments in their own box and re-ordering their postion within the course, they then started to have a play.

Their next lesson, then needed them to start mind mapping what they actually were going to do.  This included research, planning, designing, creating etc.  They have now completed a mind map and are in the process of preparing their gantt chart.  They have been very enthusiastic about the whole process and I think they like the fact that they have been given ‘control’ of part of moodle.  At the end of lesson 2 I also mentioned that once they have got to grips with moodle they will then be used to teach other teachers how to use moodle.  I was quietly pleased with their positive response. 

Now I have to wait and see how creative they become with moodle and also whether this has also meant that their confidence for web design has increased and that they can be up and running when I give them the ‘brief’ in September.

I would like to say that I will update as this develops, but I am rather useless as setting time aside to write up posts so it maybe a tad hit and miss.

misterel Teaching & Learning ICT, KS5, moodle, students, teaching, training, VLE

Prior to finishing for the summer holidays, I found myself in  discussions with SLT about the differences between the school website, moodle (our VLE) and SIMs Learning gateway(SLG) and the need to justify the use of some, all or just one of the above…. From my own personal point of view I thought I would find this an easy task.  However, every school seems to use some of the above for a variety of different tasks with many of them cross pollinating.

This is how I have envisioned our use of websites, VLE. and SLG. (I would welcome comments on this).

The website

I see the website as the first port of call for virtual visitors of our school.  It should be a great advert for the school and take on the roll of a virtual school prospectus and newsletter. It needs to be dynamic and up to date and entice viewers to want to find out more about our school. To see our interpretation of this click here. It is also the gateway to our other web based applications, moodle, mail, SLG.

The VLE

We have opted for moodle as our VLE.  One of the main reasons for this is that a good friend of mine was already using it, so I was able to ‘borrow’ a lot of ideas and resources.  Moodle is our teaching and learning virtual environment where subject and pastoral areas have been created.  This is in the development stage and is predominantly used by the ICT dept and Sixth form.  It has been decided that to make moodle a whole school success we need to remove the shared docs area and make moodle the new and improved shared area. The VLE differs from the website as its focus is as a tool for developing the teaching and learning within the school and allow pupils and staff a higher level of control over their own learning/teaching.

SIMs Learning Gateway (SLG)

SIMs say that this can be our VLE… However personally I don’t think it is quite there yet.  However it will definitely meet the requirements of 2010 when all parents need to have access to online reports, attendance, behaviour (positive and not so positive). I see it as a Management Information System (MIS) where staff are able to access SIMs.net from home, write reports, check the staffing school calender and also to allow parents access.

So there you have it, 3 different packages, with 3 different roles.  Is this the most efficent use of all three? Do we need all three? I think that it is good to have all three, but I also might just be lucky to have to option to be able to use all three….

misterel Resources, Teaching & Learning MIS, moodle, SIMs, SLG, VLE

Virtual Learning Environments are one of the big things kicking around schools at the moment.  About a year ago we as a school decided to opt for moodle.  There were a variety of reasons, the main one being that a good friend of mine was already running moodle so I therefore had a contact when it all went wrong.

Moodle, is free.  We host it internally and therefore have had to pay for a server to run it on.  We managed to get our LEA to pay for it, due to some funding initiative linked with diplomas. So far moodle has been reasonably easy to use. However our original set up has caused a few issues.  (At this point I would like to point out that I am extremely out of my comfort zone when discussing all things techy… I am a user of software, resources etc and let my technicians get it working).  Anyway, our technicians felt it was necessary for moodle to be run via a https set up rather than http for security reasons…linked to the active directory. This coupled with an RM network (although for fear of being Belshawed -lol, it might not have anything to do with the RM network), means that certain aspects of moodle don’t work, unless you use firefox.  The frustrating thing is I have no idea why. Some powerpoints won’t open, attachments linked to news forum posts won’t open. Some flash won’t play….

I am writing about moodle tonight, because tomorrow we are upgrading it, changing the server, removing the https and figures crossed getting a fully functioning VLE.  It is extremely important to me, that it is working without any glitches.  In the school at present, moodle is being used predominately by the ICT dept and also by the sixth form.  I need to roll it out to all departments over the next 12 months as part of my performance management.  As I have found to my cost, when rolling out something new in the world of ICT, staff need to be:

1. 100% sure there is a benefit
2. positive it will work
3. find it easy to use
4. make their life easier

Personally 1,3, and 4 are a dead cert. Quizzes, online assessments (self marking), surveys, lessons, forums, games, gradebooks, accesss from home etc etc make moodle a great asset.  If number 2 doesn’t happen over the next couple of days then I’m not sure what I am going to do….

I came across a moodle bookvia twitter(thanks iusher), posted on issuu, and have linked to it below. I am hoping that it will be an invaluable tool in the training of staff in the use of moodle.

misterel Resources, Teaching & Learning moodle, staff, teaching, training, VLE