nstoneit.com E-learning Experiences

Thanks to Drew Buddie for tagging me quite a while ago for the Passion Quilt Meme - it’s taken me a long while to respond but I recently came across the perfect picture to add. Actually it’s more than one so I’m not going to stick to the original rules. I’m also not going to tag anyone else to follow on the chain (I believe I’m supposed to pick 5 people) but if you would like to be picked say so in a comment and I’ll edit this post and link to your blog.

So to the post and the pictures. I was recently visiting two friends in Silverspring a suburb of Washington DC. They are both teachers but more importantly to the story new parents. Their beautiful baby is coming up to 7 months old. So the first technology bit is a website they use to buy their nappies online (or as they call them across the Atlantic diapers). With their purchase they received a free subscription to Parenting Magazine (in good old fasioned paper form). While flicking through the magazine I came across some adverts that astounded me - adverts for websites and products aimed at very young kids and parents to learn with computers. I whipped out the newly purchased camera to snap some of the adverts and they are going to find their way into some staff training this year. Why? In Secondary School we are still a long way from revolutionising learning using technology and some teachers still think it’s a fad - but with kids using technology for learning not soon after they learn to sit up surely it’s time for the naysayers to realise that learning continues to evolve.

Enjoy the pictures…
(click links or pictures for fullscreen to read the text and see the baby)

Sesame Street Media Play

More Sesame Street online resources

And a bit more sesame street

Web 2.0 For Kids

E-pen for reading

The Baby of the Future?

Another year older another year wiser, so the old adage goes. The problem with that adage is that technology moves so fast you might be wiser in one aspect but have completely missed out on something brand new that’s just come out. I try not to let that worry me though as if the new things are any good I’ll probably hear about it through a blog or twitter somewhere, if not then it’s yet another new innovation that’s passed the whole world by!

I’ve not had as much time to update this blog as much as I would have liked. I have much respect for some of the prolific edubloggers out there, especially those who are full time teachers such as Nic Peachey, Tom Barrett, Jose Picardo and Doug Belshaw. I just don’t seem to find the time and I’m not sure I ever will!

My excuse is that I am in, and I hope coming to the end, of my second year MA in ICT in Education. Yes I know some of the people I just mentioned are doing similar things or even doctorates but lets just pretend I didn’t know that! While my University assignments may take time that I could have spent blogging they have given me the opportunity to do some heavy reflection. In an assignment from February 2008 I had to write about the implementation of a technology initiative. I chose to write about the implementation of Rickypedia. It’s a little scary posting my rather rushed and unpolished assignment in a public forum for the first time but I hope it may be of use to people. It’s about 6000 words but I think is quite readable! It’s quite interesting looking back personally and seeing how my perceptions have changed even since February. I’ll keep you posted on the developments since then when I get the chance. Click on the link below to have a read

Implementing a Pilot VLE at Rickmansworth School (PDF 152kb)

So we’re onto the next stage of our VLE decision making. The last year with Rickypedia has, as I’ve said before, been a pilot project to experiment and learn. Now we are planning a larger and I hope more stable system. The first step was deciding which system to go with. We decided on Moodle for a number of reasons but mostly cost and the fact that none of the other systems we saw impressed us. (Maybe I’ll expand on this in another post though I’m a little bit worried about saying too much after Doug Belshaw’s recent experiences!) The next step which this post is about is whether to host the VLE in the school or out of the school.

I’m quite looking forward to writing a bit of a technical post but I’ll try not to make it too techie. Although the powers that be say that teachers should be teaching and not doing non-teaching tasks, an attitude that I do largely agree with, I do enjoy doing a bit of techie stuff. I’m ever grateful of our network manager and have no desire to do all of the hard work that he does, nor the knowledge to do it. But when it comes to websites and working on the VLE I’ve enjoyed installing it, playing with it and customising it. It has given me a lot of ownership, understanding and pride in the project. But it does take a lot of time and next year I’m looking forward to sharing the load with one of our network assistants/technicians.

Every VLE like any website needs hosting somewhere. In non-techie terms this means that the VLE (which is made up of webpages, resources and a database that links it all together) needs to sit on a computer somewhere so it can be accessed by everyone. This can either be done on a computer in the school, internally hosted, or on a computer outside the school, external hosting. Many VLEs have this option though some will require internal hosting. Our pilot VLE was hosted via siteground who provide cheap hosting on a shared server for about £40 a year. It’s a good place to start and experiment but it’s not a stable solution. The server it sits on at siteground is shared with maybe 50 or more other websites and if you have too many people accessing it at once things can start going wrong. I have read about some people getting locked out of their site and having to pay hundreds of pounds to upgrade before they can get back in. Fortunately we’ve not had these problems yet.

Our meeting to decide what to go with was held during the day a couple of weeks ago. At the meeting we had in attendance the headmaster, deputy head in charge of ICT, ICTAC coordinator, network manager, two network technicians, librarian, bursar and myself. I prepared a document for the discussion looking at the advantages and disadvantages of hosting internally and externally. The table showing this is below. The table wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list but was everything I could think of in the hour before the meeting!

The other point that I added was the option of hosting externally to start with and then moving it internally later on. According to advice I was given by some helpful moodle experts this is not difficult as long as you are using the same database (eg if you have mysql databases on both servers then it doesn’t matter if you use Windows/Linux etc). But if this is wrong please do correct me.

Thanks to those who helped me come up with the list, especially all those on Twitter who responded to my questions and Andrew Field who put a post up on effectiveict.co.uk that I still haven’t got round to responding to.

The discussion and meeting was very good. I went in with the preference of hosting internally as I believed this would be easier for staff and students to use. I knew though that there was a good chance we would decide on external hosting. At the meeting we discussed all the possibilities but at the end of the day it came down to two points from our network manager. He already has his whole Summer filled up with the installation of new servers and completely upgrading two computer rooms (as well as many other tasks I’m sure). He also pointed out that our room/cupboard that holds the servers is already at its limit with the amount of equipment that is there and there isn’t really room for a new server or adequate cooling and ventilation facilities. After those points we had no option but to go with external hosting and we will be reviewing this again next year. After all the reasons above the final decision came down to practicalities. I’m not disappointed as it was the correct decision to make and we can now move on to the next steps of choosing who to host for us and how we want to set everything up. We are pretty much starting again from scratch and have a blank slate for our new moodle. There is still a lot of work to do!

After a year of our pilot VLE and a few years teaching ICT I was eager to hear the opinions of the students. I hear lots of little student comments and gripes during my lessons in the ICT suite. Most of them are “why has so and so got a better computer than me” pointing at the new flatscreen monitor on one PC. I then explain that they both have the same computer it’s just the old monitor died and we had to get a flatscreen to replace it. But there are plenty of very valid comments that students make and of course plenty of positive comments.

Setting up a student e-council was something that I had meant to do for a while. I think most schools now have student councils who discuss and feedback on a variety of issues in a school. Our school PE department set up their own sports council to find out what sports provision and clubs students wanted. For my e-council I picked two or so students from every year group to come to the first meeting. I picked the ones I knew were the most talented OR enthusiastic at ICT or the ones who were frequent users of Rickypedia (our VLE). From a scientific or research point of view this obviously isn’t a very good sample, but bringing this group of students together had other benefits. It allowed some of these brilliant minds to meet and ‘network’, it allowed me to get together a group of students who may be in the future be involved in training, design, resource creation and support of the VLE. It also meant I had a group of students who knew what they were talking about when giving feedback and the participants were certainly not out of touch with the average student.

Below are the minutes from our meeting (edited slightly for privacy). As you can see they came up with some brilliant suggestions and comments as well as a few that are just not going to happen (ie VLE with links to games not blocked by filters). I look forward to our next meeting soon.

1st of May, Meeting of “student e-council” to get student feedback on e-learning in School.

Invited Participants:

Year 7 x3 Yr 8 x3 Yr 9 x3 Yr 11 x1 Yr 13 x2 (1 year 7, 2 year 10s and 2 year 12s missing)

nb participants are all students who have used Rickypedia this year – I selected students who are either very active on Rickypedia or who I thought would contribute well to the discussion – the representation is probably skewed towards the more ICT literate students.

Feedback on Rickypedia:

+ve

Overall Very positive, “I like it”, like the messaging, much faster to use since the upgrade.

-ve

Some problems with blogs (Password problems having to retype it, highlighting doesn’t work). Would like a spellchecker, problems adding pictures to work.

What Extra Features Would you Like?

Place to store files

Having a personal webpage

Being able to personalise the site – add colours and widgets

More help pages

A place to put calendar reminders or notes for yourself

Live student chat

List of games that they could access through the school filters!

Would you be interested in (suggestions from teacher)…

Student E-mail accounts: Overall enthusiastic response, student who joined in year 9 said it would have helped her to make more friends if they all had school e-mails. Would be good for communicating with teachers.

Having one password for everything: Everyone agreed this is a good idea.

Social Features: Response was varied – younger students wanted a place to chat with friends, older students prefer to use myspace or facebook.

Being able to see attendance and grades: Not so excited about this but not negative.

Online application (ie Google apps – spreadsheet and word processor): Definitely liked this idea even if they don’t use it all.

Online library catalogue: Yes

Online Encyclopaedia (like Britannica): Year 13s said it would be extremely useful for projects especially if it’s accessible from home. Overall very positive.

Any particular resources you would like on a VLE?

- Would like to have all resources from lessons on Rickypedia, any powerpoints or resources that teachers use in lessons should be up. Useful if students are absent. Also if teachers make notes on interactive whiteboard they should save them and put them online (example of teacher who already puts his whiteboard notes in shared network folder for yr 11)

- Google search box so they can search for things without opening a new window

Ideas for Design of Rickypedia:

Less cluttered frontpage – there is too much on it. One suggested a hippy themed frontpage. Students enthusiastic about getting involved in the future design. Variation in preferences of older and younger students again.

General ICT Issues in the school: All brought up by students – not part of the original agenda.

MyClasslink (accessing files from home): Some students had problems but most said it worked fine – would like it integrated with rickypedia.

6th form laptops: Need Delphi on them (non-6th formers jealous that they don’t have access to laptops.

School Website: Needs updating – students eager to get involved in doing this.

More storage space: Students would like more storage space (especially KS3)

File types: Problems with students having latest version on Office at home and not being able to open it at school. Suggestion that all computers have the converter installed (or the latest version of office)

Would like Google Toolbar installed on PCs to make searches easier (they don’t like existing yahoo toolbar)

This project has been on my list to write up for a long time. A successful presentation at the Teachmeet North East London Conference gave me a bit of kick to get it done.

This project was a cross curricular project for gifted and talented ICT and English students in year 9 (ages 13 to 14). We used a range of technology including shared network folders for online information gathering, digital video, digital photos and both synchronous (live chat) and asynchronous messaging (discussion forum) using our VLE.

In our school all subjects have the option of running extra after school classes for gifted and talented students (cleverly branded GATE in our school). This year our gifted and talented coordinator wanted to have a shared theme running through classes and in a meeting with representatives from all curricular subjects we decided on the theme of China. We also agreed that all classes should have two curricular subjects joining together. I joined forces with an English teacher (Ed Macleod) and we started work on a course where students would make videos about China after synthesising and analysing a variety of sources of information about China such as articles, prose, poetry art and music. Eventually our brainstorming and discussions came up with the following structure (the original was slightly different but this is what we ended up with by the end of the course). Nb all classes were 1 hour 45 minutes.

Week 1: Introduction to China – writing an introduction to your movie – will your film be positive or negative?
Week 2: Trip to China Town with cameras and video cameras (along with Food Tech. and Geography groups) Experience Chinese culture and collect media for use in films.
Week 3: Human Rights issues in China – internet research saving documents and resources in a shared folder.
Week 4: The Cultural Revolution in China – looking at art and writing and using it for inspiration to create their own pieces of writing.
Week 5: Introduction to IMovie. Playing with the software using footage shot from China Town.
Week 6: Script Writing – writing scripts for movies and putting together other written materials.
Week 7: Movie Editing.
Week 8: Movie Editing plus live online chat.

Lesson plans for all lessons and powerpoint presentations for some are available below. Some topics were particularly hard to cover. Human rights in particular was an issue that I really wanted to cover but at the same time I didn’t want to overshadow all the other positive aspects of China. It’s very hard to show a fair picture of such an emotive subject. You will see at the end of the presentation I looked at a comparison of human rights in the UK to show that there is plenty to criticise in any country.

It didn’t take long to realise that the knowledge of myself and my colleague, on China, was not enough to fulfil the needs and answer all the questions of our inquisitive students. On a Tuesday evening a solution came to me.

I am in my final year of an online Masters degree in ICT in Education at the University of Leeds. While looking through our University VLE (Firstclass) I noticed a posting from a fellow student originally from China. A few messages later and I had a real Chinese person very willing to help answer questions from our students.

Our willing volunteer Fiona Shen, originally from Shanghai, is a teacher at Harrogate Ladies College in the North of England. Even better her English is perfect!

I set up a Moodle course for our group on our VLE (rickypedia). The first step was to get a discussion going for students to ask questions to Miss Shen. This was set as homework for students. You can see the list of topics they asked about in the following screenshot.

I’ve picked two questions as examples. The first on food is a great simple discussion about Chinese food. The second is a question about the honesty of the government - I think this was superbly answered by Fiona Shen.

The level of questions, and dare I say learning through the process, was astounding though as you can see from the topics not all students asked questions.

I decided that as we had a willing volunteer to answer questions we should take things one step further and try a live online chat with Miss Shen. It took a few weeks to get this organised and we ended up doing this during our final lesson. My original plan was to bring students into the chat room in groups of four for about 10 minutes each. It ended up being about 20 minutes until I could get the first group to leave and even then we had a mixture of students from different groups, some of whom I let stay on for well over their allocated time. The reason for this was the reaction of some of the students. One girl pleaded; “Sir, please let us stay on, we’re learning so much from this!”

I’ve put a few highlights from the chats in the screenshots below. Some of them have been edited slightly to get them to fit on the page or to get rid of some of the more inane chatter. I also include a full transcript of a section of the chat to give you an idea of some of the chit chat and silly comments that happened in between the serious ones.

Travel in China, terracotta army chat
Food in China, dog and turtle, Chat
Longer Food in China Chat
School in China Chat
Full Chat Transcript - Government and freedom (rtf format)

As you can see from the chat there was some incredible thinking and learning going on.

The final part of the project was creating the documentary videos on China. All the videos are viewable on teachertube and all are amazing pieces of work. One or two aren’t 100% finished and two of the groups spent a significant amount of time outside of the lessons finishing off their films. One example which I think is particularly powerful is embedded below. All the script, poems and prose were written and read, edited and produced by the students. Most images are still images but some footage from our trip to Chinatown was included.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Conclusions and thanks: Masterclasses are normally six week courses but thanks to the foresight of our gifted and talented coordinator Lacey Joy, who has some experience of film editing and realised we would be tight for time, we were offered two extra weeks. These weeks turned out to be essential. We were able to incorporate such a wide range of ways of learning and I think this was key to the success of the course. The expertise of Ed Macleod my English teacher colleague facilitated some amazing creative writing that I would never have been able to get out of students alone. His powerpoint China in Crisis gives links to some resources he found. Two other colleagues Sally Jessett, a geography teacher, and Janet Staerck, a food technology teacher did all the legwork and more importantly paperwork organising the trip to Chinatown and allowed our group to tag along and join them for a meal. This cultural experience was such an eye opener for students in ways we didn’t envisage beforehand. My ICT and technical experiences helped with the internet research (thanks to our network manager Roger Baron for setting up the shared directories) and also with the use of our school VLE. Fiona Shen answered questions from students patiently and expertly. And the students Mr. Macleod and myself all pitched in together with IMovie (thanks to Matt Earles our Apple Mac network manager for helping us out technically). There are of course improvements we could make for “next time”, we could have done more work on assessment (though all students were assessed by teachers at the end), we would have liked to do some work on our group presentation at the end of the course and we would have liked to try and spend more time concentrating on the positive aspects of China. But all in all the experience was positive for both students and teachers and the results speak for themselves.

As always I would be glad to hear comments, feedback, ideas or questions.

Resources:

Final Videos (nb sound volume varies!)

Video 1 - China Mediated

Video 2

Video 3

Video 4 - A glimpse of China

Lesson Plans - not in order, also some lessons changed after we created the lesson plans.

Lesson Plans 1

Lesson Plans 2

Lesson Powerpoints

Introduction to China Powerpoint

Human Rights Issues in China

China in Crisis

example homework

Flashmeeting Presentation of the Project from teachmeet (about 10 minutes)

http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net/fm/fmm.php?pwd=759b1f-3229&jt=02:50:20

I’m looking forward to Teachmeet on Monday in Essex. I attended my first one at the Bett Show in January where I met lots of interesting people and heard lots of interesting talks that lasted a maximum of 7 minutes. Entertaining, interesting, educational, inspiring and perfect for my attention span. I wasn’t sure I’d make this one in Essex as it’s a bit of trek through the rush hour M25 from Rickmansworth. Luckily it’s at a time when I normally have year 11 who are off on study leave and I’ve got the blessing of my school to leave early. Not that I feel I’m taking a liberty when the event isn’t scheduled to finish until 21:30! One more difference this time from last is that I’ve put my name down to talk. If I’m lucky enough to get picked out of the hat I’ll be talking about… my experiences using technology with gifted and talented students - I guess I better write about it up here too, just give me a bit of time to get it sorted.

I was going to put this in a previous post but it seemed more sensible to put it as a topic in its own right. I’m calling this part one as I hope to add more posts on this topic later.

These are a few things I’ve noticed seem to work when introducing teachers to a VLE on an individual basis. To give some background my pilot VLE Rickypedia has a handful of teachers added who have expressed an interest. I have only run a half an hour group training session for some of these teachers. Obviously this is not ideal and something I hope to have rectified next year. Everything I have read about successful use of VLEs points to the importance of good staff training. Nevertheless many of us who work in schools, or I guess most of the real world, don’t have ideal circumstances much of the time. I hope these pointers of things I have found have worked well will be useful. Please do add to the list in the comments.

5 Tips for introducing new teachers to a VLE

1. Stress the importance of experimenting and not being scared to make mistakes. It’s amazing how easy it is for a teacher to get things wrong, for example confusing a live chat with a forum and setting up the wrong one. Easy to correct, no harm done and something learned.

2. Encourage teachers to look at each others’ courses. All teachers on Rickypedia have their global (or site) role set as non-editing teacher. This means they can peep in on other teachers’ courses without being able to edit them. I have got great ideas from other teachers and I know other teachers have got ideas from me.

3. Have a staff sandbox. In programming speak a sandbox is a place where you can run code without it being able to damage your system. In a VLE a sandbox can be a course hidden from students where teachers can experiment with features and build up confidence.

4. keep an eye on teachers’ courses so you can give them feedback. Some may comment that this is being nosey or interfering, but if you follow point three above you are just practicing what you are preaching.

5. Offer help regularly. A quick, “Is there anything you need a hand with?” in the staffroom can go a long way. Doing the odd favour here and there never hurts either!

Our Rickypedia VLE is still very much a pilot website with only a selection of students and teachers on the system. I’ve added new students and classes as I’ve been ready to experiment with them or as I have had requests from other teachers.

One of our student teachers (or beginning teachers as they are now known) approached me about a month ago to ask if Rickypedia would be able to help her year 7 English class with their non-fiction projects. She was looking for somewhere where students could upload their writing, she could mark up changes and the students could then refine their work and resubmit it for further review. I realised that Moodle wasn’t necessarily the ideal solution (something like Google docs or a wiki may have been better) but it did provide a solution so I explained the system and what it could or couldn’t do. Next step get the class up and running.

The year 7 group in question is also a class I teach for ICT and this seemed an ideal opportunity to get them using Rickypedia for two subjects simultaneously. It also meant that I could use an ICT lesson to get the students started on moodle to make it easier for their English lesson. All students were enrolled in an ICT course and an English course and were given access to the “Student Room” a general discussion course open to all students on Rickypedia. I gave the English teacher a brief lesson on course editing and we were off and ready to go.

It’s always fun starting off a new class on something brand new but I was overwhelmed by the reaction of the class. They loved filling in information on their profiles (see earlier post). They loved their homework to create and upload an avatar. Some of them started exploring other features such as blogging and personal messaging and word spread (especially word about personal messaging). The enthusiasm from students blew me away and when I or the English teacher added something to the site they often discovered it before we told them about it. Students log on at all hours, before school and after school. I’ll try and keep you posted about their progress but so far it has been overwhelmingly positive, a few logging on issues but nothing major. One immediate issue that has come up from the English department is the lack of a spell check on moodle, this is something that I will look into.

Here are a few things that I’ve noticed about year 7s on Rickypedia compared to year 9 and upwards that I had so far added to Rickypedia

1. They don’t mind reading and writing on screen, in fact many of them seem to prefer it to paper - maybe this generation are natural technology users?
2. They love personal messaging each other and often do so about school work - I guess older students have other communication systems that they prefer to use.
3. They are not scared of messaging teachers. I seldom receive a message from older students but get a couple a week from year 7s asking about homework or technical problems - fewer inhibitions or less independent workers?

As I write at 12:30 on a sunny Saturday afternoon my Rickypedia site log shows 122 actions on the site this morning - all by pupils from this class.

Today I rely on RSS feeds to provide me with the information I want when I want. I can’t believe that a year ago I didn’t really know what the point of an RSS feed was. RSS is an acronym for really simple syndication, it provides automatically updated feeds from websites, blogs and news sites which can be imported and read using a range of applications on the internet or on your PC. To use RSS feeds on your VLE is pretty simple.

On Moodle there are a couple of different RSS features. You can add RSS blocks to bring in external RSS feeds and you can add RSS funtionality to your site forums to allow others to subscribe to your feeds. It is the former that I use mostly because I’m still to work out how the second works especially with regard to privacy and security in schools (maybe a kind reader will explain the functionality to me).

So a few RSS examples from Rickypedia

1. The Frontpage
I’ve added three RSS feeds to our frontpage. A quote of the day, news from CBBC Newsround (child friendly news headlines) and a “This Day in History” feed. Each provides a little bit of wisdom or knowledge in one hyperlinked line. You can set how many items appear in each feed and how much information you want displayed, just the headlines or more. (the picture below has been edited). I may well remove some in the future to avoid the homepage becoming too cluttered.

2. Subject Specific Feeds

You can also add RSS feeds in a block on a course page. For my A-level computing students I added links to Wired and Computing magazine newsfeeds to present a mix of internet and business ICT news.

A colleague who teaches Chemistry added links to New Scientist and Chemistry World feeds and picked specific feeds related to energy. She then took it a step further by setting students a homework using the feeds to research a topical news item. A great use of RSS feeds and a great way to get students to read literature relating to the course and gain a wider understanding of the issues.

Problems: One specific problem I have had is with graphics and in particular advertising on a particular feed. On Moodle you can choose to allow your feed to pull in graphics or not - graphics can sometimes mess up the layout of your site by stretching boxes and moving things around on a page. With one feed even when I turned graphics off it would sometimes pull in adverts from feedburner who provided the RSS subscription. Normally I would ditch a feed that put unsolicited adverts on a site but I really wanted this particular one so I found a rather elaborate way around it using yahoo pipes (ask if you want to know more - I don’t want to bore you with the details).

Let me know how you use RSS feeds in your classroom and I’d also love to hear from anyone who has experience turning on the extra RSS functionality in Moodle.

.

There are three things that I ask students to do when they first log onto our VLE at Rickypedia.

1. Change their password
2. Fill in the profile information (see previous post on customising profile feeds)
3. Create an avatar (an online picture representing them)

The instructions I use for students are publicly available here. Feel free to borrow them and if you improve on them (not hard to do) then let me know so I can borrow yours!

I got some of the ideas for creating avatars from Ian Usher’s blog post on the same subject - it’s well worth reading and discusses online identity forming and whether to allow students to post their pictures as avatars. I told students not to use pictures but a few didn’t follow instructions and I’m still undecided what to do about it!

There are hundreds of websites available for creating avatars, just search and you’ll find plenty on the web. You’ll also find that your students know plenty of places already that they have already used for their Myspace and Bebo profiles.

If you’re a moodle user and an admin on your site you can see a great display of user profile pictures by visiting http://www.yourmoodlesite.org/userpix/ Click the picture below to see what my students look like.