nstoneit.com E-learning Experiences

Below is our latest staff e-learning newsletter that was supposed to get sent out in the last week of term but got caught in the chaos of the snow! It’s been slightly edited for privacy reasons.

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Here’s what in this newsletter

1. Reminder of how to get on the VLE
2. It’s Google Time
3. VLE Teacher of the month
4. VLE teacher targets
5. Online tool of the month
6. Reminder about Nintendo DS Consoles
7. 10 Great online tools with tips on how to use them in class

1. Reminder of how to get on the VLE -
Just log in at www.rickypedia.org using your eportal username and password. A helpsheet is available for students but all KS3 students should know how to log on from their ICT lessons.

2. It’s Google Time
Regular Rickypedia users may have noticed the new google icons on the top right of the page when you log in. Click on them and have a try, all students and teachers have accounts for Google Apps and once you have logged into Rickypedia you don’t need to log in again just click on the shortcuts.
Here’s a few things you can do with Google Apps
Make on online survey with a few clicks – results go into a spreadsheet
Have upto 20 students working a single presentation simultaneously
Share a document with a student and put your feedback directly on it.
I’ve you want some tutorial videos just ask me, there are plenty around!

3. VLE Teacher of The Month
November saw great new courses from Geography, RE, History, Science and ICT but the winner this month is Mr. White and his PE Course.
Although Mr. White hasn’t used millions of fancy features his course is a great example of how to lay out a simple and attractive course that students can use to find resources and homework in lessons and at home.
I’ve attached a file with 2 pages of his course (I had to cut it at bit as it went to 7 pages!) Mr White A2 Exercise Physiology
This kind of course will be especially useful to students come revision time as it has all the work neatly organised for them!

4. VLE Teacher Targets
Not many people have been to see me to pick up their gold stars for meeting a target!
Beginner: Create a new course and add something to it.
Intermediate: Add a picture to your course
Advanced: Set up a glossary for students to add in their keywords.
If you finish a challenge come and see me and I’ll give you a ‘well done’ sticker, 3 stickers and you can have a certificate!

5. Online tool of the Month
If you like mindmapping, brainstorming or for the overly political correct thought showering try out these 2 website.
http://bubbl.us a great simple tool – click start brainstorming and you’re away – you don’t need to register but if you do it lets you save your diagrams online – if not then you can save your diagrams as pictures on your PC
www.mindmeister.com – a more complex and sophisticated tool. You need to register – this lets you attach files or links to websites in your brainstorms, it also lets you invite other people (or students to collaborate with you)

6. Nintendo DS Consoles
Another reminder about them! They are great for lessons but also really great for filling long form periods. They are a great reward for students that get planners signed – you’ll never get an unsigned planner again!

7.Nic Peachy is a language teacher into his online stuff. He shares many great resources including this one with 10 web tools and 10 ways you can use them in your classroom
http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2009/11/10-teacher-development-task-for-web-20.html

Wishing You a great Christmas Holiday

If you are lucky enough to be going and haven’t already made plans for your evening(s), I’d like to draw your attention to some events that might prove a welcome and invigorating contrast to the hurly-burly of the exhibition floor.

On Wednesday 13th Jan at 6pm there will be a free TEDx event with a stimulating line-up of inspirational speakers from diverse backgrounds. TEDxOrenda at BETT is an individually organised TED event that epitomises the tradition of TED as a vehicle for ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’.
More details of the TEDxOrenda event can be found here: http://www.think-bank.com/tedx/
The event is FREE and tickets are available from here: http://tedxorenda.eventbrite.com/

On Thursday 14th Jan there will be a free AmplifiED event, again from 6pm. AmplifiED follows a Barcamp, unconference model and is essentially a participatory event that involves table discussion around topics and themes. In this case, the topics for discussion will be education-based and possibly provoked by the BETT show itself.
More details of the AmplifiED event can be found here: http://www.whiteboardblog.co.uk/2010/01/amplified-2010-bett/
The event is FREE and tickets are available from here: http://amplified10.eventbrite.com/

On Friday 15th at 6pm a Teachmeet will take place. For those unfamiliar with the Teachmeet format, it is an event that consists of short (2min or 7 min) presentations given by practitioners. These presentations are about great ideas and what works well in the classroom.
More details of the Teachmeet event can be found here: http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/TeachMeet-BETT-2010-Friday-Session
The event is FREE and although there are no formal ticketing arrangements, you are encouraged to sign up to the wiki (above).

If you are going to be at BETT, do consider spending an evening or two/three at the above event(s). Whether you can attend any, some or all, I am sure it will add considerable value to your visit.

If you are not planning on going to BETT or if you can’t make it to any of the evening events, keep an eye on the links above for archives, livestreams, twitcams, flashmeetings, etc.

(Thanks to Dughall McCormick for putting the above message together and distributing)

Hope to see many people there!

Just a quick post to say that the presentation I used is below and if you want to see the link to the suggested tools from the kind people in my twitter network you can see them here.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoTf6qWZwPKXdHgxalRwazdEWG5YOURMWXg5QWJpenc&hl=en

I’m running a session at 9.30am on Tuesday morning (29th December) on E-tools, E-learning and E-Communication for everyone and I need your help!

The session is being run at Limmud conference, an amazing and diverse Jewish learning conference. I’m hoping to share with people at the conference some great online tools they can use in their lives. I don’t know who will turn up at the session but as well as interested individuals there will no doubt be teachers, educators, rabbis and communal leaders.

There’s two ways you can help
1. Fill in this short online Google Form
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?cfg=true&formkey=dHgxalRwazdEWG5YOURMWXg5QWJpenc6MA

The results will be available to view at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoTf6qWZwPKXdHgxalRwazdEWG5YOURMWXg5QWJpenc&hl=en

2. Join our flashmeeting at 9.30am, pop in and say hello and share a bit of your knowledge to a captive audience!
http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net/fm/cb4639-8214

3. Tweet me your favourite e-tool – send a tweet to @nstone and I’ll collate them together.

Many thanks and I look forward to seeing people online tomorrow morning!

About a month ago I was contacted by a PR agency working for the TDA on teacher recruitment. They were looking to make a Youtube film to attract people into ICT Teaching following a similar successful campaign around maths in everyday life. Amazingly they approached me after reading this blog and hearing my interview for the Edonis Project.

I had a long and fairly tiring day at Waterfall Studios in Shepherds Bush filming in front of a green screen and constantly forgetting my lines and having to do things again and again from different angles. The results are below and I’m in awe of the computer graphics that they have put around me to make a totally empty room look full.

Film 1

Film 2

I find both videos rather cringeworthy to watch (I did have a cold and a cough on the day of filming!) but I hope they have some effect. I know for sure London and the South East are short of qualified ICT teachers. After completing my Computer Science and Software Engineering degree the world of programming didn’t have much attraction to me and I went into teaching as it brought together two passions of mine, education and technology.

Technology continues to bring so much to education and it is so inspiring being part of online communities such as twitter, mirandanet and edtechroundup where practitioners actively share the most inspirational and creative uses of tech in the classroom.

In common with many other ICT teachers I sometimes find what we teach a little frustrating. Sometimes students are not challenged by the curriculum, you often hear tales of students being fed up with teachers who know far less than they do (not in my school!) and the numbers taking examinations in ICT and Computing continue to fall. Again there are a number of inspirational people working to rectify this including the recently formed computing at school group who are pushing forward new ideas for getting computing into school.

Being a teacher and an ICT teacher isn’t an easy job, you have to learn to manage all the distractions that computers and the internet offer to children, you have to constantly keep up with all the new software and technology that change every year, and you have to help your colleagues out with all their ICT problems. But you also get to use technology that can be inspiring, children love computers, and once you get over the hurdle of realising that you can’t know everything, learning a new trick from an 11 year old student is a real joy!

Often good things come at once. Sometimes they come at the same time and you can’t make them all – but yesterday the all worked out fine and I had a busy but fantastic day that I had to share on my blog!

On a normal day I’m in school all day, teaching classes, preparing for them or doing work around my e-learning responsibilities. Most of my CPD nowadays I tend to do in my own time, via twitter, online groups such as edtechroundup or evening meetings like Mirandamods. Occasionally I get to go to a course, in the daytime – a real old fashioned Inset!

This Thursday was one of those days – I headed over to the institute of education for a morning session on mentoring. This was the third installment of this course aimed at people like me who are mentoring participants in the graduate teacher programme (a method of teacher training in the UK). The course was useful and we learnt about different methods of mentoring most of which was new to me. By the time we had finished it was too late to head back into school so I’d arranged to try and teach my A-level computing class online.

I headed over to the British Library, a wonderful place to work, and it has free Wi-Fi. I sat myself down in the cafe and waited to see if any of my class would join me in an online flashmeeting. Almost on the dot the first students arrived – 3 joined from home and 3 from the school library. We had a 40 minute online lesson and it went okay. The main problem was the other fascinated year 13 students in the school library who kept on coming over to see what was going on. One even joined the lesson. Aside from these disruptions we actually got some work done. I talked the students through database normalisation using a hefty powerpoint presentation. It was hard working out if students were listening, participating or learning. I gauged this by asking questions and getting students to summarise what I had been saying. Based on the answers obviously something had got through! I did get a few strange looks from people in the library cafe.

No sooner had the online lesson finished when I got a skype call from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano also known as @langwitches . Her 6th grade class interviewed me as part of their project on Jewish communities around the world. I’ve tried to help set them up with different friends of mine on different countries. Apparently Silvia has managed to cover every continent even Antartica! The girl who interviewed me asked great questions and I really enjoyed our 10 minute chat and meeting some of Silvia’s students. I’m very jealous of their project and look forward to seeing the results!

After an hour to kill in the British Library (which flies by when you have work to do) I headed over to the Moorgate offices of Oracle UK where I listened and joined in with the Owers Lecture 2009. The title of the lecture was “Can we reverse the decline of schools’ computing especially with girls”. The two main speakers were Kate Sims and Stephen Heppell who gave plenty of food for though. This was carried on through an audience discussion (we’d by then reformed into a circle) where we heard many points of view. I hope some of the lecture will soon be shared online by the people that were recording it. It’s well worth watching and I will add a link here if it arrives.

Overall a fantastic day – I like to think my school gets value for money when I pop out for an inset!

This is my presentation for Teachmeet Edtechroundup Edition #TMETRU09

For more information on Teachmeet visit www.teachmeet.org.uk for more info on Edtechroundup visit http://edtechroundup.wikispaces.com/

You can see info (and some recordings) of my previous Teachmeet contributions here

Both are fantastic CPD communities and opportunities and it’s great to see the two concepts joined together for an evening.

A few ways teachers and students use our VLE (Edtechroundup Teachmeet)

Please see my video presentation below. I used Screenr to record the screencast which limited me to 5 minutes hence the rush at the end. In the video I show different ways our VLE is used.

1. Student blogs – most are just for fun but we’re hoping to have students writing regular book reviews and sports reports in future.

2. As a document/resource repository for lesson or home resources. Many people decry this use as a waste of a VLE. Okay it doesn’t use all of the features and isn’t very interactive or collaborative but is a great place to start and has obvious benefit for teachers of allowing students to access work from home. Especially useful for revision time.

3. For discussion forums – Great for reflection, discussions or just setting open questions. When students post their response the whole class can see it, learn from it and comment on it. When they do it in their exercise books it’s just between them and the teacher.

4. For extracurricular clubs

5. Making students a teacher in their own course – they can then share their notes with classmates and build a collaborative resource to help with revision.

Look forward to hearing your comments and feedback as well as ideas of things you do with your classes.

Last week I sent out this staff e-learning newsletter to try and keep staff informed and enthused about e-learning and our VLE. The response so far has been excellent, we’ve had three new teachers start using the VLE in a week. See the newsletter below, I’ve slightly amended it to remove some personal details but most of it is still there.

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Dear Staff,
 
In an attempt to avoid unecessary meetings or announcements in shout I’ve been working on this mini newsletter to keep you updated on e-learning and the VLE. I’m hoping I can keep up a monthly newsletter throughout the year. Take a look, have a read, let me know what you think.
 
Here’s what in this newsletter
1. Reminder of how to get on the VLE
2. Resources and tutorials to help you, where to get help
3. VLE Teacher of the month
4. VLE teacher targets
5. Simple Videoconferencing in the classroom
6. Inspirational Videos for the classroom.
7. Reminder about Nintendo DS Consoles
 
1. Reminder of how to get on the VLE
It may have been a while so here’s how you log on…
Visit www.rickypedia.org and login – to log in use your eportal username and password. Once you are logged on if you click your name in the top right corner you can change your password and your profile details.
 
For students their username is…(removed for privacy)  I have attached a helpsheet that you can print out for students. (not attached to blog post)
 
2. Resources and tutorials to help you, where to get help.
If you get stuck with Rickypedia please come and ask myself or Julie. If you want to book a mini training session with me I can come and visit you during registration for a 10 or 20 minute slot, if you need we can probably get cover for your registration. For password resets or anything urgent you’ll probably find Julie easier to find, she’s in the quiet room every day except Friday, I’m around usually in the staffroom or LI6 on Monday and Wednesday mornings. If you need either of us Julie is at (removed e-mail from blog post) and I’m at (removed e-mail from blog post)
A few resources to help out:
On Rickypedia are a few resources – once you’re logged in, on the list of subjects click on “staff” and then choose “Tutorial videos” for basic videos on how to create and build up courses.
Also in the “staff” – section is a course called e-learning training which has a sheet for pupils explaining how they log on.
A group of very good online and short (2 minute) training videos are at http://www.vimeo.com/channels/44004 I think these work at school but can’t promise so you may need to look at home!
 
3. VLE Teacher of the month
The aim of this bit is to show you how different teachers have used the VLE. This time we’re going to visit Sophia in the History department.
 
I have attached some screenshots of Sophia’s courses with this e-mail
 Example uses in History department (pdf)
The history department are using the VLE as an interactive resource to enhance teaching and learning. In a year 9 module there is a unit on life in the 19th Century. The first resource in the course is a link to an interactive resource on the Manchester Art Gallery website looking at a painting of the times. The next resource is a discussion forum where students have to discuss various questions on the painting. It is amazing seeing students building up their knowledge and responding to each others’ posts.
Next there is a link to a page on the national archive website on the same topic followed by a downloadable word document containing a worksheet for students to complete. A powerpoint from the lesson comes next followed by another 2 discussion forums for students to carry on answering questons online. To give you an example of how students have used it – one discussion done over 3 teaching groups has been viewed over 800 times – how often does that happen with a student’s work in an exercise book?
 
4. VLE Teacher Targets
Some people like a challenge or a target to meet – here are some for you to try and get done this month.
Beginner: Create a new course and add something to it.
Intermediate: Create an online poll (it’s called ‘choices’ in Rickypedia)
Advanced: Set an online homework (assignment) and mark it online.
If you finish a challenge come and see me and I’ll give you a ‘well done’ sticker, 3 stickers and you can have a certificate!
 
5. Simple Videoconferencing in the classroom
Anyone wishing to try out simple videoconferencing should take a look at Flashmeeting a free tool provided by our local broadbam consortium. It now works in school!
http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net
Flashmeeting allows up to 25 people to chat using text, audio or video – you could also use it to connect just one person upto your class online even if they only have a basic webcam or microphone. Even without a webcam in your classroom you can talk to them via audio or text chat.
 
6. Inspirational Videos for the classroom.
This great presentation has links to 100 youtube videos that you could use in the classroom. Some are truly amazing.
http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/youtube.htm
Obviously YouTube is blocked at school to keep us safe – see this blog post about how to download these videos to bring into school. http://elearnr.org/2008/09/13/how-to-find-and-download-youtube-videos-for-use-in-the-classroom/
 
7. Reminder about Nintendo DS Consoles.
Reminder – we have 16 Nintendo DS consoles and a variety of games including maths, english, braintraining, puzzle, french and just for fun games. You can book them out for lessons or registration for your classes or forms – the sign up sheet is on the bottom of Mr. Griffith’s noticeboard in the staffroom (he hasn’t complained to me yet!) and the consoles live in a neat easy to carry box in Mr. James’ room.
For some cool ideas on how to use Nintendo DS in the classroom please check out this evolving presentation – 23 Interesting Ways and Tips to use a nintendo Ds in the classroom
http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/nintendodsdsi.htm
 
Enjoy and come and ask if you need a hand with anything!
Daniel

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Download – What gets kids on a VLE and what difference does age make? (pdf 321kb)

A year on from completing my MA in ICT and Education and I’ve got round to sharing my research study. I had grand ideas about trying to get it published but never got round to it. So here it is to share with the world on my own blog. Despite being a year old I think the research is just as valid today as it was when I started. Please feel free to read, use and distribute. If you do use it for anything interesting I would love to know.

I chose the topic of virtual learning environments to investigate and I wanted to know what gets students to use a VLE and how the use varies between ages. You can read the abstract below – please do let me know what you think – either via comments, via e-mail or via twitter.

Abstract:

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) become compulsory in UK schools from 2008. A great deal of public money has been and will be spent on them. Research on VLEs in schools is sparse and research on what makes students use VLEs even more so. This study builds on a practitioner’s observation that students of different ages use VLEs in different ways. Through focus groups, a survey and the analysis of VLE access logs, this survey investigates why students use or don’t use VLEs and looks for differences and patterns in the uses of students in three different year groups.

Analysis of results shows that there were significant differences between year groups in perception and usage, and that the youngest students were more eager users of the VLE. Communication and homework were found to be two key factors for student use. The study advises that schools take the opinions of pupils into account when designing or procuring VLEs and suggests that more research on what makes a successful school VLE would be invaluable to school decision makers who often have few experiences in this field.

And my conclusion taken from my document was as follows…

Having seen a number of commercial offerings for content for VLEs I was always left unimpressed. Most were expensive, uninspiring and did not comprehensively cover the topics I needed. Part of the challenge I wanted to take on was to see if I could do better. Though I created a resource that did a good job for me and my class I’m afraid I didn’t do better. The overall quality of my resource was not on par with commercial offerings in terms of layout and design. My content was good but every teacher likes to use resources in a different way and they may not meet the requirements of many teachers. The time taken to create the resources was also prohibitive. I did not tally the exact time spent creating the WBLE but I estimate I spent 6 to 8 hours creating a resource that is far from perfect and that would occupy a student for a maximum of 2 hours. For a software house this may be a good return on investment but for a teacher it is a prohibitive amount of time. One of the problems with getting teachers to use online learning environments is the time it takes them to prepare online resources (Dabbagh, 2002). This project has left me a little downhearted that this is a problem that will be very difficult to overcome for teachers who want to create comprehensive and professional materials. On the other hand, a few years ago I felt I could not create a professional quality website. Now there are online tools that I have mastered that have changed this. I hope in the near future that rich learning creators will be available that produce professional and immersive resources with minimal effort. Until then I shall be leaving any similar projects of this kind to the professionals and concentrating on making use of simpler tools WBLEs have to offer.

Do you have or know of any great content or easy to use content creators? Share it in the comments section, commercial suggestions/adverts are welcome as long as you make it clear who you are and are happy for others to disagree with you or confident they won’t!

Downloads (PDF 333kb)

Designing_a_web_based_learning_environment