Controlled Assessment on computers – how do you do it?

For those looking for an easy answer on how to do controlled assessments… I’m afriad I haven’t got it yet. In the UK the exam boards have come up with the concept of Controlled Assessment – this is a replacement for coursework, much of which was done at home which was seen to be too […]

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

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 […]

Staff E-learning Newsletter

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 […]

Why Scorm and multimedia learning resource development is best left to the professionals

Teachers are often critical of commercial resources available to them. Be they “old fashioned” textbooks, “new fangled” software packages or, even newer, resource packs for VLEs. This is sometimes because resources, such as books, are written to work generally with a large group of people but may not tailor to exactly what a teacher wants […]

The end of a great data project using Google Docs and Moodle

Each year for the last 4 years I’ve taught surveys and databases to my year 7 class.We used to start off by creating a spreadsheet with columns for name, age, favourite food and send all the students wandering around the classrooms to collect details from their friends.Next we went on to make a survey on […]

VLEs, costs, features and why I’ve fallen for Moodle

Although the market is more developed than when I started looking at and learning about VLEs about 3 years ago it’s still very confusing. In the UK there are approximately 10 Becta approved learning platforms (note that’s learning platforms rather than VLEs). There’s also probably another 10 or so out there that I’ve looked at […]

VLEs, Cyberbullying and year 7 – part 2: The Good

Sorry there is no part 3: The ugly but do take a look at part one of this story here Welcome to part 2. In part one I described the frustrations of trying to build up a course on our VLE on e-safety. Here’s how my course ended up looking Before we got to the […]

Top software and hardware for creating great VLE resources? Any tips?

Thanks to choosing Moodle as our VLE our school has a VLE budget to spend on training, hardware and resources. Okay we didn’t get quotes from every supplier out there but the first one we had in quoted around £30,000 for their “package”. Our current budget is more modest (I won’t put the figure online […]