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 […]
Category Archives: VLE
ICT and English Masterclass, China Videos
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 […]
Teachmeet
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 […]
Introducing new teachers to a VLE – 5 tips – part 1
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 […]
An enthusiastic new class of year 7s
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 […]
What to do with RSS feeds?
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 […]
Personalisation, online identities and avatars
. 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 […]
Keyword and Glossary Fun
One neat and simple feature that Moodle has is a glossary. (I’m sure you could replicate this functionality easily enough using other features of other VLEs). The glossary lets the teacher or students put definitions of words, hence the name glossary. As it’s such a simple and easy to understand tool it’s one I have […]
Customising Profile Fields
Setting up custom fields on users’ personal profile is really easy. The standard fields in a moodle install are things like skype, msn, icq, e-mail, website. I felt a bit uneasy about encouraging students to put in all of those personal details which I or the school could have no control over, particularly personal websites […]
What does your name mean?
This month is the first birthday of rickypedia.org. Rickypedia is the inspired name I registered for our school’s Moodle VLE. The best thing about the name is that it wasn’t my idea. Last year while spending regular lunchtimes with year 8 students in webdesign club some students decided to make a page about the local […]