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
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.
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)…
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
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)
Have a look at Google Apps for education (if you haven’t already). It would give you the email and online apps options branded for your school. And there appears to be some work going on at getting Moodle and Google Apps to integrate, which would be even better!
Nowadays ppl talk about VLE such as moodle a lot. I wonder if you feel it REALLY worth the effect. Because the ideas usually seem fantastic, but ppl don’t see the great effect behind it – such as initially set up the platform and maintain everything afterwards.
There is certainly a lot of effort to set up everything and maintain it but you can do things on a small scale quite easily. My pilot rickypedia was set up and hosted for £40 a year and although I spend time getting it just the way I wanted I could have had it set up and working in no time at all. Other online tools don’t even need a log in to use such as bubbl.us and voki.com . Using think.com or blogger requires students to sign up but little admin or setup from the teacher. I think the effort is changing your mindset, setting up your resources and convincing others that it’s worth their effort!
Hi Dan – new physics teacher at Ricky (we’re Facebook friends if that means anything!). At one of my practice schools, they had the homepage of all of their computers as their VLE. What I noticed was that almost all of the pupils loved to use the function of checking their attendance and grades.
If I had a class in a computer room, or had a set of laptops, one of the first things they did when the VLE popped up was to have a look at their recent grades and whatever other data was contained on there. [Admittedly with it being the homepage, it may have become some kind of routine for them to click on it?]
Just thought I’d let you know in case you are considering the use of a similar feature here.
This is absolutely great! Thanks for putting this online!