Warwickshire Learning Platform blog

DX2 update going live

2011-02-15T15:22:00.002+00:00

The Warwickshire Learning Platform is currently undergoing a (long awaited) update to DX2 and should be live by the end of Feb. Most users won’t notice much of a difference, those who manage their schools memberships and passwords will find they have much more management and control over their schools accounts.
Just the one account please
Users will be able to belong to different establishments and have different roles. A parent who works for the County Council but is also a school governor may currently have three We-Learn accounts. These will be able to be merged into one account with access to all required areas with one log-in.
More groups please
There will be an addition of Governor, Teaching Assistant and Other to your school membership groups. This makes it easier to assign permissions, for example if you have governor pages or Interest Space you can now add the governor group rather than individual user names. You can assign people to these groups manually within the platform.
Managing accounts
Administrators will be able manually create new membership accounts directly within the Learning Platform. You will also be able to edit account details for existing users within their school, such as a users role and access levels. If a student moves school or is attending lessons at another school you can request a transfer to a new school.
There are many other features being introduced in the update, we’ll know more once it is live and report back our findings.

Update:
DX2 is now live. One issue uncovered that Admin users can no longer download "All" Usernames from their establishment. They can still however select to download specific groups, e.g. "TeachingStaff" or "Students". Fix expected over Easter.

Create your v-Me

2011-02-04T15:44:00.001+00:00

The most important thing to remember when updating your profile, is to do your V-Me! If your character is stuck wearing pyjamas, you need to go to “My Space > My Profile > Change v-Me” after logging in and dress yourself up.

You can choose different pets…

Sports…

Hats…

And more to make your v-Me just how you want it.

Warwickshire Teachers’ Forum on the Learning Platform

2011-01-07T14:36:00.001+00:00

We have launched a new Warwickshire Teachers’ Forum on the Learning Platform, where school staff can contribute to discussions about Academies, Pensions, Changes in Education or add their own topics. The Learning Platform is an ideal place to host this forum, with it being a secure managed site for We-Learn users.

The Forum is pretty simple, with just three pages and a blog all navigated to via the top banner, you’ll find any news, events, documents and links all within the site. All We-Learn school staff in Warwickshire are invited to take part and contribute their thoughts, it’s also a chance to let Teaching Association Leaders, Senior Managers within the Authority and Senior Local Authority Officers know what you are thinking.

Visit the Warwickshire Teachers’ Online Forum here, remember you will need your We-Learn log in to access the site.

Integrated Disability Service on the Warwickshire Learning Platform

2010-12-14T15:08:00.000+00:00

We have been hard at work creating areas on the Learning Platform with the Integrated Disability Service, allowing Warwickshire school staff, pupils and parents to access resources, documents, videos, news and updates as well as add to discussion boards.

The Integrated Disability Service is a partnership, bringing together Warwickshire County Council, the NHS and Connexions. One contact opens the door to a range of services to support children and young people with additional needs and their families at home, school and in other settings.

We have developed areas for the Hearing and Deafness team, Visual Impairment, Physical Disability, Complex Needs, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Transitions and Young Carers. Each area has specific staff who have been trained up on how to update their pages and content.

The Visual Impairment team have information about equipment, top tips and lots of resources including links to programmes to assist users who are visually impaired.

Moving into Adulthood have developed interactive activities which have been embedded in the site to teach pupils the meaning of transition.

The Autism area has lots of resources such as the ASD Toolkit DVD and videos of teachers talking about their experiences.

The Young Carers secure membership area includes news, events and photographs of events, we will be inviting carers to blog about their experiences in the form of a diary to share their experiences with others who may be in similar situations.

The site has recently been opened up and we are excited about using these pages to assist teachers, pupils and parents find resources and information.

Visit the Interest Space here http://bit.ly/WCCIDS (We-Learn log on is required)

Embedding Cooliris picture walls

2010-11-26T16:08:00.001+00:00

We’ve been recently looking at ways of displaying photographs and images in the Learning Platform, we’ve not been overly convinced with the new BETA web parts to display photos.

I stumbled across a post about how to configure a Cooliris picture wall using a Learning Platform picture library as the source, getting around the e-safety issues around hosting school photographs on external websites like Flickr or Picasa.

By tweaking the Picture Library RSS feed and uploading the Cooliris flash file, we’ve successfully created a picture wall using images within the Learning Platform. The good thing about this is that the picture wall can be placed on a different Interest Space to display the photos.

In the Looking for Learning Interest Space, we have teacher community pages where teachers can upload their photographs. The picture wall has been placed on the Student community pages allowing them to see the uploaded images.

We’ve also used these on our Wedgnock Gallery Interest Space, where we showcase schools artwork that is on show at our Professional Development Centre.

Walls were built using the online tool found here http://www.cooliris.com/yoursite/express/builder/

Cooliris discussion on the KLP site (log on required) is here

Using ICE to aid transition

2010-07-08T09:28:00.003+01:00

A number of sites have been created in the Warwickshire Learning Community to aid Year 6/7 transition. These “Moving to …” Interest Spaces have been set up with the help of Secondary Schools to give future students an insight into their new school.

One of the main features of these sites is the virtual tour, allowing visitors to see a map of the school and click on the rooms.

We have used Microsoft ICE to stitch together 360 degree photographs of rooms, exporting the images as a Deep Zoom Tileset and then uploading them into our Learning Platform.

The images can be scrolled left and right and zoomed in or out.
The sites give students a real feel for the school they will be attending in the new school year.

Yr 6 pupils can also ask questions in the site which to be answered by the Secondary School Staff.

They can see what a typical day consists of

And check out what their new school uniform.

These Interest Spaces have been developed by the schools with the help of their E-learning advisers. Workshops were held where school staff could learn how to develop their site and incorporate the interactive school map and ICE images.

Warwickshire CYPF homepage

2010-04-20T11:57:00.003+01:00

Due to the last Warwickshire CYPF homepage being removed by a guest user, there is now a new home page for the Warwickshire CYPF establishment (locked so can't be removed again!)

Inspired by Bing, using a table with backgrounds from the Enjoy Warwickshire website and just typing the text over it.

Plan is to keep it simple and rotate the backgrounds every so often.

Looking for Learning Interest Space

2010-04-09T14:03:00.001+01:00

The Looking for Learning Interest Space is coming along well. This site is aimed at teaching staff and pupils with areas for small clusters of schools to upload/share information as well as areas to be updated by the LA.

Home page

They wanted areas for each of the 13 clusters and then teacher/pupil areas for each cluster, definitely a challenge! Instead of creating a silly amount of Interest Spaces there is one for teachers and another for pupils, and then created a page per cluster.

Cluster Groups:

To make sure only people from a particular cluster can access their page, a membership group for each cluster was created and permissions were set on each page to allow only the appropriate group to access the page. It seems to work well, members of the Coleshill Cluster can only get to their page

Coleshill Pupil cluster page:

Content is currently being uploaded by the schools using Colshill as a pilot, which will be presented to a room full of teachers in May.

Using a Navigation Banner across your pages

2010-04-08T11:05:00.001+01:00

Navigational banners a great way to ease the navigation around your Interest Space, it allows you to give visitors easy access to the key areas of your space without them having to dig around in the space content list. I usually use two table to create the banner, which is made up of images, text and links.

Example of banner on Safer Schools site

1. Create your pages
First off you will need pages for the banner to link to, in this example the pages are:
- Home
- Information
- Video
- Teacher Zone
- Student Zone
- Reporting

2. Create the lists and libraries
Make sure you hide the lists and libraries from the Space Content List when you are creating it, as they will be displayed as web parts on the page.
e.g. for the Information page you may want to create a Documents Library and a Links list to display as web parts.

3. Design your banner
For a starting point, create a table with 3 columns and 1 row, width 100%

- In the left column insert a picture
- in the right column insert a logo
- in the middle column insert a heading
Directly beneath the first table, create a second table. 1 column per page and 1 row, width 100%

- In each cell type in the name of the page
Play around with cell widths, colours, padding image sizes until it looks how you want.
You can use the table properties to put background colours for the table.

4. Link your banner
Grab the URL address of each page you have created and create a link from the banner cell you have created for it. E.g. link the text 'Noticeboard' to the URL address for the noticeboard. Repeat this for all pages.

5. Put your banner on other pages
When you are happy with your banner press the html button in the page editor and copy ALL of the code
Edit each page you have created, press the html button and PASTE in the copied code.

6. Modify pages
You can then go back an modify any text you may have in the banner to suit each page, or you could change any images or logos for each seperate page, keeping them the same size

7. Put in the web parts
Go onto each page and insert your webparts
You can have multiple web parts per page e.g. Information could have a Documents Library and a links list

Tips:
- By putting the table width at 100%, it will stretch the banner across the top of the page.
- I usually use 2 tables but you can play around with cells and rows depending on the site
- Use graphics software or Powerpoint to create buttons for the page links or a more graphical header

I've not created the extra pages or set the links, but the idea is that you'll have a page for each header in the banner, and you'll be able to get to each page just by clicking across the banner.
Examples of where this has been used. (you may not have access to all of these)
- PVE
- SIS
- ICTDS
- Education Policy Development

Winter Learning Platform Update

2010-04-08T10:57:00.001+01:00

You'll notice a few changes when logging on to the Warwickshire Learning Platform after the half term break. A key ones for me is that you can now export survey results into a spreadsheet! The option was always there but previously returned an error message. Now data can be collected, exported and analysed to your hearts content.

Another one is the ability to edit the page layout of a list or library, which is found in the options tab top right when in the list/library you wish to edit. This is particulary useful if you want to add a text editor above a docs library or put in a banner above a discussion. It allows more flexibility of the page, although you can't change the template.

Some of the graphical and user interface changes include:

Space Owners list has been altered, you now scroll horizontally between owners, rather than having a vertical list that takes up loads of space

For Administrators, the Manage Space options have been given a makeover

For Contributors, the Add Content button has now changed from being plus button, to a nice big green button, the library of content you can add has also been updated

Using aligned images in the page editor to improve page layout

2010-04-08T10:51:00.001+01:00

Aligning Images

For: Administrators, page editors, news or blog contributors in the Warwickshire Learning Platform.

The align function will allow you to format your picture so that text will wrap around and auto-flow around your image. This can be used when creating a page of text, banners at the top of pages, creating menu's which use images as button or for news items. Using this funtion means you do not have to create tables to format your pictures on your page.

To set a pictures alignment (you need to be in the page edit mode):

insert the image as usual using the image manager
right click image select image properties
Set the alignment using the option
set the horizontal and vertical spacing around the image
done

Un-aligned image with no spacing

This is rubbish! you can see the text continues at the base of the image, it doesnt look that great and normally I would have used a table to align the text to the middle which would take a while to set up and configure.

Left/Right aligned images with horizontal spacing set to 10

this bumps the text up to the top of the image and it will auto flow around the image, this is useful if there is lots of text, or to put a picure at the top left of the screen. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image. With lots of text you can see how this wraps around the image.

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Recently got your We-Learn log on? What next...

2010-04-08T10:24:00.000+01:00

If you've recently been given a we-learn log on to access the Warwickshire Learning Platform, you can log on here https://portal.we-learn.org.uk/

I’d recommend starting by visiting the My Profile option in the My Space tab, where you can
1. Change your password
2. Create your V-Me
3. Update your alert email address (use your main address) and information about yourself.

A list of your Interest Spaces can be found by selecting the Interest Space tab and Browse... (your last 20 visited interest spaces show up in the drop down menu). You can also visit the home page of the Warwickshire Learning Community for news/updates and navigation to active areas.

Visit the eCPD and Helpsheets Interest Space for helpsheets and video guides on using the Learning Platform, which have been developed by our e-learning advisers.

Also, the help database accessed through the help button at the top right of the screen is an extensive database on how to use the Learning Platform.

Have fun!