Changing the game?

Live Modelling the United Nations

2012-03-01T15:29:00.000Z

This is a brief post to follow up a previous post on the Model United Nations format which we have undertaken successfully in Buckinghamshire and successfully supported with Moodle. I presented (briefly) at the BETT 2012 TeachMeet on this and thought I'd share the next iteration and how we will (hopefully) improve and focus the use of appropriate technology on the day of the conference. This post will probably make more sense in the context of the original post which is here.

The view from the Al Jazeera desk at a previous iteration of the Model United Nations in Buckinghamshire.

Previously the press teams had, like the Nations involved in the MUN process, used the Moodle-based areas for preparation for the conference day, but had not really used technology to communicate outside of the conference. We've used the Moodle model again, but we're hoping to change the use of technology tomorrow and, with that in mind, each media team has a dedicated Twitter account with which they will (hopefully) broadcast bite-sized chunks of news from the conference, which is about the potential for achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals by a process of nuclear arms reduction. We want the Media Teams' activities to feed back into the Model United Nations process as well, so I'm hoping to use something like to display an RSS feed of all of the Media Teams' tweets about the positions different nations will be taking in the form of a News Ticker across any projected screens we have in the room (the conference is being held in the council chamber at Wycombe District Council). However, this was a problem - creating a list of Twitter users is one thing (I've created a list of the five media teams' accounts - you can see (and follow) it here) - but getting these Tweets out in a form which is useable elsewhere (via RSS, once the lingua franca of web services but now apparently deliberately hidden by Twitter who are desperate to keep users on the Twitter web site at all costs) has become nearly impossible. Google for rss feed from Twitter lists and even the titles of the results give you an idea that This Isn't Going To Be A Straightforward Thing.

The Al Jazeera team from a previous iteration of the Model United Nations in Buckinghamshire.

Previously I'd tweeted about what I saw as my only alternative to Twitter, which was CoverItLive. There were a few issues reported by respondents, who pointed to a security breach which occurred earlier this year, which appear to have been dealt with. CoverItLive does offer a very useful feature which allows the aggregation of a number of Twitter accounts, or hashtags, into the feed offered by a CIL event. As CIL offers RSS feeds of the content in an event, this might provide a way around the limitations of Twitter lists and RSS.
We're hoping that the Media Teams are going to replicate what media teams covering any major event would do - report to the world, knowing that their reports will be seen by those at the event during breaks, recording short pieces (on FlipCams) for summaries during the day, and in general expanding the reach of the media over what is always an inspirational day. If you want to get involved and give the process a wider audience, then you are welcome to follow the Twitter accounts of the MUN Media Teams, who I hope will be tweeting live from the event all day tomorrow...

Media teams covering a previous MUN conference in Buckinghamshire.

Teachmeets @BETT 2012 - Get Involved!

2011-12-12T11:34:00.002Z

What follows is a close relation to a blog post I wrote about a year ago. Most of it still applies, but there are some notable changes...

Pre-Teachmeet @BETT 2011

For the past few years, Teachmeet has been a highlight of the BETT Show for many people – with many even choosing to come on the Friday of the show as they know that they’ll get something new, innovative, fun - or all three - to take away. People have previously even timed their journeys from the other side of the world to attend a Teachmeet. Teachmeets aren’t only for big conferences or exhibitions of course – a cursory look at the Teachmeet site shows them appearing in all sorts of contexts, all over the UK and even abroad.

A last Olympian hurrah for Teachmeet @BETT

Due to the nature of BETT - a four day exhibition/trade fair with 700 exhibitors, its more than 30,000 attendees making it more than twice the size of NECC /ISTE in the US, there's a sense of enormous cabin fever or Lost In Space which arises from being there for more than a few hours. Such an environment means that there are more than a few issues faced by a Teachmeet set at BETT. For a start, a Teachmeet is about sharing practice – classroom practice, work being done with learners now – rather than theoretical “in the future there will be robots” presentations or sales pitches. This will be the last BETT show in the halls at Olympia, so next year will be a learning curve for anyone involved in running a Teachmeet at the show.

BETT 2009 Tiltshifted

Interestingly, this year's BETT is due to be opened by the Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath - personally speaking I won't be there on the Wednesday for this auspicious / idiosyncratic / surreal moment, but if you're attending BETT in any capacity then at all other times there will be plenty of opportunity for you to see and hear from people with experience of teaching, rather than those who set policy for those who do the work - and to share what you're doing if you'd like to.

TeachMeet at BETT 2011 panorama from the front

It's possible that there will be fewer teachers attending BETT 2012 – even though entrance to the exhibition is free, it's easy to imagine many school leaders being less willing to release staff to browse an exhibition whose lifeblood of dedicated funding has been stemmed. So could this mean a Teachmeet devolved of practice and practitioners? Well I for one hope not-TeachMeets aren't about sales pitches, and there are enough of those on the floor of Olympia for the four days of BETT. Of course, if you're more than a little cunning you could see some real practice by attending one of the TeachMeet Takeover sessions - read Ian Addison's blog post on that here.
Once again we'll be using the Eventbrite service to manage 'tickets' for the Friday night Teachmeet session and releasing those tickets in three batches:

teachers/LA/RBC consultants (those who are employed and work directly in schools on a full-time basis);
independent consultants (those who work in schools subject to contracts etc);
exhibitors (those who'll be at BETT and are salaried by a commercial company).

The reason for releasing the 'teacher' tickets first is that current classroom practice is the lifeblood of any good Teachmeet - and so ensuring that there are as many teachers and current practitioners as possible maximises the chance of everyone hearing about Good Things Happening Now. Of course consultants can talk about all sorts of great practice too, but getting your fellow teachers to present means that it's (more?) likely something will be replicable in your classroom just as it was in theirs. That doesn't mean that the other tickets are second class, or even third, but ensures that the balance is more likely to be right so that everyone sees what's happening now.

Get involved!

As ever, we'll be looking for sponsors (beyond EMAP's sponsorship of the room and AV/ICT support) to cover wifi access for attendees, an extra half hour of security so we don't all get booted out at the end, and some refreshments... information on how any generous sponsors can help out will be put on the wiki page. In the meantime, why not

read the TeachMeet @BETT 2012 page on the TeachMeet wiki;
sign up now if you're a teacher or LA/RBC consultant - and soon if you're an independent consultant or exhibitor - via the Eventbrite page;
consider presenting - either a seven minute micropresentation or a two minute nanopresentation - or if you are at BETT but can't be there on the Friday night, consider contributing a presentation to the Teachmeet Takeover.
There is normally a TeachEat event at Pizza Express in Olympia afterwards, to which you're welcome if you attend the Teachmeet - details on the wiki page.

Whatever your involvement - get stuck in if you can. TeachMeet is about sharing practice and, in the current climate, it must be more relevant than ever. Right?

Using Moodle to help Model the United Nations

2011-10-31T08:30:00.000Z

During the last academic year I was fortunate enough to be involved in a Model United Nations (MUN) project being run in the Aylesbury Vale area of Buckinghamshire. This post reflects on how that process worked and (as you might expect) how I used Moodle to support and enhance the project. This post will demonstrate why this couldn't really have been done without an online environment, and how it couldn't have been managed without a Virtual Learning Environment. It will also give some guidance on how to meet the project's requirements using Moodle in case you ever need to do this.

The Aylesbury Vale MUN Conference in session

The project's background

Voting during the MUN Conference

A few months ago I was asked by a colleague to see if there was a way of supporting an instance of the MUN being run in Bucks by the Schools' Linking Network (SLN) charity, which has considerable experience of running MUN projects in Local Authorities. I was initially invited to a meeting for staff from schools involved to work out the logistics of the project with a brief of sharing documents between the schools. This was the first time an MUN project had been run in Buckinghamshire and after listening to what my colleagues and those from SLN were proposing it became clear that without some sort of online interaction - beyond simple document sharing - the project would struggle. The students (henceforth known as delegates) would all meet once at the project's inception, and again for the final conference, but between those two times would have no organised times when they could meet. Delegates from nations would need to work on position papers which would be presented at the final conference and the representatives from international media organisations would need to carry out similar work.

How the project worked

The French MUN Delegation

Five Aylesbury Vale schools came together to work on the project. The students involved were from Years 9 and 10 and worked in pairs to represent either nations or international media organisations. Although there were nearly a dozen ~~students~~ Delegates from each school, the pairs of delegates would not be from the same school, and so would have to work with someone from another school to prepare a country profile and subsequent position paper. Their colleagues representing five international media organisations (Fox News, the BBC, Russia Today, PressTV and Al Jazeera) received some training and advice from colleagues in the BucksCC Press Office and would cover the conference on the day. During the preparation process, the accompanying staff from the schools involved (henceforth known as Faculty Advisers) would support a number of the nations and one media organisation each. The Delegates and Media Organisations they would support would not necessarily be from their own schools and the Faculty Advisers would be expected to communicate with all of their groups. An important issue was that as nations were preparing position papers which were to be presented at the final conference, this work needed to be private within the group of two delegates and one faculty adviser.

What do you want to do, exactly...?

Delegates working on papers
during the Conference

The secret to supporting an event such as the MUN, or successfully extending and enhancing any learning using technology, is to work out the processes and transactions involved - what are those involved expected to do, respond to, share, produce - and then appropriately applying technologies to support those transactions. From the initial meeting with colleagues, SLN staff and staff from schools, it was apparent that the following things needed to happen:

All delegates, media correspondents and faculty advisers needed to be able to access resources, news and updates about the project;
Three levels of access were required - BucksCC & SLN staff (aka "UN Advisers") should have complete access, school staff ("Faculty Advisers") should have access to the groups they are supporting, students ("Delegates") should only have access to their own group's work.
Delegates and media correspondents needed to be divided into discrete groups, able to:

communicate without other groups being able to see what was said;
work on position papers and country/media organisation profiles which would only be visible within the group.

These communications and documents needed to be accessible to Faculty Advisers supporting these groups;
The Media Organisations needed access to certain resources (from their media training) which those Delegates from countries should not access;
"UN Staff" (colleagues from BucksCC and SLN) needed to be able to see all work so they could ensure that Delegates and Faculty Advisers were taking part.

Different technological approaches

Members of the International Media wait for
Country delegates to arrive

First of all, it's important to point out that due to its distributed nature the MUN project could not really have taken place as it did without some sort of online technology. Pairs representing countries and media organisations consisted of students from different schools, and staff were supporting students from schools they did not teach at. It is almost impossible to get students out of their timetables for a project like this and so having another space for the project to take place is critical.
The default position for something like this - where sharing and communication are core components of the transactions - is often "let's just email everything" and it can be quite difficult to convince someone based in an office that email isn't the right tool to use. Defaulting to email misses out on many options for collaboration and makes some simplistic assumptions about how students and staff in schools work. Also, there is a need to find out if Delegates and Faculty Advisers are working on the project - since it is in addition to other school work - and the closed and private nature of email makes this difficult. Any Delegates or Faculty Advisers joining the project slightly late wouldn't have been privy to previous emails, but using an online environment makes all of the historical information transparent.

MUN Moodle course overview

Another approach would have been to go for a third-party service such as Facebook - but this would be problematic, as there is no guarantee that all Delegates & Faculty Advisers would use it and access from within school would be patchy at best. Also, there is little or no control over the way in which a third-party tool is used and no guarantees that it would not change halfway through the project. I've a blog post specifically about this issue to follow soon. By using the county-wide Moodle we could

guarantee access to the space for everyone;
ensure that the environment wouldn't change appearance or functionality during the course of the project;
provide enhanced levels of access for school staff and staff from the LA and organisers in a granular way.

How to achieve this with Moodle

The most important thing to enable the project to be supported effectively was to ensure that all participants had access to whichever system we used. In Buckinghamshire we have a unified sign-on system, meaning that an individual's BucksGfL username gives them access to a wide range of services. Most schools use their own Moodles, however only staff and students from an individual school can access that school's Moodle, so hosting the MUN area on a school's Moodle was not going to work.

A few years ago I requested that Atomwide establish a county-wide Moodle, one which meant that we could easily create cross-school projects which participants could log into using their BucksGfL username. This was the same tool used for the Buckinghamshire E-Anthology project covered here previously and means that any student or member of staff with a BucksGfL username can take part in a project with another group of students from across the County. As one of the schools involved doesn't use the BucksGfL username system we had to ensure that the staff and students involved had their accounts created, but once that was done, we were ready to go.

Let's revisit what needed to happen and I'll give some pointers to how this was done using Moodle 1.9.n:

All delegates, media correspondents and faculty advisers needed to be able to access resources, news and updates about the projectThis was done by simple document sharing - PDFs of the Delegate Handbook and a simple web page with embedded YouTube clips in. Colleagues from BucksCC posted regular messages in the News Forum (to which all members are subscribed) so any Delegates or Faculty Advisers will have received these updates as emails.
Three levels of access were required Within the course the Teacher role was renamed to UN Adviser (using the Role Renaming settings within the MUN course), the Non-editing Teacher role was renamed to Faculty Adviser and the Student role renamed to Delegate.
Delegates and media correspondents needed to be divided into discrete groupsThe MUN Moodle course was set up with its Groups setting set to Separate Groups - this meant that all functionality could, if necessary, be made to run in parallel for the groups of students. I created the groups and gave them a group image of the nation's flag or media organisation's logo. The group image is useful - have a look at the Group Discussion area to see how the images are an important visual aid to how the forum is viewed by an administrator. On the student day pairs of students drew their group out of a hat - while watching this, I simply added the two students to the relevant group. Faculty Advisers were added to all of the groups they were supporting, meaning they could engage in the next two activities:
A Faculty Adviser working with Delegates
during the MUN conference

...communicate without other groups being able to see what was said;
This was very simple - a Forum set up to run in Separate Groups mode, meaning that only one link appears on the page, but each group sees only messages from those in their group. The Group Discussion area images shows a UN Official's (Teacher's) view of this forum and it is apparent how this means
work on position papers and country/media organisation profiles which would only be visible within the groupideally I would have liked to use something like Google Docs here, however a suitable alternative is Moodle's Wiki module. Setting it up with the two settings of Groups Mode: Separate Groups and Wiki type: Group meant that each group has a document they can edit (help image on docs.moodle.org). A simple proforma document starts the wiki pages and the groups can edit these documents.
At the end of the process UN Advisers (BucksCC staff) can copy and paste the final wiki page into documents and share PDF versions of the final position papers on the day of the conference.
Moodle Wiki activity for a
Country's Position Paper

These communications and documents needed to be accessible to Faculty Advisers supporting these groups;This was done by ensuring that the Faculty Adviser/Non-editing Teacher roles were assigned to multiple groups, meaning that they could switch groups from the drop-down list at the head of the Wiki and Forum pages.
The Media Organisations needed access to certain resources (from their media training) which those Delegates from countries should not access;This was done by enabling Groupings across the site and then, within the course, creating a grouping of Media Organisations, which contained the BBC, Fox News, Press TV, Russia Today and Al Jazeera groups. The resources given by my BucksCC Press colleagues were then placed in a resource which was made available only to the Media Organisations grouping. This meant that the other groups could not see these resources.
"UN Staff" (colleagues from BucksCC and SLN) needed to be able to see all work so they could ensure that Delegates and Faculty Advisers were taking part.As mentioned previously this was done by making UN Staff equivalent to the Teacher role, which meant that they could see all groups and make judgements about how work was progressing.

It's quite easy for a Moodle course with a lot of content to become very text-heavy, so I took the approach of using simple, large icons to ensure that the important parts of the course were easily available. IconArchive is a great place to start for icons which are appropriate for decorating Moodle courses with, and inserting them into Labels on the main Moodle course page meant that they could easily be hidden and shown as the project progressed.

Final Reflections

The Oculus Room, Aylesbury Vale
District Council, before the
MUN Confe

It was a privilege to be asked to work on this rewarding project and it became apparent as the project progressed how much it could be extended and enriched. It was more substantial in its scope and impact than many school-based projects and required an approach which would work with a range of learners of varying ages & experience, rather than a focused class or year group delivering a familiar curriculum. It required creativity in understanding how the project had worked and hence what would be the most appropriate methods of using the technology to support something with quite a clearly defined scope. I was able to watch the project unfold online and tweak and nudge it where necessary, and attending the final conference was great, particularly as everyone present could see the transformation of the slightly nervous students at the start of the project to confident delegates.

I was an unofficial photographer for the conference - which was held in the new council room of Aylesbury Vale District Council - and hence there is a set of pictures available documenting the day of the conference and some of the Moodle-related work associated with it. At the time of writing I am supporting another MUN project in the High Wycombe area. Again, the project is supported by an improved version of the Moodle course used for the Aylesbury Vale project, which was featured in this brief BucksCC video:

Presenting at #ngconf on Learning Platforms

2011-06-27T09:02:00.010Z

Newcastle platforms tiltshifted

I’m tapping this out on Windows Live Writer while my 3G connection searches for a signal north of Durham and the “paltry fifteen minutes of free wifi” offered by East Coast trains sits unused. #ngconf is the Twitter hashtag for the Northern Grid for Learning Conference (alternative Lanyrd link) and, although Newcastle was a long way to travel to present a single workshop, the journey was more than worth it.

This was an interesting time to attend another conference, as two days before I’d run some workshops at Buckinghamshire’s own, far smaller, “Future Learning with ICT” conference held for schools in Bucks. The Northern Grid covers several local authorities in the north-east of England and (for anyone reading who’s not in the UK, or hasn’t spent too much time in the world of educational ICT) is a Regional Broadband Consortium, who have been tasked with offering services to schools and Local Authorities in whichever region they cover. Today's conference was illuminated by lots of inspirational and (at least as important) practical people to illustrate the difference well-used online tools can make - people like Russell Prue, Steve Wheeler, Jan Webb, Bill Lord, Martin Waller and Ian Addison (among others) were there to stimulate, provoke, make people think and above all give practical ideas.

Steve Wheeler closing keynote. Picture by simfin2010. Used with permission.

My workshop had the (rather verbose) title of How to improve your school using your learning platform without wasting time, money and opportunity. Not exactly the most catchy title, and if I’m honest I was half expecting to be in a room with half a dozen other people. However, the session was quite full (maybe fifty or sixty people) and I confessed at the start that I wasn’t sure if they would be leaving at the end with an “answer” (if indeed there is one). One of the aims of the session was to share and publicise the Steps To Adoption Model, originally written by a group of experienced users and advocates of the sort of work that can be done using elements of a Learning Platform, and the new post-Becta home for that work, namely the Learning Platform Network. I’m aware that even the mention of Learning Platforms will provoke the usual mix of responses, some positive & hopeful, some vehemently negative or sceptical, or more than a few saying “Learning Platforms – they’re so last decade…”. Which of these reactions, if any, is right?

Your answer to that will almost certainly depend on what your experience of the concept of a “learning platform”. I’m frequently amazed by the baggage the term has acquired (Becta coined the term and then, in my opinion, tried to include absolutely everything that could possibly ever take place in the definition. Simply defining it as “a tool that provided a platform or stage for enhancing learning using online technology” would have been too simple (imagine a procurement framework based on something as vague as that) - however the phrase would almost certainly have meant more in schools.

Simply put, it’s a tool (or a suite of tools, or a collection of small tools loosely joined) a school can use to be more effective, more engaging, more efficient, more open… etc. You get the idea. The group of us who were brought together under the auspices of Becta during the autumn of its time were tasked with developing, refining and publishing a refinement of the work done by the excellent Dave Whyley during his work with WMNet using the LP+ learning platform. We came together from using a whole range of tools – this was the point, we shouldn’t pretend (nor should anyone) that effective use could only be made by using A Single Brand Of Tool. That, some might argue, is the job of the vendors of such tools, but this afternoon I was really concerned to (try and) put people at ease. I feel uneasy when some schools – those just starting out, or those regrouping after a change of leadership or other personnel, or those who are unsure how much is appropriate to use – are subjected to comprehensive case studies from those selling allegedly transformative tools which ignore the change management aspect. At its very core e-learning, or e-engagement, or e-maturity, or whatever is about change management. Whether that’s on a class, year group, key stage or whole-school scale, if there’s no appreciation of the changes which are required and/or might result from taking online aspects of learning, management/admin and communication seriously, then it’s possible to expend a lot of time, money and missed opportunities (hence the title of my presentation today). The Steps to Adoption Model, based around Dave Whyley’s work, which was in turn based on Simon Hooper and Lloyd Rieber’s 1995 Teaching With Technology (definitely worth a read if you’ve not seen it before, the article’s own references are worth a follow or three), aims to couch the idea of using online tools (of all kinds, not just those which might fall under a list of ten approved providers) in five broad areas and (critically) make this measurable and understandable in the wider context of School Improvement. These areas are:

supporting organisation, management and practice;
extending opportunities for collaboration, interaction and communication;
information and data management;
approaches to learning;
parental involvement supporting learning in and beyond school.

The document itself (PDF) is quite detailed, but can be used in a really flexible fashion if (as with all these things) the context is understood. It would work well across a department or faculty, or in an environment such as a school Sixth Form where no progress has been made. Of course, it works at a school level (this being the environment it is designed for) but I could easily use elements of it at a Local Authority level and (shudder) at a Department for Education level as well. In whichever context it’s being used it’s possible just to focus on one of the areas above, progress in which can be categorised against stages modified from the Hooper and Rieber model, an clickable interactive summary of which is here:

[Displayed in an iframe - view original page in new window]

In the Steps to Adoption model these five steps (in yellow above) are described in each of the areas relevant to School Improvement, and are

Aware
Develop
Adopt
Integrate
Transform

What’s really interesting is the work that Northern Grid have done to develop what could be a dull, dry document (OK, it might actually be that way if you have no need of it) into an interactive online tool. This, in turn, was a development of some really good work by Alex Rees, one of the group of us who wrote the document, who transformed it into a spreadsheet-based tool and trialled it with some of the schools he works with as a School Improvement Adviser in the London Borough of Redbridge. This online tool will allow any school to register and record their progress – at the same time being able to filter the activities and measurements by both the stage a school sees itself at, and the area of interest, plus many more things. This work has been done by Philip Belcher who works for Northern Grid, and is a great example of how, when used appropriately, good technology can take thoughts worth having and ideas worth sharing into a space which is more accessible and, hopefully, useable.

The interesting thing that Becta did was release the document under a Creative Commons licence (a Creative Commons Attribution Licence 3.0 as long as both Becta and the originators are credited) – and from what I’ve seen there are already elements of it in Frogtrade’s self-assessment tool for users of their product (which if I’m honest looks like an early rudimentary version of some concepts we had as a group of how to express progress in each area - it's still good to see the principles being applied), and I understand that It’s Learning among others are looking at using the document to support their schools. From informal communications among the group of us who co-authored the document, it would appear that many of the commercial Learning Platform providers are looking to consolidate their user base – e.g. retention is at least as, if not more, important than new recruitment. How do you keep people using a tool you’ve sold them? By helping them to use it better of course, and the Steps to Adoption Model can be used for any tool in the original Learning Platforms Framework and plenty more besides.

I can’t wait to see the tool when it’s released (follow Philip and Simon Finch on Twitter to stay abreast of developments on this) and, if you’re serious about bringing your possibly-isolated use of new technologies – whether cool, mundane or too-new-to-describe-yet into the realm of “official” school improvement in your school, you could do worse than to have a read through the Steps to Adoption Model. As I said in the introduction to today’s workshop, I don’t give a monkey’s what tool(s) you are using – whether it’s Moodle, It’s Learning, FrogTrade, a Wordpress blog, Twitter, Google Apps for Education, UniServity, or anything else – this tool and resource should help you.

#ngconf visible tweets. Picture by simfin2010. Used with permission.

This was originally supposed to be a brief reflective piece on the Northern Grid Conference rather than a treatise on Learning Platforms in their broadest sense - but as is often the case when one's brain is stimulated in a good way, it's the different, less straightforward-than-it-was-in-my-head-when-I-started route that feels the most rewarding. Kudos to Simon Finch and all who organised #ngconf, I can't wait to be doing that much thinking again soon.

A Today Programme approach to an Open Source vs. Closed Source learning platforms debate

2011-06-17T10:18:00.002Z

Vegas Pictures 2009 Canon 003 by AdolfGalland. Used under Creative Commons.

I was recently asked to contribute to SecEd magazine on the case for using an Open Source Learning Platform - a piece to go up against an advocate of a "buy a commercial Learning Platform" approach. I didn't know who would be writing the companion / conflicting piece, so it was an odd piece to write. In the end it turned out that Dominic Tester from Costello Technology College was writing the other piece. I've met Dominic at SSAT learning platform events and he does really good work with CTC's tools, particularly on parental engagement. As I was writing / redrafting / fussing over the piece, knowing it would be edited and thatIcouldn'tfiteverythingIwantedtosayinto800words - in fact on the day I submitted it - I heard Graham Linehan's appearance on the Today Programme to talk about his adaptation of The Ladykillers. You can read about his experience on his Posterous blog or an expanded version on the Guardian's Comment is Free opinion site. Essentially, Linehan thought he was going on the programme to discuss the issues concerned with adapting a film for the stage, with Michael Billington from the Guardian there to provide a wider context. The crux of the issue is in the Guardian piece:

The style of debate practised by the Today programme poisons discourse in this country. It is an arena where there are no positions possible except for diametrically opposed ones, where nuance is not permitted and where politicians are forced into defensive positions of utter banality. None of it is any good for the national conversation.

You can listen to the exchange here, though I'm not sure for how long - but Linehan's irritation with the staged conflict is obvious. I'm not comparing myself to the man who wrote Father Ted and The IT Crowd, nor would I associate Dominic with either Linehan or Billington, but it struck me that we found ourselves in a similar position (I'm not sure what Dominic felt).

I'm not suggesting that any SecEd debate is somehow poisoned - it's not that strong. However, it struck me that having an "either/or" debate on something fairly crucial to schools who want to develop isn't that helpful for decision makers in those schools, who almost certainly won't follow either path, but instead plot a course between. We have plenty of schools who used to use commercial learning platforms and now use Moodle, and there will be schools who change the culture of their school using Moodle and then spend a sizeable budget on another tool in the future. I would loved to have had a constructive exchange of views with someone like Dominic, who is aiming for the same outcomes, using similar approaches, albeit taking a different path to that which I'd recommend. I often find the most interesting opinion pieces in newspapers are those which take the form of a thoughtful exchange of emails or letters from two contributors - which is where the "nuance" that Linehan alludes to might become more clear. If and when I can find a link to an example of this more constructive opinion piece, I'll replace this sentence with a link to it...

Anyway, here's the article as I originally wrote it (the formatting was changed slightly - to fit SecEd's publishing tool? I'm not sure) and some parts were edited out. It also includes direct links to the references. You can see Dominic's piece alongside this (well, underneath, which isn't significant) on the SecEd site, and I recommend that you read both.

Why choose an Open Source option over a proprietary Learning Platform?

When an author or commentator wants to highlight the differences between “commercial” and “open source” tools, some standard statements are often made about these broad categories to attempt to reinforce differences between the two. Such statements normally take these forms:

“Commercial products are well-supported, proven, popular and are the route you should go down if you’re serious about [insert whatever function the tools in question are supposed to perform]. Quality and usefulness are directly proportional to how much you pay for something.”
“Open source products are unsupported, flaky, unreliable and unproven. They are interesting, but only if you are at the geeky end of the spectrum, or have a room of tame geeks at your disposal. They’re cheap - and remember, quality and usefulness are directly proportional to how much you pay for something. Using something which is non-commercial is an indication that you’re not serious about the task that it’s trying to perform.”

This is a false distinction for a number of reasons, so let’s deal with some of them, starting with the “quality and usefulness” one. It goes without saying that any school can take on an open-source tool and use it well and effectively, or do the same with a commercial tool. However, to read some of the marketing from commercial learning platform providers you might think that you can parachute a glossy product into your school and transform learning without the need for good leadership, thoughtful & committed staff and an inquisitive and dynamic learning environment. In such an environment any tool, used well, can make a difference [1] - even the ones which don’t involve your bursar signing off on a five- or six-figure contract.

The “open source vs. commercial” dichotomy is a false one, as to use an open source tool effectively requires spending at least a little time or money - and “commercial” simply means “someone makes money from it”. A better way is to see it as a choice [2] between “closed source” (where you as a user have a negligible influence over the direction of what you’re using - if at all) and “open source” (meaning you as an educator can influence,shape and, if you want to, even help build the world’s most popular online learning tool). Imagine asking Microsoft if they wouldn’t mind changing the way PowerPoint works because your staff or students always struggle with an element of it - unless your surname’s Gates or Ballmer (or maybe even Jobs) that’s unlikely to happen. With an Open Source project, you can really influence the direction of travel.

The “free” aspect of Open Source is often cited as a demeaning characteristic - if I had a pound for every time I’ve been told that we as a Local Authority only offered Moodle (an Open Source tool and the world’s leading Virtual Learning Environment) to our schools “because it was free or cheap” I’d be a rich man - actually, I’d probably have enough to pay for about a week’s subscription to some of the more expensive commercial alternatives to Moodle. We use Moodle due to its quality - not because of its lack of licensing fees. Choosing Moodle has given us genuine freedom - over our own destiny. We can change it or implement it if and when we want to and pair it with what we like (integrations with SIMS [3], other MISs, Google Apps for Education [4], Microsoft’s Live@edu [5], Adobe Connect [6], Microsoft Office [7] and many other tools are available). Our schools can start to use it when they are ready to, not simply because they’ve paid out for a significant contract whose clock is ticking.

Using Moodle as an example, you can pay for as much as you’d like to, including:

training - someone to help or show you how to best use the tool;
hosting - a third party to host the software - unless you want to host it in school;
support - someone on the phone to talk you through how to do something;
or none of these.

You’re in control. The critical thing is that you’re not paying for all sorts of things which won’t benefit you and by definition you don’t need - that glossy marketing campaign in a part of the world you and your students don’t inhabit, the you’ve bought our product for n years and feel obliged to use it so please pay through the nose training sessions, or the needs of shareholders and venture capitalists who pumped money into a company when the winds of Government were blowing funding towards Learning Platforms. As a long-time advocate of Open Source options for Learning Platforms one of the most interesting times for me was February 2010, when the parent company of the StudyWiz learning platform hit the financial rocks [8] - and what this meant for those schools and LAs who had backed that particular horse in the Learning Platform Stakes. A school using Moodle via a commercial host which encountered the same problem could simply move its data to a new host & carry on, as they are using what is effectively a lingua franca of online learning..

I’ve had the privilege of supporting all sorts of schools in using Learning Platforms effectively and have lost count of the number of staff I’ve worked with who have used Moodle in Singapore, Spain, France, Belgium to name a few countries - and been able to bring their resources with them to schools in England, without having to recreate them anew. In Australia, Brazil, the US, Sweden, South Africa, Finland and all around the world a community of learning teachers and educationalists can (and are) shaping the way in which new pedagogies are developing across the globe. Some, like the Open University, LSE, & hundreds of huge institutions [9] invest time, money & resource in Moodle knowing that this will feed back into its global community of users as well as benefiting their own. Others - small primary schools, voluntary organisations, faith groups, individuals - teach and innovate using the same tool on a more organic scale. Both ends of the scale contribute to and gain from a global project that’s open in all senses of the word. Whether you buy into the latest Government strategy [10] or not, most people would agree that this constitutes a pretty big Society.

Complete reference list.

How not to apply for your own job

2011-06-17T09:55:00.001Z

ParentsPstcrd_120309.jpg by Carolyn_Sewell - used under a Creative Commons license.

A previous post looked forward (if that's the appropriate phrase) to the end of the process of applying for my own role in the Buckinghamshire School Improvement Service, and was written the evening before my half-hour interview. So what happened?
Well, the outcome was that I didn't get the post I applied for (School Improvement Adviser) but was instead offered a post of School Improvement Consultant with salary protection for three years. This is definitely a mixed blessing - of course, I'm incredibly fortunate to have a job at all in the current climate, but to say I was disappointed would be an understatement and, according to the postcard above, a way of wimping out. I'm angry with myself for not having done a better job, and in some ways angry at... what? A system that doesn't recognise work that it can't categorise? My employer for not realising how obviously great I was/am? Hmm, probably neither of those two, so it's probably just myself - and the second one wasn't meant seriously by the way...
That said, I know there are many, many other people facing similar situations right now or in the near future, so I hope this post might be helpful to someone. I've always been a fan of schools and individuals sharing practice - not just "good practice" but also "bad practice" - the "don't do what I did" sort of practice, so if you're facing a similar situation, whether in a school, Local Authority or any other organisation then I hope there's something you can glean from this.

I'm aware that this isn't a perfectly rounded or objective post, so if I have anything not-quite-right then please be patient!

The context

I've been in post for six years now (really?) - I was originally appointed with a brief of making a web site for the School Improvement Service but rapidly moved into supporting & advising schools with the practical aspects of E-Learning - specifically through the use of Moodle and Adobe Connect. (Sometimes when I'm speaking about this work I revert to the "we decided to do this" form of language. Actually, ~~much of~~ it was just me at first.) This was before Becta started the Learning Platforms Framework and before 98% of schools knew what a VLE, Learning Platform or accessible videoconferencing tool was. I was not an adviser, but not a consultant either, but was appointed on an adviser's pay scale, so I guess if you had to call it, you'd say I was an adviser. I remember my two-part interview vividly - the first part was three headteachers and the Head of Service (who'd previously moved from Hertfordshire and asked me to apply for a role in Bucks) and the second part was four senior advisers. I was appointed outside of the curriculum ICT team and was line managed by one of the senior advisers - which meant I very much had a "School Improvement" focus rather than an "ICT" focus. Having someone with a self-professed lack of understanding and experience of technology to support learning and school improvement as a line manager, I started to use this blog as preparation for line management and appraisal meetings - which helped me focus on writing things that could be read by anyone, even if they weren't familiar with the environment and issues my work focused on. Around 2008 the position of my role changed abruptly - without warning I became part of the curriculum ICT team and was line managed by the county adviser, which changed the game (!) significantly. My post went from being core funded by the Local Authority to being paid for from the Harnessing Technology grant - which didn't seem significant at the time. At the same time the focus of the ICT team became less on curriculum ICT and more on e-learning-like activities, since that's where the funding was. Of course, with the seismic changes to funding for all kinds of school improvement-type work, plus swingeing cuts to Local Authority budgets, and the decimation of the Harnessing Technology budget in line with the Coalition government choosing to give that funding to Free Schools, those chickens came home to roost in a "you are all at risk of redundancy" meeting just before Christmas. Hence the recruitment process...

Being interviewed for your own post

I won't go over everything that happened, but on reflecting on what I did right and wrong I can pull out what for me are some important points for anyone having to interview either for their own role, or a similar role in an organisation that's being restructured, but essentially remaining similar to how it was before. These are particularly relevant if your skills and experience are in areas which are seen as "non-traditional" to whatever it is that your organisation does.

Be aware that few people will know the detail of what you do - before the interview processes started I sat down with a senior manager within the Service to go over what the process would entail. He explained that the interviews would be short - 30 minutes - since "we already know you and what you do". Well, on reflection I guess that wasn't true. I assumed that they knew the large-scale, planning, delivery and advisory work that I've done within Bucks and beyond, and therefore chose a small, school-based project to present on to provide a balance to that. It turns out that, for whatever reason, the single school-based project gave a picture of working in small, individual projects and not setting policy, or guidance, or anything more significant - hence (I was told afterwards) the offer of a Consultant post rather than that of an Adviser. This may be peculiar to me (and you) - I'm often told I don't talk about what I've done in glowing enough terms - but on reflection my advice would be: don't assume knowledge of anything you've ever done, even if you've made the papers for years, been asked to write for the same paper, been on the news, won awards, whatever - it'll count for nothing when some harrassed people are having to interview their entire workforce because they've been told they have to make yet more significant cuts/savings.
Those who appreciate what you do (and the way in which it reflects well on your organisation) won't be consulted about how good or otherwise you are at your role - this is stating the obvious, but in the education context, unless your work is almost exclusively with headteachers, those who see the best of your work won't communicate this with anyone who'll be involved in evaluating you. You're almost certainly working in a different strata (heads of departments, senior leaders other than the head, class teachers, governors) and even something that's significant on a whole-school or LA level might not seem that significant unless a headteacher cites it. I'm not sure if giving them as references would help - our recruitment process involved interviewing over a hundred people in less than two weeks - another reason (to my mind) for the shorter than usual interviews. I'm currently working on a project using out Adobe Connect service to, er, connect two primary schools to work on The Big Write together. The deputies from both schools are involved and have been incredibly positive and encouraging in their responses to the work I'm doing, but I know that, unless I were to ask them to, this response won't get back to my line manager(s) and Those Who Matter in the School Improvement Service. That's not a complaint, that's just The Way Things Are.
Beware being a prophet without honour - this sometimes archaic phrase comes from the Bible and, as the Answers.com page puts it, refers to having more respect among those who don't know you as well as those who are around you all the time. One of my bordering-on-bitter reflections at the end of the process was that my own Local Authority didn't want be to be an adviser, but there were plenty of other people beyond the County boundaries who did. Now that's not completely accurate, but in some ways how you feel about being in your job equates with how it actually is, as it's the feelings that are overwhelming. Being wanted beyond your own boundaries is always flattering, but carries little or no weight with those who currently employ you - unless it earns your Authority a significant amount of funds in consultancy fees.
Emphasise the breadth of what you can do, rather than how much you know about a particular area - particularly if the area you're involved in falls outside of what the current Government's definition of "things which will improve schools" is - or the area that (it turns out) your employer is going to focus on.

Final reflections

On reflection, it's clear that among all of the upheavals of budgets, and the ~~killing~~ changing ~~of the~~ relationship between Local Authorities and schools, that what the LA wants to focus on is a traditional "School Improvement" role, in which those at adviser level are a hybrid of link adviser (who advises the schools on a broad area of school improvement issues) and subject/area adviser, with consultants who could deputise and effectively shadow the adviser. This rules out there being much of a space for those who perform roles that fall outside of those core services LAs are being made to pare down to. With that in mind, I guess it was a stone-cold certainty that I wouldn't have ended up as an adviser. Even as I write that, I'm aware that it's an attempted "get oneself off the hook" manoeuvre to make up for my poor performance, but it's all I've got...

What next?

The restructuring of the School Improvement Service in Bucks means I'll no longer be part of an ICT team, instead I'll be part of one of three teams focusing on supporting schools in different areas of the County and different elements of the education system (Pupils, Schools and County-wide issues). I'm not sure about how this will work out, but we'll see. In the meantime, I've lots to do with both Moodle (looking at when we upgrade to version 2.n) and our Adobe Connect service (the use of which is really taking off, particularly among primary schools in the County). I hope I'll be able to explore those areas in which we've innovated, and done something that in many ways has been a lead at a national level (and reasonably well-known beyond UK shores) and continue to do interesting things and have equally interesting ideas for as long as I'm wanted, as I hope I've a lot to offer anyone who'll have me. Whether that's possible will depend on all sorts of things, many beyond the control of those in my LA.

Giving up for Lent?

2011-03-07T22:55:00.000Z

Black Chair by Alex @ Faraway - used under Creative Commons

Shrove Tuesday is the day when, for some people, things are done for the last time before the liturgical season of Lent. This year, there's a chance I might be giving up something for longer. For a couple of months now I've been officially 'at risk of redundancy' - changes in government funding, plus the view of the Secretary of State that Local Authorities (and their staff?) appear to exist as a "bureaucratic intervention" (which I assume he doesn't mean in a positive way) - and so last week I put in a brief application form for my own job, or one like it. The post is School Improvement Adviser - a generic post (rather than a specific one like "ICT", "E-Learning" or "English"). If I don't get a job I can be considered for a job at a lower pay range, but if I still don't get a job then I'll be made redundant. If (for some reason) I'm offered a job but turn it down then I'll be considered to have resigned. Naturally I'm competing with colleagues for a number of roles that's less than the number of people applying - some will have applied for voluntary redundancy (I haven't) and some for potential reduced hours (I have). I know in some ways I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to apply, rather than (as appears to have happened in some LAs) being taken out the back of a County Hall and put to sleep with a mumbled apology - I've read the Redundant Public Servant ("News from the front line of deficit reduction") so I know what could (have) happen(ed).
It's an odd situation - when applying for most roles (other than in a brand-new startup, I guess) you'd have some idea who your colleagues would be, plus who you'd be working for, plus the broader environment in which your organisation is working... all sorts of things that I don't know for a variety of reasons. Maybe the startup analogy is a good one - the push of the White Paper is clearly to strip away responsibilities from Local Authorities, reducing their role to that of commissioners - to change the landscape and hence the nature of the organisations operating in it.
I'm not quite what the role of commissioner means - there are plenty of examples of commissioned services which haven't worked and even a cursory read of the Government's proposals sees many things which I'm already part of or have (in some measure) instigated being encouraged. You want schools working together? got it. Want innovation? Yup. Want examples from successful schools being used in those on the road to outstanding? Got it.
My chance to get a job lasts thirty minutes - a five minute presentation (no visual or audio presentation aids which is as - as anyone who's sat through anything I've ever presented knows, I can talk/bore for England) on a project I've worked on recently (that'll be Chick Cam then) - with a reflection on how problems were overcome and how I'd measure the success of it. Then twenty-five minutes for questions (of me). I'll know the four people interviewing me, and if my calculations are correct they are interviewing over 100 people in seven working days. Yikes.
So. It's the night before. I've read the White Paper and summarised what I think are the pertinent sections, gone over what the project's about (in that respect writing a blog post helped) - what else is there to do? Ah yes - iron a shirt. Tomorrow is supposed to be a lovely sunny spring day - do I spend the morning sat indoors worrying about what's happen at 2.30 in the afternoon? I'm tempted to dig the garden... anyway, see you on the other side. Maybe.

Daffodils by Danielle Boyle Photography. Used under Creative Commons.

Mixing Moodle and Connect with a side helping of eggs for Year 2

2011-03-02T19:20:00.002Z

I've been involved in some work with the Headteacher at Grendon Underwood Combined for a while now, but it's been difficult to get the school's use of Moodle off the ground - the school has decided to use Moodle as their main web site, but hadn't yet used it as an important part of the pupils' learning. A couple of weeks before half-term I was asked to go in to the school to work with a class teacher to help her allocate her class of Year 2 pupils to a particular Moodle course to work on a special project...

Chick Cam setup - laptop hard wired into school network connected to Buckinghamshire Adobe Connect server. Incubator containing eggs from

It turned out that the project was a delivery of eggs (in an incubator) from The Happy Chick Company which would be with Year 2 for a fortnight. The original aim was to share some information about the project - and involve the pupils in any way possible. Getting pupils at Key Stage 1 to log in successfully is often a challenge, but there are plenty of examples of ways in which this can be overcome - and as with anything, practice makes perfect. Just before half term I took a Year 2 class with Miss Hair in which we introduced the Secret Project to her Year 2 class. The class was held in the school's ICT suite and so pupils could practise logging in and replying to messages on the forum. In Moodle this was a forum set up as a Single Simple Discussion - the teacher said what she thought the surprise might be and asked the pupils to respond. There were a few Class Rules - held in a web page at the top of the Moodle course and read during the lesson - one of which was "only one smiley per message"! The class's task over half-term was to log in and respond to someone else's idea - not just saying why that person might be right or wrong, but also giving a reason why. In my experience this is really important when giving younger children their first taste of writing something online, so as to reflect the responses which would be hoped for in the classroom:

Forum set up as a Single Simple Discussion in Moodle. The teacher starts things off, and pupils reply to her and one another.

Considering the pupils were the first in their school to really use the VLE as part of a project, I was really impressed by the way they took to it. Miss Hair said that some of their parents reported that the children were a little obsessed with logging on to the VLE over half term - and for a typical Key Stage 1 class, their levels of interaction would put many secondary classes to shame. They also used Choices for a number of activities and there's a lot of potential to support their learning in future. This is by far my preferred method of introducing a class or even a school to using a VLE - it has focus, the pupils are actively involved (rather than simply clicking on links or printing off endless documents) and (by implication) the staff are active as well.

Activity report for the Year 2 "Surprise Project". On the left is the teacher's activity setting up the coruse, the pupils first accessed it on the 18th-19th February, the last day in school before half term. The eggs arrived in class on the 28th February.

While meeting before half term I suggested that with a little creativity we could use our Adobe Connect server to broadcast the eggs (and their potential hatching) beyond the classroom, since chicks aren't normally timetabled and therefore might not arrive during school hours. I'd used it in a similar way a few years ago to something I'd (worryingly) called PuppyCam (read that blog post), where a teacher in another of our primary schools had a dog about to give birth to puppies at home, and wanted pupils in the classroom to be able to see. The teacher had a webcam at home and a BucksGfL account, so I set up the room, created a logo, she pointed the camera at the litter, and we were in business:

You can watch a recording of PuppyCam here.

Grendon Underwood Combined didn't possess a webcam, but a quick visit to the classroom showed a flexible neck visualiser which (unlike some visualisers I've worked with before) was useable by the Flash Player, meaning that whatever it showed could be broadcast via a Connect meeting room.

Incubator in its original position

Well, the eggs in their incubator were delivered on the first Monday back after half-term, and I went in to school on the Tuesday. The incubator was out of the way of the class at the back, which presented a problem as the laptop (along with the only network point in the room) was towards the front by a window, so the incubator was carefully moved to the front, in view of a silent class of Year 2s lined up for PE all desperately hoping it wasn't dropped.
While the class went out for a PE lesson, I set up the room. Apologies for the lack of focus at the start, I had neglected to click my phone's screen to focus until a few seconds in...

Well, all seemed good. We decided not to use the visualiser's built-in light (the one which flips down from the head) as it would cause too much glare on the surface of the incubator.

Visualiser (document camera) showing focus ring and flip-down light (not used)

This meant that we needed to decide how to light the room, as the laptop and visualiser would be left on all night - and the issues around glare meant that we had to close the blinds as the domed surface of the incubator could reduce the camera's view to being that of just bright reflected light. You can see in the images below the effects of having no lights on, one bank of lights on (of three banks) and two. No lights meant that the camera wouldn't be able to see inside the incubator - you can see what's visible by looking at the projected image on the IWB in the first image:

No lights on (dark image on screen)

One bank of lights on

Two banks of lights on

Perfect. The room was set up, and I left the school as Miss Hair went into a staff meeting, leaving herself logged in to the Connect room via her laptop and broadcasting any happenings from inside the incubator. Unfortunately, it appears the caretaker forgot his instructions to please leave the lights on, as this is what was visible later that evening...

What happens when someone turns the lights out and it gets dark

I had knocked together the "Chick Cam Live" image in Fireworks and uploaded it as a JPEG into a Share pod in the Connect room. At the end of yesterday's lesson, after I'd demonstrated to Year 2 how they could access the live "Chick Cam" from home, we agreed that the room would be shut down to viewers at 8pm to ensure that parents weren't besieged with requests to "watch the eggs for just five minutes in case they hatch". Children (and parents, and possibly staff) could log in as Guests so it was a trivial process to prevent access - the Connect room has a simple setting to switch Guest access on and off, but we're planning on recording through the night so that no-one misses anything important. The recordings can be edited later so that pupils don't have to watch five hours of static eggs just to see a few minutes excitement near the end.
As I write this there has been a flurry of excitement all day, as the chicks conveniently started hatching at around 8:50am - which, even though the pupils were in the classroom, we had planned to record so that they could watch it later. Miss Hair started the recording without a problem, and you can watch it here (opens in a new window or tab). It takes 20Mb on the Connect server for a 30 minute recording, which isn't bad, and the recording is separate from the live meeting room. I'll be interested to see how big tonight's "overnight" recording is. (Edit: the answer: a 6 hour 28 minute recording takes 180MB on the server. Not bad.)


	Connect server recordings -		multiple recordings, each with its own URL, created from the Connect room.

Among other reflections is the one that I need to come up with names whereby children don't search for the names of young animals or birds on Google combined with the word "cam". That or schools need to start choosing different animals to work with.
There's a set on Flickr where I'll post relevant images to support this blog post, or you can view them as a slideshow here:

I love my job. The irony of having to complete an application form to apply for it due to being at risk of redundancy seemed particularly sharp today.Mind you, so did making a seven egg frittata this evening. Ah well, you can't make an omelette (etc)...

Teachmeet @BETT 2011

2010-12-23T10:00:00.005Z

Teachmeet at BETT 2010

Lost in Space / School of Duty

FPP - derived from dsc_0113.jpg by metacheetr under a Creative Commons license.
After Duke Nukem.

Due to the nature of BETT - a four day exhibition/trade fair with 700 exhibitors, its more than 30,000 attendees making it more than twice the size of NECC /ISTE in the US, there's a sense of enormous cabin fever or Lost In Space which arises from being there for more than a few hours. Such an environment means that there are more than a few issues faced by a Teachmeet set at BETT. For a start, a Teachmeet is about sharing practice – classroom practice, work being done with learners now – rather than theoretical “in the future there will be robots” presentations or sales pitches. BETT is by and large like an immersive first person pitch-em-up game (FPP?) – you’re dropped into an alien environment, populated mainly by people you don’t understand, with a mission that you’re not clear on, with a cast of characters who don’t always behave or communicate in ways you’re familiar with as a teacher – unless you are on the receiving end of a lot of sales phone calls I guess.

BETT 2009 Tiltshifted

This are accentuated by the current cloud of issues around the role of ICT in education – the confiscation of Harnessing Technology funding to support the controversial Free Schools programme, the closure of Becta and the apparent absence of a role for ICT in the Education White Paper - all of which make for an extremely rarefied atmosphere in which schools attempting to use technology to support learning, school improvement and engaging with their school community might find the DfE unsympathetic with their aims.

TeachMeet at BETT 2010

What this could mean for Teachmeet is fewer teachers attending BETT – even though entrance to the exhibition is free, it's easy to imagine many school leaders being less willing to release staff to browse an exhibition whose lifeblood of dedicated funding has been stemmed. So could this mean a Teachmeet devolved of practice and practitioners? Well I for one hope not-TeachMeets aren't about sales pitches, and there are enough of those on the floor of Olympia for the four days of BETT. Of course, if you're more than a little cunning you could see some real practice by attending one of the TeachMeet Takeover sessions...
In order to mitigate against that we're proposing a slightly different method of registering for the Friday evening Teachmeet at BETT 2011. We'll be using the Eventbrite service (which fits with the TeachMeet ethos, as it's a free service to those organising free events), and releasing the tickets in three batches:

teachers/LA/RBC consultants (those who are employed and work directly in schools on a full-time basis);
independent consultants (those who work in schools subject to contracts etc);
exhibitors (those who'll be at BETT and are salaried by a commercial company).

Eventbrite will mean that we will be able to communicate with ticket holders, match our numbers to the capacity of Olympia's Apex Room and release tickets in a way to try and ensure that as many teachers as possible get first chance to attend and share practice.
As ever, we'll be looking for sponsors (beyond EMAP's sponsorship of the room and AV/ICT support) to cover wifi access for attendees, an extra half hour of security so we don't all get booted out at the end, and some refreshments... so if you're interested in helping the event with a small amount of sponsorship then please get in touch by emailing teachmeetbett2011 [at] gmail [dot] com or follow the instructions on the wiki.
In the meantime you can...

read the TeachMeet @BETT 2011 page on the TeachMeet wiki;
sign up now if you're a teacher or LA/RBC consultant - and soon if you're an independent consultant or exhibitor - via the Eventbrite page;
consider presenting - either a seven minute micropresentation or a two minute nanopresentation.

Whatever your involvement - get stuck in if you can. TeachMeet is about sharing practice and, in the current climate, it must be more relevant than ever. Right?

Open letter to Michael Gove re: Severe Weather Disruption

2010-12-17T12:54:00.008Z

Snow Day in Seattle by cheukiecfu. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Dear Mr Gove,

Vobiscum cupio in situ euentus causa extrema caeli vel quasi eruptiones molaris scholae adhuc potest universaliter function - supportantes doctrina parentum Communicantes, cuius virtute baculum munere aliis huiusmodi. Video Admonitio de Severe Weather DFE collocato situ quoslibet mentionem fieri faciat quam Headteachers suis iudiciis quam scholis ludunt in partes key communitates locales.

Intrigued me saepe notione res posita in extreme Tempestas (maxime nives) ut simpliciter magistris conantur vade ad scholam localis. Miror quid sentias facturos ibi liberis nesciunt (possibly aetatis sunt inexperti supportantes dogmatisare), an non curriculum liberari. Quod hoc confirmat opinio sit essentialiter magistri pueri uelut minders et literae tantum processus auctoritate figura requirit praesens specimen in Nullam ac ante.

Postremo, miror si quidem plerosque studiis habere patriam potuerit facultas docendi et discendi si manere in corpore clausa Schola. Local Schools et vallavit auctores tempore et CPD volutans animo in developing online usu tools suscipere doctrinam administrationem communicet & carers parentes. Videtur quod parum vel nihil diceret aut recognicio inde consilium habilitas in scholis vel Local Authorities Communionem.
Si um necessitatem directionis pagina DFE de situ ero gauisus super scriptis sustinebunt eam.

Tuus ex animo,
Ian Usher
E-Learning Co-ordinator, consilio County Buk.

Rough translation.
Source material.

Why?

Tweaking a Moodle course to display Resource & Activities in two or more columns

2010-12-07T11:07:00.024Z

It's a long time since I've done a HowTo kind of post in Moodle, so please forgive any rustiness.

West Pier by orange brompton. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Moodle's default course layout arranges things in quite a linear way - items (Resources or Activities) are added in each section in a course, and can then be re-arranged by moving them up and down, or indenting them. This normally works fine, and a judicious use of sections means that it's not too tricky to achieve an appealing layout that works well and is understandable by anyone accessing it.
However, sometimes you (or I) will end up with a bunch of links, or resources, or something, which just seems to go on forever and starts to look like a long line of toilet paper, stretching on forever.
I'll use our soon-to-be-revamped CPD pages on our main BucksGfL site as an example. We will shortly have a long list of Directory resources containing PDFs of CPD courses, which could easily go on down the page forever. Here's how they currently look:

You can probably see that adding any more to this will make the page go on forever. In contrast, have a look at this arrangement:

If you think that's more appealing, or maybe just easier to take in, than the previous image, then here's how it's done. It's quite simple and requires a tiny understanding of how a HTML table is structured, and then the tactical addition of a few Labels into your Moodle course.

A HTML table's structure

It's not very CSS, but here's the HTML that structures a table with two columns:

<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1">
<tbody>
<tr valign="top">
<td>
Content in column 1
</td>
<td>
Content in column 2
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Breaking it down

However, it's not possible to wrap this HTML around the content on a Moodle course's main page, so it can't be done, right? Wrong.
To achieve a two column layout we need to dissemble the table HTML and break it into labels, which we can then intersperse among the list of Resources and Activities in Moodle to force it into displaying two columns. Here's the content of Label 1:

<tbody>

<td>

Here's Label 2:

</td>

<td>

and finally Label 3:

</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

Making the Labels in Moodle

Inserting a Label (essentially a piece of free text or HTML) into your Moodle course is easy - Turn Editing On, Add a Resource, Insert a Label. However, the old-ish HTMLarea editor in Moodle insists on correctly forming any HTML which is edited in it - so if you try and enter Label 1 as written above, you'll end up with all of the tags "closed" - which will end the table prematurely and stop you using it to tweak the layout. This is how you should edit the label to ensure that it's not closed:

Code for Label 1 in the Moodle editor (HTML view). The start of the table, table row, and table cell.

You should Save and return to course while in this (HTML) view, not the standard (rich text) view - otherwise the editor will close the <table>,<tbody>,<tr> and <td> tags and stop the layout tweak from working.
Do something similar with Labels 2 and 3:

Label 2 - the </td><td> code which marks the end of one cell (hence column) and the start of the next.

Label 3 - the code which closes the table cell, the table row, and finally the table.

Once you've done this, you then need to place these three labels around and in the list of Moodle Resource/Activities you'd like in two columns. Place Label 1 at the start, Label 3 at the end and Label 2 about halfway down the list of items. You might get some odd layouts happening while you're placing them, but it should work once they're all in position, assuming you've done the HTML correctly and not switched back to the Rich Text editor before saving.

Once they're in place, this is how things should look (this view is that of someone with editing rights over the course):

Labels in place - note that other Moodle resources remain editable / moveable / indentable / deleteable etc.

Some important notes:

You can of course make three or more columns by creating an extra instance of Label 2, then placing it at an appropriate position in the list of items.
If you go to edit any of the Labels, then your default view of it will be the Rich Text view, so HTMLarea will close any tags - you'll need to switch to the HTML view to remove these. However, once you've created them, there should be no need to edit them.
Don't hide the labels - tempting though that might be. The layout will still work for you if you have editing rights, but in my experience once a student looks at the course when the labels are hidden, they don't display - producing a standard "long list" if they are all hidden and a malformed mess if just some of them are.
If you are creating a course for someone else to edit, then you must explain why the labels are there, why they're important and why they shouldn't be deleted or moved! Some people are obsessive about keeping their courses tidy and the apparent superfluous sets of editing icons might just seem like they need deleting to them.
There's an oddity that occurs if you have enabled Drag & Drop on your Moodle site (e.g. you've turned Ajax on). If you have (for example) the three Labels to make this tweak work, then the first will have the Ajax Drag & Drop icon to move, whereas any subsequent labels in that section will have the old style Click & Wait icons. They all still work in their own ways though:

If you'd rather not go through the hassle of creating the labels, then I've backed up a Moodle 1.9.n course with a link to this blog post, and one, two, three and four column layouts in sections down the page. Feel free to use it as you wish - it's downloadable here in Moodle Backup .zip format.
If you've any comments about how useful this is or isn't, or if there are ways in which it could be improved, then please leave them in the comments. Thanks!

Teachmeet Takeover @ BETT 2011

2010-12-01T09:39:00.001Z

Well, it’s nearly that time of the year again… the the end of Movember and the arrival of Advent means that January can only be a month away. That means BETT is approaching like some looming city in a US road movie, full of promise, labyrinthine alleys, hidden joys (and tacky mainstream pleasures) and an accompanying population which longs for a return to the countryside when all this is over...
BETT is a behemoth. It straddles the receding world of educational ICT and does its best to stare anyone down who dares to look it in the eye and say “stop trying to sell me stuff – what actually works in a classroom?”.

Last year, Tom Barrett conceived the idea of Teachmeet Takeover – a movable Teachmeet feast where, rather than assembling speakers and participants in a room after hours, teachers take the floor during BETT’s office hours - an event that could answer this question. The aim of Teachmeet Takeover is to take the interesting things shared during normal Teachmeet sessions and bring them into the well funded and rarely-replicable exhibition space in Olympia’s main halls and, in the words on the accompanying TMTakeover presentation which preceded most talks around the stands, to

“Learning something new, be amazed, amused and enthused”

Stuart Ridout #TMtakeover by kvnmcl. Used under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license.

For BETT 2011 Teachmeet Takeover will again be using spaces donated by exhibitors to allow teachers & practitioners to showcase free tools, ideas and examples of how to do interesting things – right in the middle of BETT, during each day of the show. If you’re planning on going to BETT, either as an exhibitor or a ‘punter’ then you can sign up on the wiki – just names and contact details at the time of writing, there’ll be a detailed timetable available for vendors to offer slots and presenters to choose which slots they appear in later in December.
So far we’ve got (at the time of publication), 16 presenters (who, it would hoped, present at least once) and 10 exhibitors who have signed up to say that they’re willing to take part. I’ll be doing something Moodle-related (as yet undecided) and it’ll be good to, subject to trying to take in the rest of BETT, to see what people have been up to. If you’re not sure what it’s all about, have a browse of pictures taken during last year’s TM Takeover, or watch a brief video of Tom B doing one of his #tmtakeover presentations from last year’s show.

Even if you’ve never been to BETT before, presenting at TMTakeover is a great thing to do. Read the guidelines on the #TMTakeover2011 page on the Teachmeet wiki, and get stuck in! Thanks in advance to all the exhibitors who already have (and will) donate their time, space, AV, 240V AC, etc. – and a huge thank you to you if you’re going to share your real in-the-classroom ideas, tools and experiences with the slightly confused, bag-carrying hordes at BETT.
Many people say they most significant ideas and conversations they have at BETT come not from conversations with exhbitors, but from interactions with other teachers and practitioners - and that's what all Teachmeet events are supposed to be about. So, why not learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused for free in the New Year?

Using a VLE for a Headteacher's trip to Ghana

2010-10-05T15:00:00.002Z

About a year ago I received a note passed to me by my line manager. One of our primary schools was having an issue with Blogger being blocked by their default filtering - presumably because they were taking the "lowest common denominator" filtering offered to schools who don't want to control their own. It turned out that the Headteacher of the school was about to undertake a VSO placement in Ghana and had set up a blog to document it. After a few exchanges of emails I went to meet Karen Brooks, Headteacher at Weston Turville Combined School not far from Aylesbury. The previous year, another headteacher from Marlow Infant School had used their Moodle to document her yearly trip to Uganda over the summer and keep in touch with the school community while she was there, so there was an obvious application for the Karen's Ghana trip. After she returned to the UK, having been in Ghana for I asked Karen to write about her use of the VLE and how it supported what she'd been doing in Ghana and the UK. So, over to her...

Weston Turville Flags

Using a VLE was a new experience for me and for most of our pupils, so going to Ghana was the ideal opportunity to experiment with it. Ian came in to help me set it up, so the children could see where I was going and some of the facts about it, such as the location, the flag, the weather etc. We also put in sections for diary entries, pictures and video clips, some of which we pre-populated with school information.

During the trip I uploaded diary entries, pictures and video clips, and I was really pleased with the response from the children. Initially they wrote when prompted by their teachers in their lessons, but after a while many of them started to write independently whilst accessing the VLE at home. Parents, staff and older siblings also took part. The children asked a wide variety of questions and used the site to find out about Ghana and the school we linked with. They also communicated with each other as well as with me. It seemed to fire their imaginations and one child even asked if we could continue using the site after I came home. They used the information for discussion in class, and sometimes sent a class response.

I was also able to use the VLE to show our partner school about us. They were able to look at the photos and video clips and explore the questions being asked by the children. The disadvantage in Ghana, however, was the slow internet connection which meant that each page took a relatively long time to load.

While I was away staff began to design their own VLE pages and experiment with them. We still have a way to go in exploiting all the potential of a VLE; however, we have a number of plans to develop it for use with parents as well as pupils, and the trip to Ghana was the stepping stone we needed to become inspired, and to learn how to start to use it effectively.

If you're not a pupil or member of staff at Weston Turville you won't be able to access the VLE, but you can read the public facing side of what Karen did on her blog.

Display board in Weston Turville School

Shrink-O-Matic screen shot

Before Karen went I spent some time with her thinking about some of the practical things that might prevent her getting information back to the VLE with a slow or unreliable connection. Taking digital photographs that she might want to keep (of a large size and good resolution) might be one thing, uploading them to the VLE would be another. I think this was the first headteacher's machine I've ever seen that already had Adobe AIR installed on it, so I downloaded the easy-to-use Shrink-O-Matic AIR app which allows the downsizing of images simply by dragging them onto the application window. This meant that she could take full-resolution pictures and then easily create smaller versions for uploading to a Lightbox Gallery in Moodle, or attaching to a forum post. If someone in this situation wanted to do something similar with video, then I'd recommend the excellent (and free) Any Video Converter Free, which converts just about any format of video into... well, just about any other format (such as FLV for easy insertion into Moodle).

The BBC Weather RSS feeds for Buckinghamshire and Ghana were used to give current weather data and Google Maps were used embedded in the Course page to allow pupils to see a comparison between the two areas. Here's a (non-interactive) PDF of the main course page:

England & Ghana

Supporting this sort of activity through the school VLE or Learning Platform seems to be a fairly obvious thing to do, and I'm amazed that it doesn't happen more often. Although this example (and the school that inspired it) are examples of staff working in remote locations, there are numerous applications for visits involving students:

embedding Google Maps/Earth/Streetview locations into pages, forums, etc. in Moodle to allow pupils (and staff) to recognise & explore where they're going before the event occurs;
allowing pupils to write regular reports of what happened, including (geotagged) video, audio, etc.;
providing all of this as a re-useable resource for future visits to the same location;
using available videoconferencing resources to provide live field reports from wherever the school has sent its roving reporters;

The list goes on, but all it takes is a little creative thinking, some planning and you'll have a resource that can support learners, teachers and the wider school community in bringing learning outside of the school grounds back into school and the home.

A school library manager's view of a VLE

2010-09-30T16:12:00.000Z

RETRO POSTER - In the Library by Enokson. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Over the last few years I've done a fair amount a lot of training and development in secondary schools across the County. The schools choose who will attend and it's normally a helpful spread of subject teachers, or Heads of Department, or Third in Faculty, or... well, as with all aspects of ICT development in a school, participation is determined by someone senior in the school deciding who will take part & them having a vision to extend and apply it across the school. Occasionally there are non-teaching staff there - library & learning resources staff, network technicians, administrative people - and, to my mind, those are often signs that the school might be thinking in a more creative way about the way to use online learning to support all aspects of school life.
About three years ago a colleague and I did our regular four half-day sessions in Dr Challoner's High School for Girls in Amersham - one of the Grammar schools in Buckinghamshire's selective system. I can remember some of the details of those sessions - working across all schools in the county means they tend to blend together at some point, but among the fact that there was an issue with some PowerPoints not displaying correctly I can vividly remember that the school's Library Manager took part in the sessions - and that this was, amazingly, the first time a school had nominated someone from their library to take part. She was keen to get going and during the sessions was already thinking of applications of the VLE for student use.
Three years on, and that Library Manager has moved on from the school at the end of the 2010 Summer term. Before she left I asked her to write about how she's used the VLE to support her work, and the students' learning. So over to Lauren...

RETRO POSTER - Management by Enokson. Used under a Creative Commons license.

As a secondary school library manager, I’ve found that the involvement students have with online communities can be harnessed to further their engagement with reading and writing. When students visit the Learning Resource Centre area of our school VLE they encounter a variety of pathways into literature and research. In one corner, the latest headlines from our library blog promote library events and writing contests as well as new resources and study tips. In the other corner, the covers of our newest fiction books appear as moving graphics that students can click on to read summaries and reviews. There are forums for pupils to request books or discuss authors and novels with classmates. Students can also share their writing or post comments on the stories and poems of others in the creative writing section. Additionally, there are links to recommended research sites, subscription databases, reading lists, and websites that promote books and reading.

When I first began setting up the Learning Resource Centre area of our school’s VLE, I saw it primarily as a place to provide links to resources and websites. I divided the area up by subject, creating separate courses under the Learning Resource Centre umbrella (for example: LRC – Chemistry Resources, LRC – English Resources). Previously, we had given sixth formers enormous paper packets listing recommended web sites, as well as passwords for subscription websites. Unfortunately, these packets were costly to print and were regularly lost or mislaid by students. As soon as the resources were moved to the VLE, students could access them more readily, without having to find the packet, type in the web address or fiddle with different usernames and passwords. Students have a tendency to be overly reliant on Wikipedia and Google for their internet research, so our library induction sessions concentrated on improving and widening their research skills, with particular focus on the resources available on the VLE. For instance, students learned how to access newspapers going back to the 1700s, medical and science journals, essays on literature, and art archives that would not be available through an ordinary Google search. Teaching students how to access primary sources for their research not only prepares them for university, but can also help to kindle their intellectual curiosity. I’ve witnessed many students excitedly looking up famous historical events on the Times Digital Archive, where they absorb newspaper accounts of things that they’ve only previously encountered in history books.

RETRO POSTER - When You Want Facts by Enokson. Used under a Creative Commons license.

After creating these subject-specific resource areas, I decided that I needed a more general course where students could engage with the school library and also explore reading for pleasure. I titled it “LRC – General Research, Reading and the Library” and added forums where students could request new books or make suggestions about how to improve the library. In the last year and a half, I’ve responded to over 80 book requests from students on this forum. After letting students know whether I will be able to purchase a copy, I update them as soon as it is available in the library. If I’m unable to obtain the requested book, I suggest other ways for students to get a copy. I find these online exchanges to be enjoyable and informative (I often find out about the next big publishing phenomenon through savvy readers). But most importantly, the forum gives students a chance to be heard and to make a positive impact on our library. In a similar vein, the forum for general suggestions has led to extra library seating, new quizzes and competitions, and additional online resources. The students are happy to see their ideas being taken seriously, and I am pleased when their involvement with the library increases as a result.

A few years ago, I began exploring a website called LibraryThing, which was billed as ‘a cataloguing and social networking site for book lovers’. I was intrigued by the variety of conversations relating to books and reading on the site, and discovered a number of wonderful new books and authors as a result. In October 2009, I attempted to create a school-based forum, similar to the one on LibraryThing, in which students could create and direct discussions relating to their own reading passions. Over the past ten months, students have created 89 new discussions, and on some of these discussions there have been as many as 78 student replies, making this the most popular forum on our school VLE. With topics ranging from “What are your five best books ever” to “The Diamond of Drury Lane (you should totally read it!)” our students have been eager to participate, to share their own ideas, and to discover what their peers are reading.

RETRO POSTER - Fiction by Enokson. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The ‘book discussion’ forum was introduced to Year 7 students in a library lesson, and as a result has been most heavily used by students in Years 7-9. Without prompting, they continue to add to the forum, frequently taking up their classmates’ suggestions when borrowing books from the library. Although I monitor the forum, I have rarely had to delete a comment, so when a student-led creative writing group began to meet in the library over the last school year, it made sense to add a forum where they could share their writing as well.

RETRO POSTER - Stories Of The Sea by Enokson. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The creative writing forum, which is open to all students, is used to share stories, poems, and other fragments of writing. Students can offer suggestions or simply a positive remark. The Year 13 student who started the creative writing group made a point of adding advice and encouragement to students who posted work, and followed up with an invitation to the weekly writing session in the library. Student writers at our school can now quickly join the creative community, and their work will be enjoyed and appreciated throughout the school.

Through the development and promotion of these forums and resources, reading and writing have taken a prominent position within the online social community at our school. When a student participates in these online discussions, sharing her own expertise, she identifies herself as part of a community of readers and writers. By linking the technology of the VLE with the more traditional pleasures of reading and writing, it’s my hope that our students will continue to find new paths into literature and research.

Lauren Howard

As mentioned Lauren is now no longer at the school, which is obviously a loss to the students & their teachers, but I hope what she's written above might stimulate some thought and ideas about what's possible with some creative thinking, creative students and a positive attitude towards using something like a VLE to support a school's library. You can get more inspiration from this old-but-still-relevant Teachers TV video VLE in Action. Skip forward to 9m 34secs to see some of the work done in the library at Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, in Cumbria.

Moodling in your Office? Should you?

2010-06-15T08:45:00.157Z

It's been about two months since the Microsoft Office Add-In for Moodle was released. The what?
Well, it's an extension for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2003 which allows you to save Office documents to your Moodle and open them from your Moodle.

Saving a file to Moodle from within Office 2007

This is, in many respects, undoubtedly A Good Thing. When I'm doing Moodle training there are often teachers and other staff for whom uploading a document to an online space is something they've not done before - so the process of updating that same document stored in their Moodle course's Files area is not intuitive. They'll open the Files area, click on the file to open it (either directly in their browser if using Internet Explorer or in their browser's cache of downloaded files), edit it, save it and wonder why the file in their Moodle course hasn't updated. For people who've only ever stored files "locally" - i.e. on USB, network or local hard drives - the idea of having to upload again seems alien to them. Well, this Add-In could deal with some of that. What doesn't happen is that the file is automatically saved when using the default Save (or Ctrl-S) option within an Office program (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). However, it could be possible to alter this by a network admin (or a keen user with geek tendancies) to customise their copy of Word/Excel/PowerPoint to include the Open from Moodle and Save to Moodle buttons as defaults, possibly even (gasp!) removing the default Save icon:

The Open from Moodle... and Save to Moodle... commands added to the Quick Access Toolbar in Word. The default Save command could be removed if you were feeling brave.

I tried to find the Save to Moodle command in the Customize... button for Keyboard Shortcuts above, but as far as I could tell it wasn't listed, even under All Commands. Shown below is the default shortcut keys for Save - if the SavetoMoodle command was here you could (again, for the brave) map this to Save to Moodle by default:

I've done a quick Captivate movie of how the Add-In works in practice. Once you've watched it, read what follows below...
There are a few riders to this seemingly seamless way of saving to your Moodle:

You need to have Teacher rights over a number of courses on your Moodle. Administrator rights will get you in a whole heap of trouble, since the list of courses will be over-long if you're an Admin, and this might mess things up.
Your course(s) needs to have the My Courses or Courses block displayed on them. This appears to be the way that the add-in picks up which courses you are on and could explain why, in the demonstration movie above, the course titles are prefixed with the code to display the course icon in the My Courses block. The documentation that there is indicates that you can hide this block once the Add-In has picked up which courses you have - though I'm not sure if the Add-In would then automatically pick up any new courses you had teacher rights on.
You can have access to multiple Moodles via the Add-In, though I'm not sure where the passwords are stored (and how secure they are) if you check the "remember my password" box. I'm not saying they're insecure, I just don't know.
It doesn't work on a Mac. Or with Office 2010.
It hasn't been tested on Moodle versions earlier or later than 1.9.n - and the indications are that it might not sail faultlessly into Moodle 2.n
If you are a Teacher on some courses, and a student on others in your Moodle (for example, your Staff Room where others post notices, files and messages) then that will still show up, you'll just get an error message when you try to add something to those courses you have a "Student-like" role on.

The bigger picture

It's interesting to see Microsoft engaging with an OSS product in this way. It looks similar to rough drafts of some work I saw at Microsoft almost exactly a year ago, but appears to be a selective development of that prototype system (which allowed teachers to manage their courses' Files areas in a local drive (the M: drive or something similar created via what appeared as a network share) but which (if I remember rightly) appeared to require an intermediate Moodle site to be created in order to work). However, with a little thought, it's obvious that this isn't an entirely altruistic move. At its core it aims to ensure that users will stick with using Office files to share information. This is understandable from a Microsoft point of view, but before you insist that everyone in your school installs the Add-In to simplify things, it's worth considering how this would effect the process of sharing things within Moodle. Ask a few questions:

What exactly are you trying to do?

I've spent a fair amount of time training and supporting users using Moodle in schools - but most of these principles apply to any Learning Platform you use. It's really hard to get away from the "I'm going to take all of the documents on my network drive / USB stick / desk and shovel them onto my VLE" approach. In itself, this approach doesn't even begin to transform the learning process. It moves the repographic burden from the school to (potentially) the students which could cause issues with the community of parents & carers in your school, what with printer ink being more expensive than oil, champagne and human blood. What someone often means when they say "I want to upload a Word document" is "I want my students to read a piece of text, possibly with images in it". If you're in a situation where many colleagues are wanting to do that, then here's a decision tree to help (I hope):

If you look at that document closely, you should see that the core question is what do you want the learner to do with the information you’re giving them? Generally, this falls into a few actions on behalf of the learner:

read it (possibly on screen, possibly after printing, depends on what the learner prefers or can do);
annotate it with a pen (generally after printing);
copy its contents into some other tool (word processor, presentation software, graphics application);
save and modify it (possibly before handing it in as an assignment).

In summary, the document above illustrates the fact that there are only very particular circumstances under which, as a teacher, I’d be sharing Office documents in general (and Word documents in particular) through a Moodle course. It’s the equivalent of sharing Audacity AUP project files rather than MP3 format files to allow students to listen something, or Photoshop PSD files rather than GIF, JPEG or PNG format files to allow students to see an image. Of course, if you’re wanting learners to edit or modify the ‘source’ files then the .aup, .psd or .docx/.doc files would be worth sharing – otherwise, I’d be looking to share something that’s fit for purpose and (here’s the most important point) is accessible to as many learners as possible. Standard Moodle-generated web page resources can contain all sorts of information (just like any web page) and are accessible to learners on mobile devices, internet-connected gaming devices such as PSPs or PS3s and any internet-connected computer without the need for a plugin. PDFs (the next step up on the food chain) are accessible on almost all mobile devices which commonly have PDF-reading apps pre-installed or built-in to the OS. ‘Native’ .docx or .doc files will almost always require an external app or viewer to open
It may seem that using the Office Add-In for Moodle would railroad a user into using Office format files – however, as Microsoft themselves point out, you can use it to upload other file formats into your Moodle course’s Files area. If you have a full version of Acrobat or have installed the Save As PDF Add-In, this means you could generate your simple PDFs from within Office and save them into Moodle.

What do your learners (and staff) have access to?

No Entry - CC image by Joshua Rappeneker.

If you knew that your documents were only ever going to be downloaded in school, then you'd have a pretty good idea that everyone would be on a particular version of Office (or Word in this case) and could distribute the appropriate file accordingly. However, in the mixed environment that offering access to files from home almost certainly guarantees, this can't be guaranteed. Placing .docx files on your VLE or Learning Platform will almost certainly guarantee that some learners (and staff) won't be able to read them at home - and no, they won't bother with a 24MB download and install just to read one paragraph of instructions that you couldn't be bothered to place on your Moodle as a web page.

Interestingly, there have been numerous examples of students with particular versions of software handing in Upload a Single File assignments from home with (for example) .docx extensions (Word 2007), when the software in school which their teachers will attempt to use to open their submissions is Word 2003. This also applies with Microsoft Works assignments, or Open Document Format (.odf) documents (ah, the irony) or any other random file format that the teacher either (a) wasn't expecting and/or (b) can't open. This is one of the pitfalls of insisting that a particular piece of software is used for completing an assignment (or assuming that it will be). It might be argued that a more holistic way of education students would be to create Online Text assignments in Moodle and equip students with ways of finding, inserting and attributing images and content from around the web, since these are transferable, adaptable and agile skills which can be used anywhere.

I could insert another paragraph here about how another approach would be to ask students to create documents in something like Google Docs or Buzzword, then copy the public URL for that document and paste it into an Online Text assignment. However, you get the idea.

Accessibility is the key

This all boils down to making the information you're trying to share as accessible and appropriate as possible. As is seen from the document above, there are times when it's appropriate to use Office format documents to share information, and times it's not. Here's a simple acid test to work out how easy it is for your users. You could try it with a class of learners - just tell them that they're part of some research you're doing.

Create a simple paragraph of text in Word. Save it as a Word file.
Create a PDF file from the document using whatever method you wish.
Upload each of these files (the PDF format one and the Word format one) to your Moodle course using the Add a Resource > Link to a file or web site or Display a Directory options.
Copy the text into a web page using Moodle's Add a Resource > Compose a Web Page option.

Then ask students to go home and try and access the web page, the PDF and the Word document. Ask them to carefully record a number of things for each of the three items:

From being on the course page and clicking on the link, how many more times did you have to click to see the paragraph?
Did you have to click on any dialog boxes or pop-ups to get to see the information?
Were there any security warnings which you had to click on - or any that you didn't notice at first?
Did you see the text straight away?

You'll almost certainly find that for the text and PDF files, it's a one-click process. For the Word document however, your students will come up with a wide range of things that happened - security warnings, different versions, some things not appearing at all, oddities with differences between Windows PC, Mac, mobile device, or games console, or any number of odd things. It's not surprising for teachers to share information via Office documents and have students never see them at all - not down to Moodle, but down to how security settings might be configured between Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, or some other reason that prevents files from being downloaded. Remember, that was when you specifically told them to look for oddities, or things that didn't work, quite possibly because you're bothered about how this online learning business works. For other staff and other students, it's just another reason why this online learning thing doesn't really work, or an excuse why they couldn't hand their homework in. Bear that in mind the next time you're tempted to throw a Word document at a group of learners, just so they can see some text that you want them to read.

A small tangent: what if...?

This makes me wonder if Microsoft could, with a bit of thought, create a "student" version of the Add-In which allows learners to submit a Word document as an Assignment. All the Add-In would have to do is scan the user's Moodle for courses that s/he is enrolled in as a student (similar to how the current one looks for courses the user is a Teacher on) and then look for any active (i.e. not yet closed) Upload a Single File assignments. It would know (from the Moodle userid) which area of the course's moddata folder to create a new subfolder in and place the Word document in there. It would perpetutate some of the issues outlined above but might be useful in some environments. Just a thought...

TeachMeet hits its fourth birthday: Coming of Age

2010-05-24T13:37:00.000Z

The main room awaits TeachMeet Midlands 2009

TeachMeet is entering its fifth year and the unconference for teachers, by teachers has helped hundreds - maybe thousands, in fact - to try out something new, alter the way they already teach and learn, join a community of innovative educators or completely transform their way of working.

The hope was that the model would spread. It has, but as those who have created and helped pull TeachMeet together over the past four years, we want to see it spread further, deeper and with increasing quality of input from practitioners. This post outlines how we think we might manage this. This is the beginnings of a conversation with those who care about TeachMeet. Add your views in the form of any blog post or comment or tweet - tag it #tmfuture

What are the goals of TeachMeet?

TeachMeet was originally designed to:

Take thinking away from the formal, often commercialised conference floor, and provide a safe place for anyone to pitch their practice;
Provide a forum for more teachers to talk about real learning happening in real places, than one-hour conference seminar slots allow;
Showcase emerging practice that we could all aim to undertake; sales pitches not allowed;
Be all about the Teach, with only a nod towards tech that paved the way for new practice;
Provoke new ways of sharing our stories: PowerPoint was banned. We wanted people to tell stories in ways that challenged them, and the audience;
Empower the audience to critique, ask questions and probe, all online, through SMS or, later, Twitter.

Over the years, these 'rules' have altered, leading to some great innovations, others less so. The answer to "What is a TeachMeet?" has become a myriad of meanings, some pretty far off the original goals. We need to help and support people to organise, run and contribute to events that build on previous ones. We need to make TeachMeet as accessible to newbies as it was in 2005. We need TeachMeet to once more find its focus.

Supporting the "infectiousness" of TeachMeets

Organising TeachMeets should not be easy. Taking part in them should be. But more support is needed for organisers:

Sponsorship is hard if there's no bank account into which funds can be sent
Without sponsorship, any event over 30 people becomes tricky to organise while also giving people a special night of learning, the time, space and mood that gets people over their self-conscious selves
Paying for refreshments and venues is impossible if there's no organisation to pay them the precise sum.
The best TeachMeets provide social space, social activity, entertaining MCs, good refreshments, good online coverage and some form of online 'conclusion' - this needs coordinating by the organiser(s), but it's not a skill everyone will have the first time around.
We've got a superb opportunity to curate the best bits from all these TeachMeets that are happening weekly - this needs a degree of oversight.

A means to make TeachMeet more sustainable, easier to use for sponsors and organisers, and have the ability to do something spectacular.

TeachMeet is owned by the community that shape it - but there needs to be a body to manage sponsorship and sponsors, and provide support for new organisers so that they maintain the TeachMeet goals. We assume that if someone is organising a 'TeachMeet' they would like to emulate the success of those popular early TeachMeets, and better-supported national conference ones (e.g. SLF and BETT).

What would support look like? (is this for new organisers of events? support from the TeachMeet body?)

Seeking of sponsorship all year round - including ways and means to get your message to as many teachers as possible;
Brokerage of sponsorship - i.e. one place sponsors and those seeking sponsorship can come together, in a transparent manner;
Recommendation of onsite support (good venues at discounted rates/free, A/V, event organisation [for bigger venues], catering etc);
Suggestions for various formats that have worked in the past;
Mentoring from previous TeachMeet leaders including on-the-night help;
Featuring of content and promotion of the event in a timely manner on an aggregated, higher profile TeachMeet site;
A group calendar so that events can be seen by geography and date;
Promotion of TeachMeet through international and national events, using contacts of existing TeachMeeters;
In-event publicity (e.g. if you plan an event at a regional ICT day or national event, then we can help broker paper materials for insertion into packs etc).

But, above all, TeachMeet is reaching a point of saturation in the UK - things are going really well in terms of enthusing teachers about their own learning. We have a great opportunity to carry over a small proportion of the sponsorship and contributions towards creating a TeachMeet culture in countries where teacher professional development in this way is still blocked by barriers physical, financial or cultural. This is just one idea, harboured for a long time but unable to realise in the current setup. This body can take the form of

A Limited company (with a Director and shareholders);
A Charitable Limited Company, with a board of directors and voting rights for fellow 'shareholders' (we could work out some way of people being 'awarded' shares based on [non-financial] involvement?);
A Social Enterprise, perhaps formed as a Limited Company (see more information on what this means and how it might work (pdf));
A Charity (this feels like a lot more red tape to pull through and perhaps not entirely necessary).

As we take things forward we invite you to contribute your ideas and thoughts to make things work smoothly. We want you to comment, probe and make your own suggestions before the end of June, using the tag #tmfuture

Becta, Jamie Oliver, and the Romans

2010-05-24T12:35:00.003Z

Highland Theatre by miss mass. Used under a Creative Commons License.

Something I should say up front: I've done a little consultancy for Becta in the area of learning platforms, but the funds involved went to my employer (Bucks County Council) for my time & travel, and not to me.

[This post was started before the announcement of Becta's closure and completed on the day of it and so the first section has been edited to reflect this.]

With the nascent coalition government already unable to control leaks of Tuesday's forthcoming Queen's Speech to the newspapers, today is the day ~~tomorrow is heralded by many as the day on which~~ it ~~will be~~ has been announced that the government's education technology agency - Becta (formerly the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) - will ~~either~~ be closed ~~or at least severely cut back~~. Becta - a non-departmental public body classified as a quango - operates in many different roles and its roles have changed over the years. It was very much a child of its time - formed in 1998 to oversee the increased levels of investment in education technology which the incoming Labour government of 1997 brought with it. It's fair to say that the UK had never seen such a significant investment in information & communication technology specifically aimed towards education and hence Becta's role could be likened to inventing, then studying, nurturing and then trying to domesticate a new breed of animal - namely ICT harnessed to support education.

Becta has a number of aspects which impact on schools - it was charged with overseeing the Primary Schools Whiteboards Expansion project in the early 2000s, of the Laptops for Teachers scheme of the and a number of procurement frameworks, in particular the ones concerning Learning Platforms and Infrastructure Services.

It's easy to place oneself at either end of the spectrum of views of Becta - either at the "it never did anything for me, so good riddance, let's put the money straight into schools" or the "it should carry on as it ever was". Whatever the truth is (and no-one will ever know), there are some odd attitudes around. Some people seem to be overjoyed at the prospect - though someone would only toast it with a chilled bottle of wine if they were particularly bitter at feeling marginalised in the past, or didn't quite appreciate that there might be perspectives other than their own. I've seen a lot of messages on Twitter saying things like Becta never managed to introduce technology effectively into schools or I never got anything from it or an unthinking It didn't work - and a lot of these messages come from those whose heads are screwed on normally in terms of educational ICT. There are a few things that these points of view miss:

Becta was not really given the power to make schools do anything.

I recall a conversation with someone involved in the Learning Platforms framework who was referring to the spring 2008 "personalised learning space" target. As this person said "it was a target with no teeth" - meaning that schools wouldn't face sanctions it they didn't meet it. The drivers which would make it a genuine target - if Ofsted looked at the school's provision of such a space as part of their inspection, or if a school's SEF had a section concerning online support for learning - just didn't exist, and with Oftsed showing such a lack of understanding of Learning Platforms / Virtual Learning Environments it must have felt like trying to explain to a medieval knight how important passenger airbags are. The instruction to make change in schools happen using ICT without any compulsion for schools to engage with this instruction meant that in many ways, Becta were on a hiding to nothing...

You can lead a horse to water...

Every now and then there's a complaint that food facism is taking children's freedom to eat junk food away. Then Jamie Oliver makes the point that maybe it's not such a good idea to feed children Turkey Twizzlers and there's general acceptance that the dietary health of schoolchildren might actually be important after all. Try and implement such a programme, however, and you create a black market of crisps, sweets and sugary drinks run by the children themselves - plus all the usual stories about mothers pushing burgers through the school gates to fat-deprived children. The point is obvious - all of the good intentions, funding, examples of what a difference a particular programme can make - can easily run aground on the rocks of an attitude which says Nope, we don't want to do this or I don't think it's important. Was it Becta's responsbility to force feed the healthy eating of well thought through ICT down the mouths of unwilling schools? Not unless it wanted to be accused of the opposite - of imposing technology on schools no matter what. Take its foot off the pedal and it would be subject to the half-hearted complaints surfacing at the moment - something that gets individuals, schools or Local Authorities off the hook as Becta is a convenient scapegoat when "it doesn't succeed in putting ICT in schools".

My view & experience don't represent everyone else's - and neither do yours.

Part of a mature outlook on many things is to recognise that one's own portfolio of circumstances, attitudes, experiences and environment isn't the only one - meaning those who say Becta failed have taken their own experience, or someone they know, or something they've read and extrapolated it to apply to everyone everywhere for all time. It's true that not everything Becta carried out worked as intended but, as Ken Robinson points out, you can't be creative if you're not prepared to be wrong. Many of those who want to encourage creativity in learners and teachers (often through the use of ICT) don't have time for the possibility of an organisation which they don't control being creative and (quite possibly) getting things wrong. If my experience of Becta (whether positive or negative) leads me to draw a conclusion about its overall worth, then the least I can do is consider those who've had the opposite experience and work out where the truth lies.

Becta, Moodle & the market

Before going on I think I should address some of the misinformation going on around Becta and Moodle (or Open Source in general) - particularly on Twitter today. One of the accusations being levelled is that somehow because Becta didn't "get" Moodle (or Open Source in general) it deserves to die. Well, hang on. Moodle couldn't be offered as a platform in the Learning Platforms Framework because the Framework was about services, not software, despite the fact that some servicing companies weren't up to scratch. If anyone knows anything about the way schools, Local Authorities and the wider NEN works they should know that, so saying "Becta blocked Moodle" is uninformed I wrote years ago about how if someone really wanted Moodle under the LP Framework they could get it that way. Did anyone do it? Not that I've heard of. Secondly, here in Buckinghamshire (and in West Sussex, and in Cumbria and Lancashire, and in... etc) we use Moodle to meet the relevant parts of our targets - completely sanctioned and approved of by Becta - they visited us enough times to validate that what we were doing was good enough and were really positive. Our work was featured on their Learning Platforms in Action DVD and in a number of case studies and... and... and... well, after a while I get bored of hearing people moan that they weren't allowed to do things by Becta like "use Moodle" - if that was the case, how do they explain what we did? Answers in a comment please...
(an edit as I originally forgot to include this when I was rushing out to a school) Also, Becta supported & supports the Open Source Schools project in the UK as it starts to work out how to best support and advocate OSS in schools.

Hang on. What about...?

In all of this, there are some important unanswered questions:

Bearing in mind that most government web sites currently have the disclaimer with words to the effect of all statutory guidance and legislation linked to from this site continues to reflect the current legal position unless indise, but may not reflect Government policy. where does this leave things like online reporting, home access (which was a one-off grant). Do the targets for parental reporting (etc) still apply, or are schools and LAs now not required to meet them? Is the ditching of Contact Point indicative of a large-scale rolling back of projects, meaning that everything will be swept away in a baby/bathwater episode, or will initiatives be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
What will happen to the resources on the Becta web site - such as the research papers, resources, guidance, etc. Closure is slated for November, but there's a wealth of resources there which should not go to waste.
What does this say about the Coalition's view on the appropriate use of technology in education? The Conservative party, whose pre-election education information contained no mention of technology in any form, and who had an image of a child writing lines of I will respect my teacher in chalk on a blackboard only a year before the general election appear to have steamrollered the Liberal Democrats' thoughts on education, so it remains to be seen if any green shots appear from beneath the paving slabs. Listening to George Osborne & David Laws announce the extent of thecuts/efficiencies/savings this morning I was struck by the number of times they thanked the people who'd been working all weekend on them, but didn't hear anything about those who will lose their jobs & professions as a result of them. Ah well. Slightly more disconcerting was to hear David Laws say that they'd fought hard to protect front line services for schools - was this an admission that the Coalition doesn't see effective use of ICT as something important to 21st Century learners? We shall see.

So, what next?

The phrase curate's egg is almost certainly tripping from some commentators' tongues, but the nub of that phrase is that what is good in some parts and bad in others is "completely spoiled". I don't think that this is the case with Becta. What was needed was a leaner, meaner, keener Becta, which could have addressed the wasteful spending in the realm of ICT. I often wonder how much of what is spent at the BETT show is used effectively - at this point some people would start to blame Becta for a waste of government funds, but ultimately the money spent at something like BETT goes to schools and (for the moment) Local Authorities. At this point, I was going to pontificate on what this leaner, keener, meaner version of Becta would look like, but on reflection (since this blog is, primarily, a means of reflecting on what I claim to be my "profession"), I'll leave that to another post after some thought.

In the meantime, reflect on this. Over the past thirteen years Local Authorities and their schools have been, for the most part, like spoiled children in terms of educational technology. I have colleagues in private schools who are green with envy at the funding, support and guidance that LAs and schools have had - and for the most part, those colleagues have benefited from the latter two elements while pining for the former. Like spoiled children, we get bored with being endlessly accomodated to, whether it's more money for this, or this, or that, or... and the moaning begins. It's really interesting to look across at the United States and see parts of President Obama's Stimulus Package, with its $650 million for educational technology, as a direct descendant of the model overseen by Becta in the UK. I'm also aware of the resources made for UK schools used across the globe to measure impact, look at "E-Maturity" and other resources which would never have existed if a group of school leaders had sat down in 1998 and listed what they'd like. However, that's just my view of course. I've had plenty words to say about how Becta could have done things better (and when they've done things well) but that's probably enough for now. I'll edit this post further as things come to mind, or if anything isn't clear. In the meantime, if you want to hear the popular view on Becta, just search Twitter, you might find plenty of bile and celebration overwhelming the worried voices. However, you could always summarise what's being said by listening to a few guys from England put it in just about the most succinct way:

Preparing your VLE for snow, swine flu, or a huge invisible cloud of volcanic ash

2010-04-21T15:22:00.005Z

Waiting by ShawnMichael. Used under Creative Commons.

On Monday I had a phone call from one of our Area Advisers - a colleague who works with schools in a particular area of the country. He'd been contacted by one of our schools who had a group of students in Chicago and couldn't get back to school due to the volcanic ash affecting flights in and out of the UK. Naturally the school was thinking about how to get work to and from the students (and accompanying staff). We could, of course, have supported the school via its Moodle and our county-wide Adobe Connect server - if, that is, the school had engaged with our county-wide offering and hadn't chosen to do its own thing, which wasn't an issue until this event when it became clear that they had a need for this sort of facility to support teachers and learners who, for whatever reason, couldn't be at school physically.
Speaking to senior leaders at one of our Upper Schools this week it was apparent how thinking about how to use the VLE or Learning Platform in a day-to-day environment makes it far easier to cope when unexpected events occur. Witness the teacher stuck in North Africa who emailed the SLT to say that she'd got to an internet connection and all of her work was on the VLE ready for students to access.
So, if you have a working VLE, what do you need to do to ensure that it's useful and useable what might you need to do to ensure that it's ready to be used in times of crisis, or even just times of inconvenience? As promised earlier this week, here are some pointers for things you might want to think about as an institution to ensure that, come hell, ash, snow or high water, your insitution will be in the best position to use your VLE or Learning Platform and have as few traumas as possible in the process.
I'd break the issues down into several elements. Some of the processes described are Moodle-specific, but if you use a different platform and have more than a few brain cells to rub together, you'll be able to see the parallels to your system. You don't need to pretend that if people buy the tool you're using then that's probably the only answer to H1N1 or snow or anything like that, even (or especially) if you're flogging Moodle to schools. Right? Oh, and when I refer to VLE, you might want to read that as Learning Platform, it's up to you.

Awareness

perspective by paul (dex) busy @ work
used under Creative Commons

You'll need to make sure your staff & students are aware of:

the VLE's address - in Buckinghamshire this is of the form learning.yourschool.bucks.sch.uk. Encourage them to email it to themselves, add it to their equivalent of an iGoogle page if they use one, or use an online bookmarking tool such as Delicious if they are away from their "default" computer where they may have it as a bookmark, or it may be their home page. Probably the simplest way of doing this is to ensure there's an obvious link to the VLE from the school's "official" web site (if they aren't already one and the same). Trying ~~Googling~~ searching for your school's VLE and see if it's easy to find when you use what should be the obvious search terms.
their username and password - our system in Bucks uses the same set for their email as for their VLE login, so if they can get to their email and can enter the address of the VLE, then that's OK. If systems use different passwords, then you'll need to think about the logistics of this. Do you email the VLE or Learning Platform username and password to them - and if so, is this only to their school address? It's your call.
how to find any new resources and access them - if you're creating new sections specifically for Snow Day work, or an area for a group of staff & students on the other side of the world, are you going to enrol them in this area, or should they do it themselves? Again, you could use a HTML block on the front of your Moodle to highlight this, with a direct link to the course or categories involved.

Where is the work?

Day 136 - So organized? by Sarah Cady
Used under Creative Commons

Should you have a dedicated "School Closure Work" or "Snow Day Work" section, or put the resources in your existing online courses?

If you are already using the VLE to support work done in class in a significant way, then practically it's probably better to simply add this work into your existing courses - maybe at the top of a course so it can't be missed. As students in this scenario would already have access to the courses/classes in question, there will be few issues about ensuring that the right students (and staff) can see the appropriate work.
However, I think it's safe to assume that, come the next eruption near the end of a school holiday or, more likely, falls of snow in winter, there will be increased expectations from parents, the press or indeed anyone with an opinion and a voice with which to express it that schools should be seen to be doing something. Therefore, politically & PR-wise, it may be best to have a complete section (in Moodle parlance, a Category entitled Snow Day Work or something appropriate, with as many sub-categories or courses within it as necessary. Many schools in Buckinghamshire who used their VLEs well during the snow days this year still have these categories - but they are currently hidden and can be easily made visible at the next instance of snow. It's not over-confident to say that it's possible to guess during which parts of which terms snow is likely to occur, so it could be possible for staff to populate courses in this section with work.

On creating a (initially hidden from students) Snow Day course staff could use Moodle's Import course data function (within each course's Administration block). The Import function allows staff to bring in activities or resources from any other course they've taught, which could help make a single Snow Day course, with appropriately labelled sections, suitable for providing work for many different groups of pupils, rather than needing a separate course for each class or cohort.
If your school has never used the VLE "properly" before and an incident such as 3 inches of snow or an as-yet-unpredicted panademic is the first reason you have to use it, then you won't have any of the pre-existing infrastructure of a school which has been using it previously. This situation probably means that you almost certainly won't have staff who can place resources / work on the VLE, so you need to do some thinking about that. It might be worth ensuring that at least two members of staff can upload and edit information on the VLE, and ensuring that other staff know how to get work to them and in what format. Of course, if you were being more than a bit adventurous, you could use the VLE to allow other members staff to upload work in the same way that students would hand in homework using Forum or Assignment activities. Those staff who are responsible for preparing the Snow Day pages could then take this work and put in on the VLE for pupils to access. In a Moodle context, these courses would need to be "guest" (i.e. publicly) accessible (or accessible to guests using an enrolment key

What will the work be?

Poofy's Adventures in Calculand by roboppy
Used under Creative Commons

I had an interesting comment from a Senior Leader in one of our schools that has been using their VLE well for a few years now. It went something like:

As a school we can easily set a lot of Level 1 Snow day work, we need to move to doing some Level 2 and 3 quality stuff.

This raises some interesting issues around what would constitute "good" work on a virtual space when learners were unable to attend the physical space. Should "Snow Day"-type work be the sort of work which fills a gap, like cover work, which can often not meet the high standards to which a teacher might deliver their curriculum in a regular lesson, or should it be on a more continuous line of teaching which transitions neatly between the face-to-face lessons either side of it? In the case of a Snow Day, there are lots of examples of schools putting tasks of the "Go outside and measure the depth of snow outside your house" sort, which are fairly rudimentary and could be seen as playing the political game of being seen to set work rather than necessarily encouraging higher levels or thinking and learning. Also, if the time that the school is closed isn't seen as time off for staff, then is it reasonable to assume that staff should be marking this work while school is closed?
So what are the options for a school wanting to use its VLE to set work for learners who aren't at school?

At the lower end of the scale might be publishing printable worksheets (in PDF format just for printing, or in RTF format for opening editing in a home word processor) for learners to print out and fill in for marking on return to school. This of course assumes that a working and fully inked-up printer is available to the learners at home and also starts to pile up a great deal of work which will need marking when the school re-opens. The longer a closure lasts for, this approach becomes unsustainable & the piles of marking will, well, pile up.
Somewhere above that is posting a message in a forum or completing an Online Text Assignment - the advantage of this is that no special tools are required - learners aren't expected to hand in a file in a specific format which might only be produced by a tool they don't have access to. They simply need internet access and a browser that can access the VLE and enter text in a standard editing box. The advantage of this is that it can be marked by staff while school is still closed.

Interestingly, I've just interviewed a teacher who was stuck in Morocco due to the volcanic ash, but still managed to get work set for her KS5 students. I'm going to transcribe it into a new post, and will finish this post when I do that one...

Your school's VLE/LP & Swine Flu - sorry, Snow Days - no, hang on, Volcanic Ash

2010-04-18T20:37:00.005Z

You might think that the title of this blog post is trying to be link-grabbing, but it's simply a manifestation of the latest incarnation of many phenomena which might close schools or a school for a length of time.

Now, that opening sentence was originally written last Autumn in relation to H1N1, but in the intervening months it's had an increased relevance for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, back to the original post - I'll cut in soon and try & put it in a more recent context...

I'll do my best to explain.

Peppa Pig beset by Swine Flu by cole007. Used under Creative Commons.

Swine flu H1N1 was due to rise ~~this~~ last winter and the accompanying media coverage ensured that very few people weren't informed about it, from symptoms, to treatment, to vaccinations (I had one a few weeks ~~ago~~ before writing the original incarnation of this post), to all sorts of user-submitted stories about the virus.
One of the only things it was difficult to get a clear picture of is what would happen to schools - sometimes the virus appeared to be spreading too fast for school closures to have any effect, other times it was thought some schools would need to stay closed at the start of this term in September. Actually, bear that last article in mind, we'll come back to it.
There is some guidance from Teachernet on Support Learning During Extended School Closures (PDF) and a Model Flu Pandemic Plan (a checklist in Word .doc format). The relevant sections in there are probably:

1.7 Develop communication and dissemination plans for staff, students, and families, including information about possible closures, any timetable changes...
2.2 ...Consider also compiling home email addresses for students and parents/carers who have access to the internet at home.
2.9 Consider developing and testing communications mechanisms in the possible event of school closure e.g. Telephone trees and text messaging services.
2.11 Investigate options with your LA about how students might work from home during a pandemic.

The guidance from Teachernet is here:

What stands out in this document are:

It is useful for schools to review the proportion of students with IT facilities at home, and the extent to which students with such facilities could access school IT systems from home;
It is useful for LAs, or any schools that work outside pan-LA plans, to consider possible (non-IT) systems for getting work to and from students in the event of lengthy school closures;
Schools should recognise that staff – teachers and support staff – have a role to play in emergency planning and, together with their trade unions or professional associations, should be consulted on the school’s emergency plans (for pandemic flu or other emergencies);

This (for me) is interesting as there are lots of issues here. If schools were to close for extended periods and hadn't made any provision to support learning during this period, what would happen?

Well, that's how the post started. Then it snowed.

The Snow Days of January 2010 - an extended period of school closures due to wintry weather - highlighted the fact to many schools here in Buckinghamshire that they needed the ability to provide for supporting learning online when physical access to the schools was limited. This ran into a snag. What happened here was that a lot (if not all schools) saw a screen similar to this, only with their school's Moodle address at the top:

Now, if you're familiar with Moodle, then you know that that could mean a significant issue, even if you're not sure what caused it. Of course, a lot of people saw it as an opportunity - see? Doing that Moodle thing is just asking for trouble. Where's your technical support now then? Well, as it happened they were all over it, but what looked from the screens above to be a Moodle-sourced problem turned out to be an issue with the (commercial) SAN software which tied together the vast amounts of storage which underpin our Moodle service. When the storage didn't respond in a timely manner to a Moodle's request for something, the error message above was generated. This was all pretty messy, but hey, I'd rather have the sort of problem where people are too keen to use what we're doing than the opposite.

Many schools made really good use of their VLEs during the snow days, though I had some interesting comments from those who have been doing it for a while, saying that they needed to move beyond "Level 1" online learning in this sort of situation and move on to something more sophisticated in terms of the thought that was put into it by both staff and pupils.
However, those questions above regarding preparations for H1N1 were still relevant.

The Shot Everyone's Taking by Mike Knell. Used under Creative Commons.

As if Swine Flu and Snow Days weren't enough for one academic year, it's now the end of the 2010 Easter holiday and the skies above the UK are quiet, cloudless and have no trace of contrails left by any airliner stretching across them. The recent eruptions beneath the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in south-western Iceland and the ensuing total cancellation of all flights have transformed not just the sky, but all sorts of things. As flight restrictions were imposed from Thursday onwards, any staff and pupils attempting to return to the UK almost definitely won't be in school for at least the first half of this week unless they can squeeze onto a ferry or Eurostar and any backlog could affect schools and learners for a good few days, if not into next week. What happens in these situations (snow, floods and now the unlikely "ash") is that complaints start to rumble about how schools aren't prepared, how teachers like to take it easy, how decisions are taken lightly. Well, in the case of the ash cloud, there's not much that can be done. One secondary school I know of at the time of writing has at least eighteen staff and that's probably among the lower numbers. The reports of parties of stranded schoolchildren are rife (including a group from Loughborough in Iceland for a geography field trip) and the Director of Children's Services here in Bucks responded to the fact that we have seven school groups abroad on the BBC News web site. At the moment it's an inconvenience, but just as the Snow Days earlier in the year moved from a mood of it's fun, we're not at school! to How is this going to affect our children's learning?, there will come a time when schools will need to think about what to do.

This situation is a much more nuanced version of the Snow Days and what would have been the situation in the event of closures due to H1N1. In those cases, the lack of physical presence in school was due to the buildings themselves being inaccessible and was a blanket effect - if the school was closed, no-one came in to experience a normal school day, even if they lived around the corner and could walk into school to teach or learn. In this situation, it's likely that most staff and pupils will be able to get to school, but obviously many won't be. How should a school respond in this situation? Plough ahead with the curriculum anyway? Put everything on hold while the dust settles (literally) and then start when the school's community could be considered "quorate"? These are questions which would need answering on a school-by-school and class-by-class basis, but form the basis for some interesting debate. The questions originally posed for H1N1 apply here too, but in a different set of circumstances.

As James Clay has observed, a similar phenomenon is occuring to what happened during the Snow Days, namely an assumption that nothing can be done to support learners who aren't at school. Well, if you've got a working VLE or Learning Platform then you'll probably have something to say about that. This has already been a long post, but I'll shortly follow it up with something approaching a checklist of things your school will need to think about if you want to be proactive for something like this - whether it be snow, H1N1, an invisible cloud of volcanic ash, or something else. A few years ago I attended the 2006 MoodleMoot at the Open University and saw a presentation called After The Flood which inspired me to think a lot about these things, so I hope to share some thoughts which might have matured a little. It seemed timely that the MoodleMoot concluded as the ash spread across the UK and then Europe, so I hope to bring a few fairly obvious things about how I'd advise our schools in Buckinghamshire using the two main tools avaialable to them - Moodle & Adobe Connect - and hopefully how to address some of those original H1N1 questions. Right, now I've promised something, I'm going to have to write it. Probably this week. Hmmm. In the meantime, enjoy this courtesy of Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœkʏtl̥], translated "island mountain glacier") & Tessa Watson:

Image by Biology Big Brother. Used under Creative Commons.

On leaving Firefox for Chome

2010-03-27T08:00:00.001Z

If you're vaguely serious about working online, then you almost certainly don't just have Internet Explorer as the only browser on your computer (assuming you have control over these things). Even before Google officially joined the IE6 No More movement many people still wanted an alternative to Microsoft's default browser, and most of those people installed Firefox, which rose from the ashes of Netscape's demise. There was even a funeral for IE6 planned for the 4th March - and in a nice touch Microsoft (apparently) sent a bouquet.

Firefox is famously based on Open Source and so you'd think it'd fit in around this blog, which looks at using the similarly Open Source Moodle - and to a greater or lesser extent, it does. This is in part due to the vast constellation of Firefox Add-Ons which are incredibly helpful for all sorts of reasons - the Web Developer add-on is essential in identifying which CSS elements of a Moodle theme can be selected and customised, something like ColorZilla offers all sorts of helpful elements for working with existing pages and designs and Aviary's Talon brings a browser based screen capture tool which will drop the results straight into Aviary.com. With Internet Explorer 7 being average at best and Internet Explorer 8's approach to standards meaning that even my County Council's (Microsoft) Outlook Web Access (OWA) server can't be opened unless IE8's "compatibility mode" is active, it looks like Firefox should clean up, especially with the essential IETab add-on which allows selected sites (such as an OWA server) to be displayed in a tab which uses the IE7 engine to display the site As Microsoft Intended (e.g "not in Firefox").

However, any user of Firefox can point to numerous issues associated with relying on the browser. It's an enormous memory hog and - the efforts of add-ons such as MemoryFox/AFOM notwithstanding - can often run sluggishly, though I'm fairly sure that the complex pages of the OWA service don't help the load of running IETab in my case. However, most of these issues are moot, aren't they? After all, most new machines have uber-processors and an excess of RAM, and so should be able to handle anything that Firefox can throw at them, right?

Until you have a netbook, that is. 1 or 2GB of RAM and slower processors make the weight of running Firefox more apparent. So what to do?

Well, the most recent kid on the browser block is Google's Chrome, which has been heavily plugged in the press (and shared large billboards outside this year's BETT Show with David Cameron). Chrome is fast, relatively lightweight browser which is based on the Open Source Chromium project and will be a significant part of Google's forthcoming Chrome Operating System. For many people, the huge billboard and newspaper advertising campaign were a mystery - until the impending EU "browser choice" issue surfaced, and it became clear that people were going to be offered a choice of which browser to use.

So, it's quite possible that a few of our schools might end up using Chrome - but what are the issues with using something like Chrome with Moodle? Most stem from the increasingly old HTMLArea editing tool which is the default in Moodle 1.n versions - in Chrome this simply doesn't display, leaving the (often unsuspecting user) with a plain text box, with no formatting controls:

This box will take HTML tags to format the text and content, but that's not an option for most teachers. Contrast this to the standard HTMLarea view in Internet Explorer 7 (similar in Firefox):

There are two options for this. One is to wait for Moodle 2.0 which uses a new, better (and far more configurable) editing tool TinyMCE3, or alternatively you could follow Julian Ridden's instructions on how to get TinyMCE3 into your current Moodle site. However, if you're using a Moodle server but have no interest (or access) to the code that makes it work, those aren't viable options. I know from various forum postings in the area where we support our Moodle users in Buckinghamshire that some people, particularly on their home machines, are using Chrome and coming up against the issue described above. One way to sort this issue if you have Chrome on Windows is to use Extensions - easy-to-install tweaks to control how Chrome behaves. Here's an overview of what extensions are:

If you have Internet Explorer installed on your machine then you can install the IETab extension for Chrome, which allows you to set rules for which site (e.g. www.address.of.your.moodle.site.sch.uk) should be rendered in Internet Explorer when loaded in a tab in the browser. When this extension detects you're on a web site in a list you've specified (such as your Moodle, or my Outlook Web Access server), it will use Internet Explorer's page rendered to display that site inside Chrome. This will mean that you get the "normal" editing tools, even if your Moodle site is still using the HTMLArea editor. It's not quite as elegant as the Firefox IETab tool, but it's very useful and on a netbook it's definitely my preferred way to ensure that I can edit Moodle sites as I wish - especially where the alternative is installing Firefox. Hang on, did I really just write that last sentence? How things change...

Open approaches to education from an LA perspective

2010-03-26T17:32:00.002Z

the following post is a facsimile (with minor edits) of a position paper/provocation paper presented at the Open Source Schools Think Tank held in London on the 26th March 2010.

Just in case you were wondering, all opinions are mine and not those of my employer.

These are not fully realised or worked-through thoughts, but hopefully contain some useful / contentious principles to provoke some discussion, or at least make the reader think. While reading please bear in mind that it may be unfinished!

What's the problem?

As someone who started working in school-level education systems ten years ago, the one thing which has remained constant throughout has been my amazement at how a certain system has dominated and, in some schools and in many ways, has shaped the way children of all ages are taught and how teachers of all levels of experience work. I am of course referring to the dominant MIS system used in the UK. I have no particular beef with the system , but the fact that it is in some spheres so universally reviled by staff (and hence used ineffectively or in ways which are less than optimal). However, the tortuous process of moving from the MIS system in question to any comparable system are such that most schools appear to feel content (compelled?) to stick with the devil they know.
Such a situation can only lead to a lack of innovation. Consider how this landscape would look if the opposite was the case - i.e. that schools could migrate from one MIS system to another with no more than a month of upheaval, which consisted of a certain amount of data transfer (possibly through open XML schemas) and some appropriate retraining of key staff. If this was the case, innovative and (let's face it) better tools would be rewarded with schools flocking to them - the "the school down the road thinks it's great so we're having a look" modus operandi is well developed in terms of technology in schools. Since these tools would operate on data (which would be held in a common, open standard) then it would be possible to use a single tool to access all of the data, or even (for those schools who really wanted to cherry pick the best bits) to use different tools to carry out different tasks - for example, one element of a particular MIS to "do" attendance and another from another provider to "do" assessment.

Such an environment would nurture innovation - indeed, innovation would be the main driving force in this sector, which isn't something that can said to be true now. The market leader is by parts counter-intuitive, lumbering and nowhere near as agile as its competitors. However, it's still the market leader, which gives you an idea of how difficult it must be to migrate from it.

Where is the role of Open Source in this? OSS-based school MIS tools don't currently come close to the worldwide reach and use of a tool such as Moodle for any number of reasons - they are either fragmented, the efforts of a small group of individuals, or in the case of the leading contender (SchoolTool) so beholden to a complete insistence on being run on a particular Linux distribution that this immediately disqualifies them from use in most schools-and almost certainly rules them out of a wider market in the UK.

Again, here an insistence by a body such as Becta on Open Standards for MIS data would be a way to make this work and could also stimulate innovation in the MIS market. SIF does some of this, but is primarily concerned with ensuring that data can be piped between systems and doesn't, from this user's perspective, have true interoperability at its heart. The discussions (verging on squabbles) and splintering of vendors and other parties around SIF (see SALTIS for an example of the issues here) shows the potential for factions over any standard, but for the good of schools, learning in general and the MIS industry's reputation. There are examples of excellent interfaces between the existing proprietary systems and Open Source tools - the limiting factor in these is the closed and obfuscated data in the existing systems. Think what could be done if the data was open and easily (and securely) accessible.

The arena of school Management Information sorely needs a ringmaster with a whip and a set of house rules - such an approach could be a shot of adrenaline to a lethargic industry and an opportunity for the creativity & innovation afforded by OSS to flourish & benefit schools in a measurable way.

A comparable solution to a different issue?

The issue of ePortfolios has waxed and waned in importance as online parental reporting has lumbered over the horizon, however there was (to my mind) a chance to have opened up the realm of how ePortfolios could be supported and developed on a national, and even international, basis.

Here's how it could have worked...

Becta / the DCSF / whoever commission what could be The World's Largest Slice Of Cloud Storage - with resilience, backup (possibly devolved to local data centres on an LA or RBC basis). Hey, if they want, that commissioning could be done through a procurement process...
The storage is accessed via a common (and Open) API - an Application Programming Interface which means that, like many online services, data could be written to and read from the storage using a variety of tools - whether web-based, mobile applications, or functions built-in to desktop tools such as the MS Office or OpenOffice suites. Flickr is an example of a tool which, in some ways, exhibits characteristics which might be deemed desirable in an ePortfolio system of this type.
Any "vendor" or "supplier" would need to offer a tool which used this API to both write data to and retrieve it from the hosted service. This would open the market up to a range of providers - in the knowledge that the stored data would be accessible

This openness would deal with many of the issues around the portability of ePortfolios. For example, it's fairly clear that there's considerable mobility across arbitrary county & other administrative area - in 'my' County of Buckinghamshire (for example) many parents choose not to put their children into the selective secondary system - so there's an immediate issue of a child's work being "held" in Buckinghamshire and then being inaccessible in a form - other than an as a read-only archive - once the child ends up in Oxfordshire or Hertfordshire. In the current paradigm an ePortfolio is "for life" as long as a pupil's "life" stays in one administrative boundary.

Such an approach would see the "traditional" providers of learning tools (including those 10 9 companies on the Becta Learning Platform Services Framework) offer ePortfolio tools and allow any open-source tool which could interface with the open API to be used on an equal basis. Such an approach fosters innovation, creative approaches to learning and would be a healthy, strong, competitive environment which would exist in significant contrast to the MIS market described above. As everything was immediately transferable - since a portfolio could be accessed and modified using any of the tools - and it might be the case that a whole host of best-of-breed tools are used by an individual user or institution, if each of the tools offered something unique and innovative. The role of Becta (or a similar organisation overseeing the storage) would be to ensure it was resilient and maintain the API.

This last element - agreeing what the API does or how it works - looks like another opportunity for the HTML "standards" wars of the late 1990s, when Netscape and Microsoft decided that "innovation" meant "a standard of ours not supported by anyone else". Well, with a little thinking and the carrot of "the funding goes to where the standards are" this could potentially be dealt with. Becta's Learning Platform Services Framework was supposed to have interoperability - the principle that meant that (in theory) an institution could switch providers almost seamlessly, or that a learner could move between institutions who were using different Learning Platforms and retain control and access to their data. It's an open secret that none of the providers was able to offer that true interoperability - see the case of StudyWiz's demise for more discussion on that - however having to fully meet a common API could ensure that interoperability was at the heart of such a project.

Truly portable portfolios for truly lifelong learning would be no mean achievement - but what would it require from both Becta, the Open Source sector and suppliers of proprietary software? A first start would be a commitment to open, competitve innovation with an acknowledgement that if the playing field were truly open, then only the most useful and valuable would survive. Could the proprietary and Open Source sectors stand up to that sort of test?

Author's note:

I'd appreciate comments on this, but particularly on the second issue - as I'm aware that this post could be link bait for those who want to post re: SALTIS/SIF/SIFA - so if you have a post on that subject, please ensure that it's original thinking rather than just a re-statement of arguments which have been or are already being thrashed out elsewhere. Many thanks in advance for your understanding!

Troubles for StudyWiz - an acid test for the LP procurement framework?

2010-02-12T11:30:00.008Z

During Wednesday this week it became apparent that things were not great with eTech - one of the (relatively) newer players in the UK Learning Platforms market, which provides its StudyWiz platform to about 13 Local Authorities (LAs) and other schools (29,000, according to its own site). An increasing number of tweets indicated that Becta were going to contact schools (and presumably, LAs) who had opted into StudyWiz as part of the Learning Platforms Framework (which itself has been the subject of much blogging here and elsewhere).

I had assumed that StudyWiz had been at BETT but for some reason I hadn't seen them - however it became apparent that they hadn't, despite still sponsoring various elements including TeachMeet. A couple of direct messages on Twitter during Wednesday suggested that eTech Europe had gone into administration. The information isn't as easy to find as you might hope, especially if your school was depending on it, but it appears to be here - a winding up order served by HMRC (PDF). Subsequently it would appear that eTech appears to have gone into global administration - see this article from an Australian newspaper last weekend (PDF) - despite receiving an AU$2million government grant after being "unable to secure finance from other sources" in 2009. eTech is an Tasmanian-originated company which had previously grown rapidly across the globe (see video with obligatory dot com fußball and table tennis segments) and, like all of the other providers of Learning Platform services under the framework, had to pass a number of tests which weren't just concerned with what its product could do, but also about the viability of the company.

Ten companies made it onto the framework and a number of advantages were promoted as pointing to why the LP Framework was A Good Thing. One that was routinely mentioned but not (to my mind anyway) ever taken seriously as a scenario was that "if one of the providers go under, then within the framework [a school or LA] should be able to move to another supplier". Everyone who heard this imagined schools getting bored or dissatisfied with products or companies - but not the companies themselves going under. Well, I guess this situation is the acid test of that claim - and it might ask some serious questions of a number of groups:

first of all, Becta, under whose guidance the Framework was put together. The "moving to another supplier" idea is, course, an assumption predicated on interoperability - another core principle of the LP Framework but one which, when discussed with anyone involved at an LA or RBC level, is normally met with either a chuckle or a shrug. Essentially, everyone is aware that it appears that most vendors appear to pay lip-service to true interoperability. Becta's role in this will be to deal with many of the issues which arise from this for those LAs and schools who opted for StudyWiz through the provisions of the LP Framework. It's always been my understanding that if a school purchased direct from StudyWiz/eTech (or any supplier) and didn't go through the Framework then they wouldn't benefit from its provisions, even though eTech were an approved provider. It appears that Becta, eTech/StudyWiz (in whatever form they are now) and the affected LAs are meeting next week to sort things out and plan ahead.
secondly - and obviously - eTech/StudyWiz. If the worst happened and those schools or LAs who chose StudyWiz under the LP Framework route are forced (or choose) to move to another supplier, then it will very quickly become apparent how easy or otherwise it is to get data and content out of StudyWiz and into another system. However, I hear that StudyWiz might export into Common Cartridge format, which offers some options if your tool of choice can work with that.
finally, the other providers under the Learning Platform Framework will be immediately affected by how interoperable their systems are. Of course, I'd imagine that any school or LA approaching another vendor with questions about bringing the content and operation of a learning platform in from StudyWiz would be met with the answer "Yes" to almost any questions they might have. However, listen more carefully and I wouldn't be surprised to hear the trill of discussion in UK offices, or Skype calls to developers in India asking if it's possible to hoover up information once held in StudyWiz courses into the one you're trying to sell to schools. It's also interesting to see employees of other LP providers retweeting messages from their users expressing relief that they didn't choose StudyWiz.

I've often read the company profiles of those involved in the LP framework and noticed the number who trumpet investment by venture capitalist companies and even provide dedicated channels of information for their investors. This is obviously understandable - companies need/want to grow and I'm not questioning the morality of companies selling 'stuff' to schools to make money, it's more of an interest in how some of the basic functions (like teaching, learning and management) of schools can be affected by wider economic issues.

[Edit 12/02/2010 18:00 a direct message on Twitter points me to the travails of a company which appeared, as if from nowhere, a few BETTs ago and appeared to swallow up several existing companies whole...]

As it turned out, the star of the above video, Geoff Ellwood, tweeted that everything was kind of OK. Now it may well be the case, but to my mind one of the issues of having venture capitalists and investors depending on your performance (and you as a company depending on their confidence in you) must be that you need to send positive, upbeat messages to them. I can't guarantee it, but the confidence in that statement might not have been shared by a school nervous about the position of StudyWiz. As I understand it a new company formed from the ashes of eTech and will be named StudyWiz and retain the staff and IPR of the product (as it is, on Friday morning, StudyWiz confirmed the predicted management buyout). However, would I be right to assume that any contracts with eTech now won't be valid as that company doesn't exist any more? Any new procurement through the Framework would take at least a year, so will LAs & schools be expected to enter into fresh agreements outside of the Framework? (These are genuine questions - I don't know the answers and am just asking the ones I'd want to if that was my situation...). The LP Framework document itself is huge - "so big that schools wouldn't see the need for its size" as someone from another LA once said to me - but it's in situations like this when it becomes apparent why these agreements are as detailed as they are. I'm willing to bet that any LAs and groups of schools who involved their legal teams in drawing up the terms of any contracts are now very relieved that they did.

Co-incidentally the news of StudyWiz's troubles surfaced during a day which started with a Google Alert in my inbox which linked to a story of how a Californian college was "eliminating" BlackBoard for Moodle. Now, if you're an occasional reader then you might think that this was just another "Look! Moodle's winning!" link, but I'm interested in other issues. San Jose City College stopped using BlackBoard for mainly financial reasons (a combination of a cut in budgets and increased license costs) - again an example of non-educational factors affecting a whole institution's teaching & learning strategy. We're in the fortunate position that if our hosts & service providers (Atomwide) were to have issues, or for any other reason we (as an LA) chose to move our learning platform provision elsewhere, it would be a fairly simple process (though large in terms of the volume of the data we'd be shuffling around) to transfer things. There are plenty of Moodle hosts around (most good, with only one that springs to mind of the "don't ask me about them or I'll rant" variety) which (importantly) gives us choice - and the ability to have more control our own destiny in terms of technology provision.
I've always thought that interoperability was (understandably) near the bottom of a list of priorities for LP vendors - after all, if it's difficult for a school or LA to leave once they've seriously committed to your product, then you've got them for life, right? I'm willing to bet that, with a shadow seeming to have passed over StudyWiz, interoperability has bumped up most vendors' to-do lists now...

If you're a StudyWiz customer, either through the Framework or not, in the UK or not, what are your plans? Are you going to sit tight or try something else, either through another provider or on your own?

Taking over BETT 2010

2010-01-06T14:39:00.000Z

Subject to the uksnow it's likely that I'll be trekking to Olympia again next week for the annual shuffling-round-a-large-hall-fest that is BETT - like Naace it's something whose origins are given away by its acronym - in this case the British Educational Training and Technology Show/fair/exhibition/bunfight. I'll be there for four days, mainly on the Adobe stand talking about our use of Connect & Captivate to support our Moodle implementation, and also about some of the practical issues around running our Games Design course across two continents. This is fairly standard stuff as far as BETT goes, as is (surprisingly) the Friday evening TeachMeet session - which if you're attending you can (& should) find out more about and sign up for on the relevant TeachMeet page.
During various threads on Twitter about BETT - including a mainly productive one on Tips for (new) visitors to BETT - I opined how BETT would, to my mind, benefit significantly from having an "L" in its title (and core purpose) similar to the one in SLF - the Scottish Learning Festival, which was tellingly formerly titled SETT. Both are run by EMAP, who have donated the space for TEDx Orenda, AmplifiED and TeachMeet's evening session on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights respectively but it appears to me (never having attended SLF) that there's a clue to the focus of the events from their acroymns. I don't know what "BELT" would be like, but I think it would have more of the flavour of a TeachMeet-like event...
It struck me this week that I'm could end up being ridiculously busy during BETT - I've put myself down to do a micropresentation on the Teachers As Writers project I've blogged about previously, plus there's...
Perhaps something more encouraging in this is the development of TeachMeet Takeover - which can best be summarised in the strapline on its wiki page - teachers sharing inspiration for free. Essentially, if you're going to BETT and want to share something about using free tools to support learning, you can sign up for one of the thirty minute slots donated by a number of exhibitors from the Thursday to Saturday of BETT and share what you're doing (with free tools). It's that simple. Here are some of the sorts of topics being covered at the time of writing:

Edmodo, Ning and Wallwisher - The more ways students can communicate, the more teachers should listen;
Google Maps and Google Earth in the classroom;
Ideas for using tools in language learning (but applicable to whole curriculum!) Voki, Voicethread, Storybird, Wallwisher;
Maths Maps - using Google Maps to find maths all around us;
Glogging all over the World;
Wordle, Tagul & Brainpop

You can read the complete list (and sign up) on the TeachMeet wiki, or read Tom Barrett's original blog post. Either way, if you're around BETT on the Thursday, Friday or Saturday, come and encourage those who are taking the free stuff into the exhibition halls (like a better, newer, shinier version of something that happened a few years ago...). I'll be doing three practical #tmtakeover sessions on how to incorporate things like Google Docs, Buzzword, Aviary, Wallwisher etc. (all free) into Moodle - though the principles I'll be demonstrating are hopefully generic enough that any VLE, Learning Platform or web-based app that's half decent will be able to use them to good effect. I'll also try and record one of the presentations (or maybe someone on one of the stands might do it for me) and publish it in full afterwards...
Something else which may be of interest is the Open Source Café on stand L20 which promises bean bags, coffee and presentations, discussions and possibly workshops on using Open Source in education. I'll be doing a presentation on Wednesday on how we've reflected some of the Open Source-ness of Moodle in how we've rolled it out and supported it across schools in Buckinghamshire, and Miles Berry has promised Good Coffee at the café (as you'd hope, really).
If you're going to BETT, have a good time, sign up for one of the evening events if you can - and remember if you're going for the first time, or taking colleagues who haven't been before: it's better to come away with one or two good, practical, useable ideas that you'll keep far longer than any amount of educational technology promotional swag that you'll only throw away in a year's time. If you have any BETT tips and use Twitter, then use the hashtag #tips4bett to share them with other people...
David Buckingham writes interestingly (and quite accurately in my opinion) about BETT in Beyond Technology- Children's Learning in the Age of Digital Culture - but what are your experiences of BETT? If you've been to the Scottish Learning Festival, has there been a difference since it changed from SETT into SLF? I'd love to hear.

Using a VLE with teachers as the learners

2009-11-23T23:06:00.018Z

Today I've been at my second face-to-face session with teachers from all over the County who make up the Teachers As Writers group (despite being started in November, this post wasn't finished until the end of the Autumn term). The TAW project is part-funded by NATE, the National Association for the Teaching of English and is being led by Simon Wrigley (our English Adviser and former Chair of NATE) and Jeni Smith from the University of East Anglia. Here's Simon's desciption of where the project had its genesis:

TAW was inspired by rage over the past 20 years of seeing the culture of English teachers denigrated, side-lined and eroded by centralised systems more concerned with control than learning. The National Association for the Teaching of English (a completely independent charity, funded entirely by subscriptions of those wanting a free voice in education) has argued for all that time (and indeed since its foundation in 1964) that teachers' culture was by no means all bad, that teachers knew things and, if trusted, could improve the lot of learners through their own agency. All this fell on the deaf ears of government- until about 2005 when it seemed that the powers that be were force to admit that without attending to the health of teachers' professional 'hinterland', further 'progress' was stalled. In fact, shortly before that the DCSF had been forced to concede that testing arrangements at KS1 were flawed, the importance of talk for learning had been underplayed, and there was a great deal more to education than that which could be easily be measured (eg ECM). And despite the enormously expensive apparatus of inspection and assessment, in the end, if a professional education service was to work well, you had to nurture and trust professionals rather than dictate to them or dismiss them. Indeed, had it not been for the professionals pointing out the short-comings of education policy, the policy would not have improved.
TAW was also inspired by the growing conviction that teachers who were succeeding with learners did so by their own energy, enthusiasm and reflection, by personal understanding of their pupils, and by trusting that film and literature had ways of talking directly to pupils which no amount of simplified method or scheme could do. What was needed was to gather teachers into self-help groups so that they had the space, time and respect to recharge their batteries, gather evidence and support each other. TAW's final impetus came from Jeni and I discussing writing groups which we had run with NATE over the past 17 years in Suffolk, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, London, Cambridge in the light of two government publications. That teachers of writing should write - and hence build healthier writing environments for pupils in classrooms - was endorsed and encouraged by Richard Andrews (Lecturer at the Institute of Education) in his 2008 DCSF report Getting Going, and by Phil Jarrett, (English HMI) in his 2009 Ofsted report, English at the Crossroads.

Bucks TAW is funded by Bucks County and DCSF Strategy money for the professional development of lead teachers, and for raising standards. It is endorsed by NATE and by UEA. Other TAW writing groups run by Jeni and by me will be contributing to the overall findings; these are funded by teachers themselves or their institutions. Jeni runs several other (mainly self-funded) writing groups, including a student writing group that must, therefore, be funded by UEA.

Bucks TAW's aims are:
to explore CPD which gives teachers independent professional confidence through having more agency in research, and gathering evidence of their own;
to improve the teaching of writing through more careful reflection on the processes of writing;
to develop a sustainable model of professional development in the LA;
to understand how on-line sharing may support the teaching and learning of writing in conjunction with paper and face-to-face methods.

The cohort of teachers was selected after submitting examples of their writing and have met a couple of times at the Teaching & Learning Centre in Aylesbury, as well as an inspirational day at the British Museum. My role has been to think creatively about the ways in which an online environment could support them - between the sessions the writers have little or no contact with one another - they are from primary and secondary schools across the county - and so a few months ago Simon approached me about the role an online Moodle-based environment could play. Prior to the project Simon was a self-confessed techno-agnostic - he could see the value of its use and was keen but (and I think he'd agree with this) often struggled with using it effectively in a way that wasn't frustrating. I've been longing to do this sort of thing - a medium term, involved, committed, blended approach to teachers working together - for ages, so I jumped at the chance. Here is a rough outline of the process:

The first thing was to establish a Moodle course on our central BucksGfL Moodle (to which staff from all schools have access) and, importantly, establish a server redirect so we could give out a simple, easy to remember URL - www.bucksgfl.org.uk/taw rather than www.bucksgfl.org.uk/course/view.php?id=413.
The next stage was to ensure that all participants had BucksGfL accounts. Due to the unified username system we use across the county, most did, but there were several people from schools who run their own username systems and won't play ball with other schools - these needed to be created as "one offs" along with a username for Jeni Smith. Simon & Jeni were given editors' rights over the course.
The first exercise was to establish a simple forum (set up with the "Each user posts one discussion" setting) and encourage participants to introduce themselves, what they'd like to learn about their writing or themselves, one claim to fame they had, and what they could see from their window. This last one was shameless ripped from the NCSL's online facilitation courses, but it seems to work, and we're about sharing practice, right?
Despite having never done any NCSL facilitator's training, Simon responded to all of the introductions (as did Jeni) prior to the initial project meeting at the Teaching & Learning C Centre in Aylesbury - an important part in encouraging further responses within the online space.
At the first session, the group went through various writing exercises, were given (real!) notebooks to work with, and introduced to the elements of the Moodle course. These were:
Various relevant documents from Ofsted, NATE, etc inserted as Resources in the course;
A Creative Writing Journal which was implemented using the (vaguely redundant) Journal module;
A series of open Forums to allow participants to share Examples of their own writing, Reflections on their own writing, Close (anonymised) observations of children writing and Reflections on classroom practice.

At the inception of the project we acknowledged that we didn't know how the use of the online tools to support the project might progress - we didn't really know how confident the participants were with using ICT and how comfortable they would be with sharing their writing and thoughts with their peers - we tried to structure it to have a private space (the Creative Writing Journal) and a public space (the forums). Right from the start we intended to start the project off and review and revise the use of the tools as it progressed. As expected, number of issues became apparent during the early use of the course.

The pretty-much-obsolete Journal module didn't retain formatting when someone wrote a poem, or allow the creation of multiple pages, plus the commenting/grading system was unwieldy. At the start of the project I'd seriously considered setting up a Wiki (with its configuration to be No Groups / Student) so that one activity could effectively create 16 parallel Creative Writing Journals, though shied away from it as, without explanation, it can be a complex tool. However, the needs of the participants and the course meant that moving to a Wiki was the right thing to do. Using a wiki meant that Simon and Jeni could switch between the journals by using the menu at top right when viewing the wiki:

This also gave participants who were bothered the ability to add a structure to their journal, by using the [square brackets] method of adding a page. This was a move away from the Journal activity, and simply required me to go through the Journal and copy the entries to the wiki, adding structure where it was obvious. I introduced this at the third session at the Teaching & Learning Centre and we spent ten minutes on it so that the participants could familiarise themselves with the new model. It works much better, and allows Simon or Jenny to add comments to any page simply by adding the text [Comment by Name] to the foot of the page and then adding their observations on the new page. The iterative, versioned nature of a Wiki activity also allows the course leaders to see how a piece of writing has developed.
It became apparent that one or two participants were getting overrun with email notifications from forums they had subscribed to, possibly without realising what this would mean when other participants posted to that forum. Each email from a Moodle forum comes complete with a link to unsubscribe - however my experience with being a member of the Naacetalk list for years shows that even those who have an allegedly advisory role in ICT can struggle with simple instructions on how unsubscribe, so at the top of the course we placed a link to the list of all the forums on the Moodle course, with instructions to have a good look at the Yes and No buttons as an indication of how many forums the participant was subscribed to.
Jeni had indicated that she wanted to share resources with ideas for writing with the group - a forum could have worked, but part of my approach was to broaden the range of tools we used, so I created a simple Database activity which allowed comments. Why do this? Well, we're working with a diverse group of teachers from an equally diverse range of schools and I wanted to give them examples of the different Moodle tools and how they might be used. After all, although TAW is explicity not a course, it does involve a cohort of 'learners' with nominal course leaders.
We used the non-standard Questionnaire module to carry out a survey of participants' attitude to and experiences of writing to get some baseline data. I chose the Questionnaire module over the easier-to-use Feedback module due to the ease with with a grid of similar "Rate"-type questions can be created - the two questions in the following image would require at least 11 questions to be created in a similar Feedback activity:
After filling in the questionnaire we asked the participants to reflect on their writing in an Online Text Assignment activity with a due date of the end of the (Calendar) year - as there's a need to move on through the process in the Spring Term.
Creating a web page of links to (and thumbnails of) relevant texts available from Amazon and embedding significant extracts of relevant texts on Google Books.
Simon has also been blogging about the project, a nice reflective process for the duration of the work and it's been encouraging and interesting to see how the fortunes of the project - and the participation levels have been interesting. Obviously they've peaked around the face-to-face sessions, but there's been an encouragingly consistent level. In this sort of project there's no guarantee of "success" through a ski slope of increased participation - but what's been encouraging is the level of engagement from the participants - e.g. the content of their contributions, not just the number of them:

Throughout the process I've been encouraged to see the reflections of those taking part and a number of requests to create something similar to the course which supports the TAW project on their VLEs - at primary, secondary and Sixth Form level. I'm really excited and encouraged by the project - it's an (at least) year-long endeavour and offers what would hopefully be a way of "developing a sustainable model of professional development in the LA" (to quote Simon's introduction above) and "to understand how on-line sharing may support the teaching and learning of writing in conjunction with paper and face-to-face methods". If we get a clear idea of both of these then, for me anyway, the project will have been a success. I'm not afraid of saying that we didn't get things right in the first iteration, but things are much more focused after the tweaks we made and will also hopefully improve throughout the rest of the year. Simon has reported that "TAW was well received by Phil Jarrett and others at the Ofsted conference on December 15th" which might be a sign that we're heading in the right direction. I may try and ask Simon to do a guest post on this blog about his experience on the project - and the more and more I reflect on the project, the more likely I am to submit a micropresentation on it for the forthcoming TeachMeet at BETT 2010. Watch this space. Or that one.

Microsoft, Moodle & Ayers Rock

2009-11-03T07:58:00.002Z

At the start of June I was invited to Microsoft's HQ in Reading to be shown some developments that the company has made in the area of VLEs/CMSs/Learning Platforms. I mentioned this briefly on Twitter and received a number of responses and direct messages speculating on what this might mean. Some were positive, some were of the "I've heard MS wants to kill Moodle with version nn of Sharepoint" variety, others said "Don't drink the Kool-Aid".

Microsoft, Moodle & us

Our relationship with Microsoft (or at least their products) in Bucks varies - naturally all schools use their products in some form and to varying degrees and prior to our use of Moodle on a significant scale most of the servers at Atomwide (who do our hosting) were, as far as I could tell, MS-based. When we started our Moodle project both our central Moodles & the schools' Moodles were hosted on Microsoft's IIS web servers. When the scale of the project increased, it became apparent that for a number of reasons the Moodle installations weren't running as well as they might have done. Over two years ago I wrote about how we switched to Linux-based servers and, as the project has scaled there appears to be no reason to switch back. The vague “real time reporting to parents” targets will (apparently) be met with a SharePoint-esque integration with Capita’s unweidly, as-open-to-the-rest-of-the-world-as-North-Korean-pop-culture SIMS and any SharePoint integration gives schools another chance to have a whole different set of interactions with parents, or completely confuse staff even further, depending on your point of view.

The (mainly) NDA stuff

So what was the meeting in Reading about? Well, two main subjects, primarily the work that Microsoft have been doing to begin to bring the worlds of SharePoint and Moodle together. It's still NDA, but as a first draft I thought it was an interesting take on things. Also at the meeting in Reading were colleagues from Swansea and Pembrokeshire, who are definitely starting at the other end of the scale from where we are - heavy users of SharePoint who are looking to develop their use of Moodle, whereas we're travelling in the same direction for reasons mentioned above. I can’t go into much detail (all will probably be revealed at some point in the near future), but I think that the Moodle integration & associated tools, though well intentioned, may be based on a model of Moodle use that’s not that widespread in schools. The forums on Moodle.org are a useful place to get support if you are in the developer/pathfinder/early adopter role, but aren’t necessarily the place where a regular teacher would share what they’re doing. Hence, I think the MS approach, while having much to commend it, may need some finessing before it turns into something that a regular Moodler (meaning a teacher in a school) might use in their day-to-day moodling - it may be too based on patterns of use described on the Moodle support forums. Those forums aren't where (for example) teachers in our schools in Buckinghamshire would describe how they were working, but as someone who started experimenting with Moodle before we adopted it it was there that I'd ask questions, but they were definitely asked from a situation where our use of Moodle was in beta - even if the software wasn't, and hence wouldn't be "normal" use cases.
The second part of the meeting (and, if anything can be judged by the amount of time spent on it, the less significant part) was concerned with what is (or was at that time) the forthcoming integration of Microsoft's Live@Edu services plugin for Moodle. Essentially this is a block which, if an institution subscribes to the Live@EDU services or has hosted Exchange servers (as many of our schools do), allows some integration with Moodle (single sign-on). The first thing in many people’s minds when they saw this was probably the MoodleRooms work on combining Google Apps and Moodle. It’s a very fertile area and offers lots of potential for future development – integration of Calendars (with Moodle Calendars, including Assignments, Quizzes and other events) feeding into a user’s Google or Live Calendar via the iCal/RSS-type Calendar feed.

Reading the tea leaves

Microsoft’s relationship with anything Open Source is hard to judge – clearly it has an interest (to put it in the bluntest of terms) in obliterating any Open Source products which compete directly with MS products, or even that operate in an arena that MS thinks it can make serious money in. However, the abundance of free tools from MS’s competitors (some large corporations such as Google, others more niche such as SlideRocket) means that simply taking out (or trying to buy) “competitors” one at a time won’t work any more; for every competitor removed another ten probably exist and are more agile than the one that rolled over and allowed Microsoft to tickle its tummy with a wad of cash. Hence there’s a need to embrace, or offer compatibility with, Open Source projects.
At BETT earlier this year I (nearly literally) bumped into someone from the Microsoft Open Source development lab at the Synergy Learning stand. Now, you may think that any OS development team from Redmond is probably located under the stairs and shares its space with one of those mop buckets on wheels and 50 tins of furniture polish, but I don’t think it’s quite like that. The Microsoft guy was clearly coming out of left-field (he had Moo business cards, not the standard issue MS corporate cards) and was talking about how his (admittedly small) team were looking at optimising things like PHP to run on MS servers (see the performance issues I mentioned above) and the like – stemming from what he saw as the demand from lots of organisations who use MS-based infrastructure to run Moodle simply and efficiently on top of this. MS’s worst nightmare might be that they lost out on the server market due to their systems’ poor performance running tools (like Moodle) that their existing clients wanted to use. The MS guy (if I still had his Moo card I’d namecheck him) was keen on Moodle and Mahara – but mainly keen that they ran on MS servers, which fits in with the model that Microsoft would want to go for large scale licensing rather than the odd school using MS servers here and there (would the larger scale model sit well within BSF, or would a smaller one be better? I'm not sure...).
This all seems like good news if you’re in to Moodle and the like – however, my mind keeps coming back to what a trusted contact told me about what a Microsoft rep said as part of a BSF planning process elsewhere in the UK – that Microsoft wanted to destroy Moodle and its like using SharePoint, that well known, pedagogically founded (don’t start me on that…), not derived from an office-app tool.
In my experience its very easy to find different faces of a large corporation saying completely different things – so I can sit in a room in Reading with some guys from Seattle who say that they embrace Moodle, while someone else hears in a BSF meeting that the Master Plan is to do away with the same. Meanwhile, I’m assured by a senior MS UK person that the presence of the guys from Seattle means that the local rep in the BSF meeting must be wrong – but will anyone tellthe rep, or has he maybe blurted out something he shouldn't have ? I’d see it that the guys from the States have recognised that the thing that they once categorised as a weed – invasive, alien to their plot of land, to be eliminated at all costs – actually brings diversity and colour to their monocultured, industrially farmed plot – whereas the local rep in the BSF meeting is still reading last year’s instructions from his chief gardener, promising that your lawn will be perfectly green and uniform (or probably covered with perfectly graded gravel) with a liberal application from the big green spray can labelled SharePoint.

Uluru on the horizon

Speaking of which, a few indicators on the internet give another angle on what might be Microsoft's genuine view of Moodle - more like an annoying insect to be swatted away. Read that quote at the top of this post again - "I've heard MS wants to kill Moodle with version nn of Sharepoint". Now, if you recall, the local UK response is "Nope" - but then I had an interesting conversation with someone at the recent Open Source Schools conference. "Google Uluru" he said, "it's Microsoft's attempt to kill Moodle". Now, of course if you ~~Google/Bing~~ search for "uluru" you'll find your results dominated by Ayers Rock - Uluru is the Aboriginal name for this. So, a little more digging is required. Doing this finds the following:

a Google Groups posting mentioning Uluru from a Sharepoint provider in Ireland;
an article (translated from the original Russian) which mentions Uluru as being shown to a group of Russian educators visiting Microsoft's HQ in Redmond (Day 5 on the page in question);
a posting in Microsoft's own EduCommunity group which speaks of Uluru as a forthcoming product - interestingly, written by someone who doesn't see a use for Twitter in education.

So, what to surmise? Uluru is (in my mind) a direct like-for-like Moodle replacement which ties tightly into Sharepoint for those who are too scared to run anything which isn't Microsoft badged (Moodle) - or, from MS's point of view, those who might do and might end up exploring other server technologies (e.g. OSS) and dent MS's revenue stream - which would obviate the need for the MS guy with the Moo cards and his team since, as Blackadder would say, "Satan will skate to work" before Sharepoint runs on any OS other than Microsoft's latest one. I would imagine that Uluru would feature Silverlight heavily (or as a "value-added" option - "use Silverlight and you'll get a better experience") as Microsoft needs to increase the use of Silverlight, which currently doesn't register on many users' lists of core tools for a good online experience. Oh, and Uluru is a codename, just like all commercial tools have codenames while they're in beta/alpha, so "part of Sharepoint" or "Sharepoint Learning Environment" will be a better approximation.
So, what exactly is Microsoft's view on Moodle? I guess the answer is "that depends on who you talk to". Maybe the rep at the BSF meeting knows the true story (the "eliminate at all costs" view) and blurted it out, maybe the team from Seattle represent another view (that Moodle is something to be embraced) - certainly the work they've put in seems to suggest it. What do you think? If you've used Uluru and know Moodle, what's your point of view?