Changing the game?

Links for 2009-11-09 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-10T00:00:00-08:00

Why aren't students pushing paperless? | Education IT | ZDNet.com
er, because of the institutions and the assessment models. That's why. IMO.

Links for 2009-11-06 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave

Links for 2009-11-04 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

British Educational Research Association - Winners Of BERA/SAGE Practitioner Research Awards 2009 Announced
A report on our project which won this year's school-based BERA award.

Links for 2009-11-03 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-04T00:00:00-08:00

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"

Links for 2009-11-02 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-03T00:00:00-08:00

Google's New Assessment Tool | Teaching Matters

Links for 2009-10-30 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-31T00:00:00-07:00

92-year-old's website leaves oil giant Shell-shocked | Media | The Guardian

Whole School Moodle Inset - An Unusually Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious Day

2009-10-23T18:33:00.001Z

Great Missenden, where Roald Dahl lived and where the inspiration for the released-this-week Fantastic Mr Fox was formed, has one secondary school - The Misbourne. In January this year my colleague Geoff and I did our four sessions at the school in liason with Lisa, one of the Associate Headteachers (a level of senior management I'd not encountered before). Rather than the often seemingly random

Links for 2009-10-22 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

Flickr Adds People Tagging With Opt-Out Controls

Five ways to use your VLE / LP to support homework

2009-06-22T13:56:00.007Z

The Dog Ate My Homework 1 by iirraa used under a Creative Commons License.Today I randomly received a phone call from someone who'd been recommended to speak to me about using a VLE Learning Platform (must get the terminology correct) to support homework. Well, it might not make you the most popular teacher, but if used well it can support colleagues and students with managing, tracking and even

Create a free e-newsletter service for parents using a Moodle forum & Feedburner

2009-06-18T13:54:00.015Z

Communicating with parentsEmail Subscribe by derickkwa - used under Creative Commons license.In Buckinghamshire we don't currently encourage schools to give out parent usernames for their VLEs, so having a "log in to the parents area" section is difficult, other than doing it anonymously via a Moodle course with an enrolment key set and Guest access allowed for those who have the key. The

Using Web 2.0 within Moodle

2009-06-18T10:15:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to a meeting at Great Marlow School in, er, Marlow concerning the Wycombe A-Level consortium. While this was a fruitful meeting, what was equally interesting was the chance to meet afterwards with one of the Assistant Headteachers of the school and Haydn Jones, who's been leading on the development of the school's Moodle as both VLE and the main school web site.The decision to

Does Ofsted really understand VLEs?

2009-05-28T17:37:00.004Z

Belated reflections on the Ofsted VLE ReportFolly in the evening by Adrian Midgley - used under Creative Commons license.About a month ago I spent an evening trying to get into the FlashMeeting of EdTechRoundup - but for some reason it wouldn't let me in, which was a little bit galling - however it did prompt me to bash out a brief blog post on the Ofsted report Virtual learning environments: an

Schools get treated with scorm by content providers

2009-02-26T09:55:00.009Z

Changes are afoot in the world of online content. What used to be gravy trained ELC-funded sets of resources sold in the guise of DVDs, CDs, access to web sites etc., are rapidly moving towards resources which purport to fit in to the much funded, much discussed Learning Platforms framework. Any schools or Local Authority advisers might already have got wind of this from the latest mailings and

Reflections on BETT 2 of 2: Don't sell, sell... camel!

2009-01-19T16:38:00.008Z

During the week of BETT it felt like something was looming over me.I had presentations to do on the Adobe stand which could be subject to the usual show problems of lost internet connection, there was the usual challenges which face any BETT visitor or exhibitor - finding satisfying food for less than a tenner for each meal, finding somewhere to sit (other than the floor), and finding a food

Reflections on BETT 1 of 2: Sell, sell, sell...

2009-01-19T11:14:00.010Z

Today I received an email which contained the wordsGetting on with the day job, a bit of a shock after last week...Clearly, the author had been to BETT - which describes itself as the world's largest educational technology event. Just as with any event which has the phrase world's largest attached to it there's bound to be a certain sense of detachment from what's "really" going on - whether it

Review of Becta's DVD "Learning Platforms in Action"

2008-10-23T15:08:00.000Z

What seems like an age ago I was contacted by Becta to ask if I could recommend some schools who had progressed well with their Virtual Learning Environments Learning Platforms (I'll explain the amendment in a moment). There were many candidates to choose from, but some of the most interesting work was being done at Buckingham Primary School and Chalfonts Community College. Becta said that they

BBC fails to choose between RSS & elbow

2008-10-22T09:53:00.000Z

Sometimes, the BBC provides an object lesson in the art of being open. The new Common Platform blog by Steve Bowbrick on open content, open culture and sharing at the Beeb is the sort of thing to get people like Theo Kuchel excited and revved up about the wealth of content which sits somewhere in West London and the potential for opening it up. At other times, there's a (hopefully unintentional)

A short conference, some inspired teachers

2008-10-05T15:16:00.000Z

Last Wednesday was the Celebrating / Sharing Success E-Learning Conference. For me it was a day bookended by a meeting with a Headteacher in a primary school, and a brief after-school INSET session in a secondary school. In between, 60 or so people met at the Teaching & Learning Centre in Aylesbury for a couple of hours to hear about 16 of their number share what they had been doing with all

Conference on Celebrating / Sharing Success in E-Learning

2008-09-30T14:53:00.005Z

Tomorrow (1st October 2008) is our E-Learning conference - a slightly smaller scale than other conferences. It will last for about two and a half hours and follow a morning of presentations for our Just a Minute digital video competitions - consisting of videos of less than a minute entered from schools.The presentations will be about what schools are doing with E-Learning - some of them major,

Open source finally approved for UK schools

2008-09-23T10:35:00.006Z

According to a post on the PC Pro News pages 12 "open-source companies" (I think it's the software they support that's open source, rather than the companies themselves, but hey) have made the list for the Software for Educational Institutions Framework, which means that they can supply schools with Open Source software without the schools having to feel like they'd bought it from a bloke down

A free flexible Moodle theme

2008-09-16T11:54:00.014Z

Running a host of VLEs is fun - sometimes. One of the most difficult things to do is ensure that things are centralised (to some degree) so that changes we implement at the centre happen with little or no fuss on the Moodles which are across the County. This creates a natural tension with schools who want to do their own thing within the framework in which we're all working.The way a VLE looks

Parental usernames - why we don't (currently) do them & why the Government needs to put more thought in...

2008-07-10T16:07:00.005Z

If you're involved in educational technology in the UK you'll probably be aware of "targets" for all sorts of things - but the thing that's made most schools wake up recently is the issue of Real Time Reporting. Put simply(ish) this is the target that any parent should be able to access their child's progress reports online - at any time. This is a target for secondaries for 2010, while

Final reflections on the Bucks E-Anthology project

2008-07-06T22:25:00.007Z

Well, the Buckinghamshire E-Anthology project is finally over (more or less) - I dashed from a school in the south of the County last week to the Civic Centre in Aylesbury where the Year 10 poets had a final celebration meeting with friends, family and teachers at the publication of the E-Anthology. The local paper turned up, but neglected to bring a photographer, so it was a little odd! It was

Have I been Moodling under a rock recently?

2008-07-04T15:29:00.000Z

Well, it felt like that when I realised (through reading Doug Dickinson's blog in Google Reader) that this blog has been nominated alongside seven other diverse blogs (including Ewan M's) in the Public Sector category of the Computer Weekly Blog Awards 08. Which was nice. Anyway, should you wish you can vote for this blog over at Computer Weekly - but I'm obliged to suggest that you read all of

Fancy a free Moodle site?

2008-06-19T16:18:00.001Z

So, you're at a school where the Local Authority / Regional Broadband Consortium hasn't made its mind up yet about a Learning Platform (or hasn't even reached the "shall we have a VLE?" stage yet), or if it has has chosen something you don't like (though if it's Talmos be careful that you don't say so in public or who knows what might happen). You'd like to give an alternative like Moodle a go,

E-Pedagogy Final Presentations

2008-05-22T17:50:00.001Z

It's the final day of our Masters-level course on E-Pedagogy. We're at the Chalfonts Community College with about ten people who are each about to do a presentation on the projects ("interventions") they've been doing in their schools for this course.Chris Higgins starts off by outlining how this fits into an MA - the CAEP (this element) counts as 3 units, and could be followed by Education

Pupils aren't stupid / don't build us a creepy tree house

2008-05-14T09:01:00.002Z

Image credit: Steampunk Treehouse by AlmostJaded. Found using CompFight.A post from Martin Weller at the OU (now in my Google Reader Shared Items list) co-incided with many thoughts I'd been having about online learning environments and how they're spun to students / pupils, some of which was due to an Education Guardian article I'll mention shortly. Much of the discussion is based around

Characteristics of an ePortfolio exhibited by Flickr

2008-05-09T10:00:00.001Z

[Warning: long post, lots of links, your mileage may vary...]As with many posts I scribble on here, this is by no means a complete piece, but more of a starting point or junction for my musings on the subject at hand. So please be patient...One of the biggest beefs I have with the imposition idea of ePortfolios is that, in the main, the education community is being instructed what to do in this

On the 'Access to work, any time, any place' ePortfolio piece

2008-05-07T20:06:00.002Z

Stable Door by DavidT2006 A couple of weeks ago I answered a few questions for a forthcoming piece in the Guardian on ePortfolios. Here in Bucks we haven't committed to an ePortfolio yet, for a whole number of reasons (chief of these being a lack of clarity and guidance on what 'counts' as an ePortfolio). I was reminded of this vagueness on starting to read the article in the printed paper and

Stone UMPC review

2008-04-25T12:11:00.007Z

It was just before the "Easter" break and being signed off from work for a couple of weeks I got to use another of the sub-notebooks doing the rounds. The Stone UMPC (I think UM = Ultra Mobile) is a rebranded Belinea s.book 1 and runs Windows XP Tablet Edition, has 1GB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive (unlike the Elonex ONE or Asus EeePC). As it's running XP Tablet it has a small stylus hidden in the

Poetry with Motion in Moodle

2008-04-23T21:55:00.003Z

Apologies for the most obvious title for a blog posting (don't worry, you'll see why...).Today I've been at one of our secondary schools for an introductory session to what might be known as the Bucks Poetry E-Anthology. It's the project of one of my colleagues who's undertaking our M-Level course on E-Pedagogy (which had its fourth face-to-face day yesterday).The project works with twenty