E-Learning

I have been using Gliffy for a few weeks. As a free web app it is excellent. The problem comes when you loose your password (no accounting for stupidity) and you loose everything that have done. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that the free account only lets you create 5 public diagrams.

I have not really taken to it because I have a non-free installed app on my mac book pro called Omni Graffle which really does the business when it comes to diagramming and it doesn’t lose my stuff AND it is so much more feature rich than Gliffy that I cannot begin to describe. However it does NOT do collaboration and it is expensive, especially compared to ‘free’.

I have also been experimenting with Google Docs and have set-up an academic group for everyone who has an email address for my school. I have high hopes for this but it does, of course, rely upon the internet connection available. In the very near future I see this and apps like it really replacing the expeinsive HDD based office apps which cost too much and are becoming over burdened with glossy features that distract the user from the real point i.e. creating content and completing work!

I have also used writeboard.com which, if anything, is a clean breath of fresh air c.f. MS Office apps as I just mentioned. It is clean and no-nonsense. Just get on with the writing and don’t worry too much about the 3-d glossy buttons with a shadowy reflection! It is also collaborative which will make it a tool to use in the classroom.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be here just yet as I am skipping around some of the things. I noticed this one as I have already embedded clips from Teacher Tube into the VLE I am creating. I am particularly keen on the ‘common craft’ clips which explain, for example, what a Google Docs is all about.

I am making use of these as ‘free’ training videos on the site homepage to, hopefully, engage users or potential users.

As I don’t just want to use other peoples stuff I have also downloaded Jing from Tech Smith. i have used this to make two small clips so far about using the schools VLE. Embedding clips into an Edublogs page seems to be more hassle than doing the same in a standard webpage.

If this doesn’t work I have to redo it later!!!! Just seen a link for a how-to work-around but will have to check it out later on!

As part of the K12 course I have to make use of wikis in my classroom. I am actually already doing this but the site is a closed password protected site. I will be looking at how I can open the site a little to allow people to what my students and I have been doing recently. At present you will have to take my word for it!

The site is based on the Moodle platform which is great because it integrates loads of useful stuff into one site. However the wiki engine is quite basic compared to the ones I have been looking at

• Westwood schools studyhall
• Welkers Wikinomics
• High School Computer Science

I could get my students to do their wiki work on a public wiki site but the advatages of a tightly integrated platform like Moodle far outweighs the loss of a nice GUI etc. I am hoping that Moodle V2.0 will have a revamped wiki engine. This seems reasonable as it must be one of the major modules that is used by Moodle site contributors.

Anyway, what do I think of the sites mentioned above?

Firstly I scanned through the Economics site. The site looks great and having scanned some of the articles written by students I am impressed. Some of the students have really worked hard to contribute to the site and the articles are, to my untrained eye, well written. Also it appears that EVERYONE is involved with all students having contributed to at least one page. I wander how much students log-in to use this wiki for revision rather than resorting to textbooks etc? That is one of aims of my wiki i.e. to replace textbooks and personal notes in a writing book with a collaborative document as the focus for everyones efforts.

The westwood schools study hall did not inspire me. I found the site hard to navigate in terms of finding student created content. Perhaps it’s really easy once you become familiar with the locations of items. I don’t like the look and feel of the platform. It is not as clean as the wetpaint wiki engine.

Long time no post!

There is a reason, albeit nothing unfamiliar to those people who are trying to make use of the latest on-line tools in the teaching. In a nutshell. there is a limit to the amount of time I wish to spend damaging my vision staring at a computer monitor whilst my wrists succumb to RSI. At the moment I am working on creating a vurtual learning environment for my school which, I hope, will transform the way in which students learn and teachers teach. This is taking up the majority of the time I wish to spend on a computer, I just do not have time to do AND blog about it!

So at the moment I am working on building a virtual learning environment for my school. I’m using Moodle to do this and have managed to move the site from my own personal web site to being hosted on a server in the school. The site is really coming on and there are, at last!, more teachers than just me using it.

What I would like to create is an on-line school where students can learn, collaborate, interact and get support with their work and thereby compliment and support what happens in the classroom.

The site is closed to the public but it can be found here if you would like to see the frontpage. That may seem anti social, to close the site like this, but at the moment this is the way it has to be, perhaps long term there may be content their that is applicable to people from outside the school.

Anyway less time blogging more time working!

Cheers

This is my first ever experience of blogging on a public site like this so keep those comments clean!

As a school we have been working on our e-learning project for about 3 years. That time has seen a huge amount of money spent on infrastructure to support learning in the classroom. Our next move will be to extend the teaching and learning across all subjects out onto the web to enable anywhere and anytime learning. To this end eleven of the schools staff have recently signed up to take part in a collaborative on-line training course to explore the potential for various ‘Web 2.0′ facilities for teaching and learning both inside and outside of the classroom.

As a first attempt I have written a short (possibly rambling!) piece about what I would like to see happening with e-learning in our school. I have used Writeboard to do the typing and editing and upload the text to this blog, here it is!

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