I have enjoyed exploring  the free ‘Show Me’ app on an iPad.  The app allows videos of the screen to be recorded, complete with a recorded soundtrack.  On playback, the user views an animation of all of the sketching and annotating that has taken place.  My example below is a quick demo of showing grid method; I have simply sketched the calculation, but pictures can be imported too. I can’t understate how simple the app is to use!  On completion of recording, the app can be published live to the Show Me site following setting up of an account, and the embed code can then be used in a blog or VLE such as Moodle, or the usual array of social networking sites.

I can see many teachers quickly creating really useful online content using this app – as I will be doing shortly!   The only downside I have come across so far is that drawing and writing on an iPad is pretty tricky; use of a stylus does help though.

Pupil use of the app could include replacing the traditional  ‘show me’ or WOWO boards (wipe on, wipe off) boards, albeit expensively!  Asking pupils to create Show Me videos to exlain would also be a good use.

More information can be seen at the app’s website:

http://www.showmeapp.com/

As such, the priority for the school is to enhance the wider curriculum for pupils via the use of ICT, and to ensure pupils’ ICT skills are sufficiently developed.  My first thoughts are to recommend that the school installs a secure, fast wireless network, allowing pupils to use a wide range of devices across the curriculum.  Following this, teachers could then use class/group sets of netbooks and other electronic devices such as I-Pod touches and I-Pads in lessons both in and out of the classroom.   An essential aspect of the setup would be a strong and reliable wireless setup; having worked in a school with inconsistent wireless networking, I’m aware of the frustrations of ‘no network available’; if teachers lose faith in the system working properly then the hardware will sit unused!

Netbooks are very reasonably priced, and with a range of ‘free’ online software (often Flash based), allow pupils to enrich the curriculum in many, many ways.  However, many schools are exploring using Apple products as an alternative or addition to traditional PCs, and in this post I am musing about whether or not I would recommend Apple to this particular school.  Why use Apple when similar specification products can often be purchased with a lower cost?

Historically, Apple products have been associated with excellent movie editing and rendering, and a real selling point of the latest iPod Touch is the possibility of having an ‘all in one’ movie maker;  the iPod Touch (4th generation) has a built in HD video camera, and with the iMovie app, pupils can potentially film, edit and publish movies using a single device from anywhere within our wireless network.  Having used iMovie on an iPhone 4, I can verify that this is possible (I edited a movie and published to Facebook in a car journey the other week), but a bit fiddly!  Given the choice, I would edit movies on a larger screen.   Of course, an iPad 2 has a larger screen and HD recording, making the job a little bit easier, but an iPod touch can be purchased for under £200!   ‘Traditional’ movie making devices such as the reasonably priced Creative Vado can be purchased more cheaply, but such devices don’t offer Internet access and the wide range of apps available for Apple devices.

Having filtered Internet access available so readily for pupils via small devices in a primary school would be very desirable.  So many of us now quickly use a smartphone to access questions we may have about a topic in our general lives, and for pupils to have something similar would surely aid learning (with the obvious reservations of ensuring information is accurate and from a trustworthy source).  A small device such as an iPod Touch would be unobtrusive (although easily lost) on a pupil’s desk, and could be used in addition to traditional writing tools.  There are, of course, so many good educational websites that could be used in lessons; it is such a shame that Apple refuse to budge on the Flash front, though – as many good education sites use Flash for the content and interactivity.

Garage Band on iPad

On the ‘app’ front, there are an increasing number of apps that are appropriate and useful for primary aged pupils.  Keynote is an excellent equivalent to MS PowerPoint, Pages a word processor (equivalent to MS Word), and Numbers a spreadsheet (equivalent to MS Excel).  The Garage Band app for the iPad 2 is great fun and would be an excellent addition for delivering a music curriculum, and very sensory for primary pupils.

A range of art and photography apps are available, including Artrage for iPad, which many PC users will be familiar with, allowing pupils to completement the art curriculum.  Additionally, an increasing number of primary school aged ‘reading books’ are available as apps; these have the multisensory advantages of music/speech/animation and interactivity, and they are reminiscent of the CD-Rom based talking books that were popular in the late nineties.  I’ve explored several of the ‘Math’ developing apps, some of which have seemed reasonable for ‘drill and practice’ type activities, but many are American and the methods may clash with the Primary Strategy.  Telecommunications apps such as Skype could be used to allow pupils to video conference from the classroom, if the filtering system allows.  Prices for apps range from free to around £6, so can be very good value.

From the previous paragraphs, it may be easy to assume that I’m advocating buying iPods and iPads; however, I have quite a few reservations and questions that I need to have answered before I proceed.  Having had a couple of hours at our local Apple store working with the education expert, I left feeling strangely defensive about PCs and alternative MP3 recorders and video cameras.  I was barraged with lots of quotes, seemingly straight from Steve Jobs, about how ‘everything Apple just works’, how terrible Flash is, and how superior Apple productivity software is to its competitors.  The education expert couldn’t tell me when Safari for iPad/iPhone was going to be updated so that it worked with Moodle properly (WYSIWYG text editor doesn’t work as of writing), and I still don’t quite know how we would set the devices up to work with school’s existing printers (sure we can fix this one easily enough though).   All of the Apple devices are very desirable, which does make me worry how long they would survive in school!  It is also important that we don’t confuse ‘desirability’ with ‘purposeful for education’ too!

So hopefully you can understand my dilemna, especially when you consider that touch screen keyboards, although improving, still aren’t as good as the more tactile traditional keyboards, especially for little fingers, and that an iPad is roughly twice the price of a netbook (which has a keyboard and can run Google Sketchup)!

In this post, I haven’t got as far as considering other tablets (Android/RIM) or  iMacs as a replacement for the current RM PCs; I’ll save this one for my next post!

Any thoughts appreciated….

SLG

I’ve received several email requests describing what we are doing at Buckingham Primary School with SIMs, electronic registration and assessment data, so I thought I’d outline what we’ve done so far (Jan 2011), and what we are going to do next!

At BPS we decided that we wanted to implement electronic registration with a long term view of meeting the requirements of real time reporting to parents and a short time view of reducing the amount of time office staff spent each day re-entering data already collated by teachers.  We also wanted to improve the pupil assessment data recording and tracking system, again with a view to real time reporting, and streamlining our reporting to parents arrangements.  We also wanted to have a system which allowed the SLT to centrally monitor data effectively, and to have a more consistent approach to tracking pupil progress.   We didn’t have to look too far for the implemented solution, as we had been using SIMs for years for recording attendance data; however, we had previously looked at, and discounted, Sims Assessment Manager for pupil progress tracking as it seemed a bit tricky!  Despite our reservations, the LEA announced that they were looking for schools to trial Sims Learning Gateway (SLG)  – web based SIMs – and this was enough to give us a nudge to give SIMs a proper go!

Despite SLG being web based, we were very keen to have each teacher in school have direct access to SIMs to enable speedy registration of children and access to the full range of Assessment Manager’s features.   We had a real battle to get our electronic registration set up, and we’re not very popular with the local admin ICT support team to this day because of what we’ve set up!  Basically, most primary schools have separate ‘admin’ and ‘curriculum’ networks that aren’t linked; this means that the teacher laptops (which in most schools make use of the curriculum network) can’t ‘see’ the SIMs server.  We changed our network settings so that teacher laptops can access the admin network, and, therefore, access SIMs.  The ICT support team had issue with this because of the security risks – potentially teachers or pupils using the teacher laptop could access/delete information stored on SIMs.  We though it worth the risk, and many secondary schools are setup in a similar way to this anyway!

With SIMs now set up in the classroom, we now use SIMs for electronic registration.   This has saved lots of office staff time.  The only issues we’ve experienced are that some teachers turn their back on the class whilst taking registration due to the position of laptops; solution – move the laptop(?!).  The other ongoing issue is what occurs when either SIMs isn’t working (update needed) or there is a fire alarm and the teachers need the register on the playground.  The solution we have for this one is to use laminated lists of pupils in addition to the electronic register; teachers simply indicate absent pupils here too, and take this outside in the event of a fire alarm.

Teachers now also use SIMS Assessment Manager for assessment data; this is with a view to realtime reporting requirements for primary schools by 2012.   This year: teachers are using SIMs for the first time to write report comments; the ‘individual pupil report’ feature of SIMs will then be used to generate reports.  Ultimately, these won’t even be printed – parents will log into SLG to access the reports – but we are not quite there yet!  Our office staff have been trained in running the reports, freeing teachers from the task of having to create and then print word documents for school reports.  We are reporting to parents bi-annually this year too.  Next year: the new class teacher will be able to easily access previous reports and assessment data via SIMs for his or her new class.

We now have SLG set up; this enables teachers to input assessment data via the web; the register can also be taken via the web too, but teachers tend to use this only as a backup.  Potentially: teachers could use SLG full time for electronic registration and for assessment data, negating the need to link the admin and curriculum. Having SLG means that teachers can complete school reports or add/track assessment data from home.   We have had to update our policies to ensure that teachers are very secure with their passwords and that security is a high priority; staff sign an updated internet agreement, promising to only use SLG from trusted locations and networks.  The Assessment Manager element of SLG is minimalistic compared to the full Assessment Manager available from a full installation, and it doesn’t contain features such as the useful tracking grids or charts, but it is still very impressive for a web-based implementation.

Our next step is to issue parental logins to access reports and attendance data.  We are also considering using the SEN functionality of SIMs for our IEPs, and the behaviour module to track rewards.  Parental access is a challenge that involves lots of ‘cleansing’ of data, ensuring that the correct login details are given to the correct parents!

Another next step is to integrate our school’s Moodle VLE with SIMs.   This will enable courses to be quickly set up in Moodle using data exported from SIMs of pupils and their classes.  Our support team is on the case with this, and we are looking forward to trialling this soon!

BPS Website

The two schools in which I am employed, Buckingham Primary School and The Royal Latin School, have both been using Moodle as the main school website for a couple of years now.  Initially, at the Royal Latin School, we were tasked with creating a site that would allow teachers to update it with the latest news and information.  At this point, the school had a separate website and a Moodle based VLE.  After exploring a range of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla and Drupal, we decided to stick with Moodle and attempt to structure it to meet the needs of a website and a VLE.  After all, why have two separate systems, with two sets of logins and two times the administration, when one could do the trick?

RLS Moodle website

The ‘technical’ aspect of setting up Moodle to be the school website was straightforward; simply redirecting traffic heading to our school address to our Moodle.  Following this, the biggest challenges were firstly to create or adapt a theme that not only looked professional, but also included ‘website style’ navigation, and secondly, for Moodle to host the traditional website content, such as the prospectus, side by side with online learning materials.

The first of these challenges was the most difficult.  Creating a theme from scratch was time consuming, and at times very frustrating.  Just when we thought we’d got it right in Firefox, a test in Internet Explorer would prove we hadn’t!  Much patience, and understanding of CSS/HTML and PHP is desirable if you are considering attempting this from scratch!  We originally wrote a theme pretty much from scratch, with the theme based on our existing website.  This did help the transition for the user base from the old to the new sites.  Since then, we have changed themes a couple of time, and we now adapt themes from elsewhere, mostly from New School Learning, available for a very reasonable price!   Another great source of inspiration is the Moodle.org themes database.   Important aspects of the themes have been the navigation; we have explored a wide range of ‘drop down menus’; accessibility has been a concern – we’ve tried Java based navigation, but found it didn’t work on the majority of phones.   We now have a drop down menu from CSS Play installed, which is generally well received.  Changing the navigation involves editing the theme, and a knowledge of scripting webpages is needed.

Installation of the finished theme involves FTP accessing the Moodle website and uploading the theme to the themes directory.  However, even a nicely themed Moodle is unlikely to look as appealing as some of the stunning bespoke websites that many schools employ.  Setting up the theme is not something that the average teacher is going to do (without tears, anyway); it needs somebody with web publishing experience, or somebody who is brave enough to learn.  Support isn’t always readily available for this sort of thing, and much time could be sent in trawling forums for solutions.

Buckingham Primary School soon followed suite in using Moodle as the main website; this was instigated in the main by requests from parents of children at both The Royal Latin School and BPS; they wanted to see the latest news updated on the front page regularly, and Moodle does allow this with its ‘Front page news’ forum.   Another nice feature at BPS is the letters’ page.   A letters’ page is easily updated by the office staff.  This is based on forums with RSS feeds, so parents can subscribe by email very easily with a bit of help from Feedburner.  Both sites also make use of Moodle’s very neat calendar.   The calendar is attractive, and staff/student dates can be separated.  We’re now looking at alternatives that offer a bit more flexibility, but Moodle’s calendar has certainly served both schools quite well.

Our vision of having everyone able to update the website/VLE has been partly met.  It has been good for a number of teachers to share front page news.   At the RLS subject leaders update curriculum overviews regularly too, and at BPS teachers maintain year group pages.   The problem with this approach is that even when using Moodle (or any CMS), users do need a basic understanding of webpages and images.  On a number of occasions, I’ve had to compress 6mb+ images that staff have put on the front page news, not realising the impact of what they’ve done!  The number of staff that are keen to copy and paste from Word is high, and training is needed in alternatives.

Separating Moodle into private and public areas is relatively simple; public areas are mostly based around ‘courses’ with guest access allowed.  We’ve update the themes to mask the course title bit, and to hide the numbering to make the courses look less ‘Moodly’ and more website like.

Image slideshows are very popular on websites, and integrating one into Moodle can be a bit of a trial.  The main problem that I’ve found is that image slideshows tend to work best when of a fixed width; Moodle themes, however, are mostly fluid width.  This means that if you view your Moodle based website on a wide screen monitor, you can end up with a very odd looking site with an image slideshow in a sea of white background!  One way around this is to make the moodle theme fixed width, but this presents a whole host of new issues that can soak up hours in trying to fix.  The RLS and BPS sites are both fixed width, and both have Flash slideshows on the front page.

In Buckinghamshire, almost all schools have a Moodle VLE, and it has been interesting to see some schools where a thriving online VLE community is in place and the main school website has subsequently become relatively moribund.  I do sometimes wonder why such schools still bother with the website.

I suppose at the end of the day, whatever your choice of website/vle combination – the site is only every as good as the content.  If your school needs an incredibly well designed, stunningly attractive ‘showcase’ site to attract lots of new students, perhaps Moodle isn’t the answer.  If, however, you want your site to be a central part of the school community, with contributions from students, teachers, and parents then Moodle could be then answer.

Another factor to consider if you are thinking of using Moodle as a main school website is that Moodle 2.0 is just around the corner, and the current Moodle themes are not compatible.  If you create a new theme now, you’re going to have some work to do very soon when you upgrade in making it Moodle 2.0 compatible.   Even if you’re not going to upgrade, the likelihood is that you are going to want to update the theme at some point, with new navigation links or slightly different images; if you are in a primary school with very little technical support, and you don’t have anyone on the staff who would feel comfortable with making these sort of changes, then perhaps a more straightforward option is what you need.

As ever: your comments and thoughts welcomed!

Blogging and MyZone

Moodle has an interesting, and little used by many institutions, blogging facility.  Although it is very limited in comparison to, for example, WordPress, it does have its uses, and I have seen learners in both primary and secondary schools take good advantage of it.

At Buckingham Primary school, we use the moodle blog as a basic introduction to blogging.  Writing has been a focus for the whole school for the last couple of years, and the initial idea behind using blogging was to inspire reluctant writers, particularly boys, to write more frequently.  Also, in pupil surveys (Moodle surveys, of course!) , pupils had indicated that they would like the opportunity to write about subjects of their choice more frequently, and to have a wider audience for their work.  Moodle’s blog facilitates these requests quite nicely!

Again, at Buckingham Primary School we have a prominent link on our VLE to the ‘My Moodle’ page (yourmoodleURL/my), and we call it ‘My Zone’.   ‘My Zone’ is configured so that Moodle’s blog menu, and blog tags, appear for every user on this page.   Although not quite i-Google, it is still quite a neat ‘home page’ for pupils.

The first steps with primary pupils and blogging is, of course, to consider blog safety.  We have setup a blogging Moodle course and it is the first thing that we introduce to pupils before entering the world of blogging.   I’ve backed up the course and made it available from this post.

Link to Moodle blogging course

Blogging course

What has actually transpired over the last few years with blogging with Moodle at Buckingham Primary School is that a core selection of pupils have regularly blogged about subjects that interest them.  New friendships, often between pupils from different year groups, have been established electronically.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t had the wide scale impact on writing that we hoped, but it has allowed pupils with an interest to explore new ways of communicating.  Use of the blog has also peaked around key points in the school year.  For example: we run a ‘Baftas’ moving making competition every World Book Day, and we encourage pupils to blog about their movie making experiences and thoughts; this is a busy time for the blog!

At The Royal Latin School, older pupils are using the blog in a very different way.   Currently, pupils don’t have access to an online portfolio or an online file storage area.  There is also currently no access for students to their school user area from home.  Students who have forgotten their memory sticks are in a bit of trouble if they want to access their work.    Many students ‘send an email to themselves’, but this has the problem of filling small mailboxes very quickly.  The solution that I encourage many students to use is to ‘blog’ work home.  Adding a blog post and attaching a file is very easy for students; the only thing I have to remind them is to make sure that they set the post so that only they can view it, as opposed to ‘The Whole World’!    This temporary measure works well for many students, and it is also a good backup, and it suffices until we get a proper online portfolio setup.

Art Gallery screen shot

Following requests for support from several primary school teachers, I have put together a simple Moodle course that can be used as an online art gallery.  The course consists of forums for each year group, allowing pupils to post to their hearts’ content!  Each year group also has a slideshow already set up, hopefully making it easy for teachers to add photographs or scans of pupils’ work to the files area and subsequently to the slideshow.

This course is intended as  a ‘whole school’ course, capable of running alongside the school’s art curriculum.   I believe that one of the key motivational reasons for using a VLE/learning platform in primary schools is the audience that the VLE generates.   With this course, pupils get a chance to post their work for other pupils to view.  Establishing the ground rules of forum posting is very important with this kind of course.  We encourage children to be critical friends – posting positive praise.  If a criticism is to be made, it can only be added after two positives!

Three years ago, I put together a very similar course entitled ‘Poetry Page’, simply giving pupils an area to post their poetry.  It is still in active use today, despite not being directly used by teachers.  Many pupils love to share their work, be it poetry, stories, artwork, or music.  Many pupils aren’t confident enough to share but can learn so much from the efforts of other students.

Feel free to download the backup of the course.  Any ideas for improvements – please let me know!

Link to a backup of the Art Gallery course

http://voicethread.com

I’m now currently building a school tour using Voicethread, including inviting students from across the school to comment on videos and photos.  When finished, I will export a ‘finished’ version and have it on the front page of the school site!

Currently, I have subscribed to the ‘Class pack’, giving us one hundred accounts to use at The Royal Latin School.  I have sent an email to all members of the school community, inviting them to take part in adding a voice to the tour.  A small group of students have been wandering around school, filming different areas of interest using Creative Vado digital video cameras.  The clips have been added to our video Voicethread, with a view to all of the people who have applied for an account adding comments.  We also have a photos only based tour for students to comment upon.

Students can add text comments, record comments using a microphone, or they can use a webcam to record live footage.  Whilst recording, users can doodle on the screen, pointing out key features etc.  The response so far from students has been very positive, although most users have elected to post text comments rather than audio or video.

The tours will be used as part of our Year 7 induction process, hopefully giving new students a good idea of what school is like before they have even visited!  We have set up a Moodle induction course for the new year 7s, and Voicethread embeds nicely into a course.  We have had to adjust our filtering settings to get it running in school though.  Another slight problem is that students have been a little bit sloppy on the spelling and capital letters front; as the tour is a showcase for the school, it is important that students check their work, but this is easier said than done, as most are posting from home.

Voicethread can be used for free, although we have elected to subscribe so that we can make sure that our area is fully protected and only our students can post comments.

For the future, I would very much like to share the use of Voicethread across KS1, 2 and 3; it has so much potential for collaborative learning.

At Buckingham Primary School, every child is given the chance to contribute to the school council via forums, polls and questionnaires.  Additionally, the council meets formally to decide the agenda for the online council.  However, the inspection team were concerned about the lack of any formal election of school council members - so much for ‘Every child matters’!  Why couldn’t the team celebrate the fact that every child has a voice?

The inspection at the Royal Latin School was a pilot for the new inspection regime; I anticipated that the team would, therefore, be very keen to find out how the online provision has impacted upon learning.   The lead inspector did come along to our ‘Oscars’ evening and an inspector visited one of my lessons, during which pupils were creating movies using Flash.  Was this celebrated (or even mentioned) in the final report?  Not at all.

At both schools, pupils from across the school use the VLE to supplement and enhance their learning.  Pupils collaborate in forums, teachers prepare online quizzes, and the VLE is used to generate an audience for pupils writing, artwork, movies, music and much more.  The impact on the school community is considerable.  Were Ofsted interested?  Barely.

Personally, I don’t think that schools will invest precious time and increasingly precious money on their online provision until there is a section of the SEF specifically looking at this area.  If this was to happen I am sure that currently reticent schools would have to improve their provision, ending with a more enriched curriculum for all!

Hot Potatoes

I’ve just got back from a training session with a group of teachers who, generally, have been ‘reluctant’  Moodle users.  Despite being enthusiastic about ICT in general, they have taken some convincing that Moodle is worth spending the time on!  However, today I introduced using Hot Potatoes to create quizzes and crosswords and they loved it!  By the end of the session they had all created at least one quiz, some with images and hyperlinks, and uploaded the quiz to Moodle.  This brought real meaning to the gradebook and how it can be used to monitor pupil progress.

Simple, easy to use and quick – surely just what the teachers need?

Making quizzes in Moodle, on the other hand,  can be time consuming and confusing, especially for users who are new to working online.  Alright, the quizzes can be shared across course, but big deal, a Hot Potatoes quiz can have background images!  Hot Potatoes runs offline, with the quizzes being uploaded at a later date.  This is inconvenient in that software needs installing, but it does mean things run quickly and smoothly.  The crossword, cloze procedure and mix features are very useful too, the crossword in particular being popular with students.

In case it isn’t obvious, I currently believe that Hot Potatoes, combined with the excellent Content Generator Scorm compliant penalty shoot out for fun, is the ideal combination for teachers to make online quizzes for Moodle.

I do, however, keep an open mind.  I am keen to see what Moodle 2.0 upgrades are made to the quiz.  I’ve also explored using the Word template for making Moodle quizzes;  I think it’s good. but not as good as HP!

Hot Potatoes is available from:  http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

After working on making movies using a variety of applications for the last 1/2 term, The Royal Latin School last night celebrated in style with its own ‘Oscars’ ceremony.  The event was attended by well over two hundred excited parents and students.    We watched short extracts from films nominated for eight different categories.   The full version of the winning film for each category was then displayed, with students encouraged to make an acceptance speech!  Finally, the parents voted for the best overall movie using ‘Voting System’ handsets (ninety of them!) and the headteacher awarded the winning shield.

All films entered into the competition were posted onto the school’s moodle based website.