Sunday 31 May 2009

On Learning Platforms

I've been involved with the procurement, installation, training and ongoing development of 2 learning platforms now. Several years ago we felt the need to unify our existing systems (intranet, email, shared learning resource folders) and provide 24/7 external access to them (along with "My Documents"). At the time, we were slightly ahead of the curve and we struggled to get a solution that was really tailored to the education market. In the end, we went with MS SharePoint Server 2003, customised by a local firm. This was not without problems (like synchronising Class Server and Active Directory via CSV files!), but served us well until recently, when MS began to withdraw support for the old version of SharePoint and totally phased out Class Server (the "VLE" bit of the solution, which allows teachers to allocate work to students, mark it and give it back).

There is a new version of MS Learning Gateway which includes the free SharePoint Learning Kit to replace Class Server. However, the old issue of the whole thing looking like it was designed for business then rebranded remains. We decided to look around and found that things had moved on significantly in the marketplace. At BETT 2008 we tried out systems from the major manufacturers and decided that although there were many more systems and they were much prettier than our current offering, they didn't add significant functionality (and many reduced it). The only system we were interested in was Frog.

Although I've been less involved in the Frog implementation I'd say the key things we've tried to do differently this time are:

  • transfer files over for teachers, rather than asking them to do it themselves (the downside to this is that junk isn't cleared out)
  • involve the tech support team and admin staff (who will need to update content) much more from the beginning - with SharePoint we had a teacher who set the whole thing up and maintained it and when he left we were in trouble: I think this "sustainability" issue is the big one for many small or medium sized organisations and it ties into my comments on other systems we use or have created.

I'm still not convinced about the concept of Learning Platforms: I think 24/7 access to email, My Documents and learning resources is excellent (and the hit stats bear me out), and as a school we could make more of some of features like surveys and forums. I also think that the line between website and Learning Platform is blurring and we need to be smart about this process ensure there are simple ways for staff to update content so parents and students always have up to date information. However, it's the VLE bit I worry about. I really can't see the day (yet) when all work is set, completed and marked electronically. There are many obstacles to such a situation: individual access to computers all day at school, training, link to the school MIS, workload... let alone tasks which are just better done "by hand" (like making a papier maché volcano!).

Frog are working on a number of new projects, one of which is the Parental Engagement Portal. This looks interesting in the context of Online Reporting. 14-19 collaboration is another of their projects, and this is certainly an area which could benefit from joined up solutions to sharing data. I suspect that whatever is developed now will be OK, but stymied until SIF (Schools' Interoperability Framework) is properly in place across the UK. This standard should allow different systems in different schools to share data properly at last. We'll see!

I'm interested to hear how others are getting on with Learning Platforms, especially the VLE element.

Friday 29 May 2009

Ipod Touch

I love my Ipod Touch and today went looking for a free blogging app. This post is therefore being written with Lifecast! It was dead easy to configure with Blogger an option from the start-all I had to do was enter the username and password. So, it's free, easy to use and gets the job done: I recommend it.

I'll write a proper post at some stage about the Ipod touch - it really is a brilliant device and OS3 looks likely to bring some killer features like Copy and Paste and bluetooth: the latter would enable an external keyboard which would really remove the need for me to even consider a netbook.

I can see us looking at the Touch (or even Iphones) at school for SLT. We already all use Outlook for email and calendars (but don't share our calendars properly) and Itunes is happy to sync with Outlook; we also have mobile phones so we can ring each other in emergencies. As we've got wifi I could see us using something like the touch to access web apps like the school review / lesson observation system I wrote (which I'll share with you in a future post). This would be much more unobtrusive than a laptop but would save people typing in their written notes later.

Do you have an Iphone or Ipod Touch in use in school? I'd love to hear if others are using these devices already...

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Fun tech projects for our festival

We have a 2 week festival at school every year to celebrate our specialist status in technology (and the arts). I'm hoping to put a couple of "DIY" projects together for this year's festival and I think they'd be good fun for any school to try:

Build your own roller coaster ride
There was an item on The Gadget Show on Five this week where Suzi Perry and Ortis Deeley put together a simulated roller coaster in her front room (see the end of this video). The website is supposed to have details of how to do it yourself, but I can't find it. Hopefully I can manage without by downloading the software (No Limits Roller Coaster Simulator) and "hardware" (an old car seat welded to a metal plate with springs and handlebars - seemed to work better than it sounds!). Time to ask the DT department to get the welding gear out!

Try 3D gaming
Nvidia have released a consumer product (see PC Pro article) to enable 3D gaming on a home PC with a normal (if high end) graphics card. It uses an updated driver to read the Z-level data about the depth of objects in modern games, in conjunction with a pair of special glasses to produce a - reportedly fantastic - 3D experience. There are downsides: some people report that the system induces headaches, though the effect can be reduced by tweaking settings, and you do need a fancy monitor with a 120hz refresh rate: these currently cost over £200 in themselves. Despite these drawbacks, I'm hoping to convince a retailer to lend us the kit to show the kids what's possible. My local PC World couldn't help, which I think is a missed opportunity, but I won't give up!

A home-made 3D printer
I'm very lucky to have a very keen 6th form student, Nick, who wanted to build a Reprap machine. I'd read about it in PCW magazine but knew I didn't have the skills to be able to construct it. Follow the links for more detail, but basically it's a machine you can put together for a couple of hundred pounds which extrudes plastic to form 3D objects (like those shoes on the right). OK, it's not a commercial 3D printer, but it's great for prototyping and it doesn't cost£10k... In fact, it can make most of the parts necessary to clone itself! It's an ongoing project at Bath University and they are looking at developing new "print heads" for it to enable it to build other things, like circuit boards.

If anyone has any other fun (and relatively cheap!) projects to suggest I'd love to hear about them.

Sunday 24 May 2009

Assessing Pupils' Progress

We're currently getting to grips with the pilot materials for APP (Assessing Pupils' Progress) in maths, English, science and ICT. For readers who don't know anything about this I'll give a bit of context; everyone else can skip this bit. With the end of SATS tests at KS3, the DCSF is keen to ensure teachers' end of key stage level judgements are secure; APP is supposed to provide a criteria-based framework which helps teachers to look at the entirety of a pupil's work in one subject over a key stage and make a judgement. It can be used to track progress as pupils move through the key stage and to suggest next steps (in the best traditions of Assessment for Learning). For the full description, click here.

Most of the teachers at our school don't have an issue with the principles of APP (now that the prescriptive maths units aren't seen as compulsory) but we all recognise the difficulty in managing the assessment process. It's not too bad in ICT, with only 3 "AF"s or "Assessment Focuses"; in maths there are 6 and in English there are currently 8 (before you add in speaking, listening or handwriting). Within each AF there are criteria at each National Curriculum level.

The theory seems to be that each child will have a large piece of paper (or 3, in English!) and the teacher will highlight or tick off criteria as work is done and milestone assessments take place. The problems seem to me to be:

  1. How do you "back up" this data? (It has to last 3 years).
  2. How do you share the data with the student, parents or colleagues?
  3. How do you manage the process of assessing work so that only those AFs which are relevant are shown (thereby making life easier for the teacher)?
  4. How do you get an overview of the performance of a class (or multiple classes) in order to plan intervention activities?

I know I can't help but look for ICT solutions where they aren't always necessary, but this seems to me to be a classic situation that calls for a database. Unfortunately, once again the MIS manufacturers look to be behind the curve on this, with our own Serco offering not integration for criterion-based assessment at KS3, but a separate product called Alfie, which appears to create online tests for students to gauge their level. This isn't bad in itself, but it seems to be missing the point of APP...

As we move towards Online Reporting (which must be in place by September 2010 for all secondary schools), surely we need to be making APP information available to parents? The solution for now at our school is likely to be paper-based, though I'm working with the maths team to develop a web database solution (and, predictably, the ICT team are already using a custom database). The aim will be to allow data to be entered for a single assessment, but for it to be reported either as an overview of a child's achievement or that of a group of students. Naturally, as a web application it will be multi-user and easy to back up. If you're interested or you'd like to help, get in touch! The sticking point is sure to be integration with Facility, so let's hope Capita, Serco et al pick up on where this is going and develop something themselves.

Saturday 23 May 2009

MRBS - Meeting Room Booking System

I spent a few minutes this afternoon helping a fellow Edugeeker sort out some issues with MRBS. I first came across MRBS a couple of years ago when we were looking for a system to manage room bookings across our school site. It's a free, open source system written in PHP which is pretty easy to set up and customise.

The particular problem we faced (as would most UK high schools) was getting a two week timetable with holidays in the middle into a calendar application. I did a lot of work on this and came up with a process using MS Access which could be done at the start of each year or after a major set of changes to the master school timetable. This was fine, but I wasn't very happy about foisting something I'd knocked together with sellotape and bits of string onto our data manager, or about guaranteeing its reliability in what would be a critical system for the school. (If you want to see what I did, leave a comment - I'm happy to share). Off the back of that I played at creating a web app to convert a teacher's timetable into Outlook format. I nearly succeeded - you're welcome to try TimetableConverter, but as I write this it's not fully functional and won't be until I spend some more time on it (this summer?).

There were two other issues which prevented us from choosing this excellent piece of software, and in my experience they come up pretty regularly in the education sector and are applicable in many situations:

  1. It would require staff to use yet another system, with all the username/password shenanigans and extra training that entails.
  2. We couldn't find a company with the relevant expertise to support it at a reasonable cost.

We ended up using an extra module for Facility CMIS (sold by Serco) which does the job OK, but it's not something teaching staff can use easily. MRBS was far superior in terms of the interface, but it was just too much of a risk due to the lack of support out there.

I think there may well be a market for a company with the skills to set up, customise and support MRBS (and get the LDAP element working so active directory takes care of the authentication). As schools open up more and more of their sites through the Extended Schools initiative, this is only going to become more necessary, and the public who are looking to make bookings are going to start to expect to at least see what's available online before they call.