New build 1.9

There is a new reasonably stable release of moodle out called 1.9. I want to test run it on the Los Alamos site. I'll back everything up first.

Any objections?

Oh bugger - Themes issue

I have just installed the 'Funky' theme on Los Alamos and the damn thing disables all buttons, so I can't change it back!

Looking around the site, it appears that no courses were harmed and I will sort this out soon. sorry about the tacky theme guys, normal service will be resumed shortly...

Oh. My. God. I've solved it! It's REAL!

I just mentioned in passing this morning to a friend that I had been up late last night trying to work out how to download videos and she said that she had worked it out last night herself, totally independently.

Get this.

It's THIS easy....

Download the latest version of Realplayer, install it, and go to youtube.

In youtube, once you've found a video that you want to see like this one



or this one



just hover over the video and realplayer gives you the option to download the video!!!!!!!!!

and just for effect....

!!!!!!!!!

and you know what's even cooler?

You don't even have to go to youtube, it works on the embedded videos like erm... this one



Try it!

It's only 10:30 on saturday morning and I already feel like I've solved a small amount of the worlds problems.

Video Library issues - legal and technical issues

The first concern is legal, but I have covered this by mentioning that the site is only going to be for teachers to access the videos, and perhaps to make them available to the pupils to download for learning. I believe that this shouldn't cause too much trouble.

Technically I have already encountered the first issue with the use of a video library. The maximum upload is set by default at 8mb and the server I currently have is not going to be big enough if we start to upload a lot of videos. For a real video library to work I will need to splash a bit more cash out and go for the package one or two steps up from the one I have.

I can change the maximum upload size and retain the maximum upload size for pupils as is, so that isn't a problem. I will change the maximum upload size on Los Alamos now to try and accomodate the extra space needed for video and we'll see if this works.

NOTE TO SELF FOR LATER: Ensure that the setting for the main site is changed to accomodate files larger than the present 8mb limit.

Well bite me - I've nearly worked out how to get around our youtube issue!

I've been poking around on the net for a way to circumvent our 1985 mytube system. A simple search done by typing in "Youtube Downloader" into The Answer Machine turned up this little beauty

http://vixy.net/

Yes it DOES deserve it's own line. In theory, this little baby does exactly what we've been after all year. It takes a youtube video and converts it into a MP4 for playback on Windows Media Player and I-pods!!!!! I have had trouble with the AVI converter, and MP4 doesn't play as standard on windows media player I think, so we'll have to check it out on the school computers before we can safely say that we have kicked the arse of this particular beast, so there are still some gaps that need to be filled before we can go into a class and not f*ck around waiting for 40 minutes for that precious 50 second video in class while the class sits laughing at your apparent IT incompetence.

I've been trying it out with this tasty guitar solo piece by the little Korean Funtwo and now my ears ache after having converted this to MP4, MP3 and various other formats and blasting my brains out with guitar madness!!!

Enjoy...

A KS3 Scheme of Work in development

Following the appointment of our new KS3 Coordinator, I have been thinking about how to use moodle to facilitate the planning and coordination of KS3.

So far, I have created the Years 7 and 8 courses as they are and have uploaded all teh files onto the courses, so if you look in the back of the courses, all the files are ready to go and be imported to wherever the new scheme says they should.

I have in mind an entirely electronic version of the scheme of work, which has all the lessons planned and ready to go, purely as a teacher reference guide.

The planned outlay will be a Main electronic scheme of work in the topic zero which hyperlinks to every lesson in the unit, through which the teacher can open any lesson and any worksheet required, with alternate routes for differentiation etc.

I will be creating an example of one course scheme for you to see soon. Watch that space

The library

Rafa, you mentioned that the library would be interested in any potential VLE applications.

Any ideas on this? I am thinking the database module here, but I still don't know what it does

Video Archive as an external library

My vision is that the video archive is actually external to the science site and that all teachers have access to it, as some videos may well be of benefit to a large number of subjects. I hope that this will then easily make the system accessible to external departments (and in turn we can nick some of theirs...)

Obviously there will be some copyright issues, but this is an entirely closed system and no-one else can access this without password.

We need to find out how to get this youtube downloader too

A video archive

It struck me today on the way home that we have a massive issue with the videos in the department and I thought that, on top of giving myself the whole of KS3 Quizstar to do I might as well set up another major digitisation project/computing shiftover.

The issue is this: At present the science department has a bunch of videos on VHS (Yes it IS 1985) and we have this really quaint cabinet that gets wheeled around. The kids laugh their heads off when we get this thing out and some of us get a nice retro feeling (embarrassment actually) in our stomachs.

The solution? Well erm...we have these bloody huge white boards in the front of every classroom. You might have seen them. Apparently they replaced blackboards some time in the future. And APPARENTLY they are interactive! *Gasp* It's like the mythical "Answer Machine" that was predicted on paleo-future!



Now call me naive but I see a glaring solution here. Rather than having to wheel around this big fuck-off TV and VHS thing, I think it's time we did away with the whole thing, digitised the lot and put it on...yes you guessed it... moodle!

The benefits are obvious. No more lost/knackered out tapes, everyone can use the resource at once and download the video directly to the local computer before the lesson, the pupils can watch the video at home, etc etc, I don't even need to go on.

So erm.. onto the "how" bit. Well I'm happy to do it on one condition.

The school coughs up the money for the kit and I get to take it home and run it.

There, I've said it. Finally some money should change hands for a change.

If this is done that is a HUGE benefit for the school and a MASSIVE investment in the future. Will they stump up? Let's see...

Marking and the gradebook

In order to facilitate a useful and meaningful markbook on moodle I have found that I have had to change my marking tactic from an A-E grade to a 1-10 grade. This means that the marks fall more in line with the final test marks. The reason I say this is because the default marking numbers are out of 100 and if this is put into the markbook the pupils will have an unnaturally skewed mark, leaning very heavily towards classwork at the end of a unit. If perhaps we had 8 exercises of 10 marks then the end unit test of 30 marks then at least the pupils have a fair chance all roundánd the markbook doesn't look all funny if ya know what I mean

Major trouble with year 10 to year 10 cross course importing

Any ideas on how to resolve import issues from one live year 10 course to another would be greatly appreciated.

It's getting as far as zipping the file for export then stopping, Is starting to annoy me a bit now.

Marking workload and choice

It's 22:43 and I am STILL marking stuff, both on moodle and in books and I've realised a big issue here that, in my opinion will determine the success of a VLE.

I was talking to Brian earlier and he said that when a job is set on moodle, pupils need to be given CHOICE of whether to submit the job on moodle or in a book. I agreeed with him, but tonight after marking some moodle, some books, it seems that the moodle benefits are effectively negated by such a large number of book submissions. I find myself having to flip between the two to try and figure out who has submitted where and all the benefits of quick marking evaporate. In fact the whole thing has been bloody confusing and it's only because I am very aware of the system that I am putting up with it.

My conclusion from tonights all night marking bender is this

If we are to move onto a moodle work submission system, I think it must be made explicit that the pupils are to submit on moodle or die. I think that the pupils should be allowed writing up time and submission time in class and if they genuinely have no computer at home then some provision MUST be made by the school in the form of a computer suite for use at lunch times and break times that the pupils can access.

As long as this school continues to provide substandard computing facilities I wonder if a VLE is viable. I think that the fact that all the kids SHOULD have computers at home really makes online submission in principle at least, a doddle, but so far it hasn't done the job it was intended to do, which is to cut my marking load significantly.

Import problems

It's Sunday night and I'm trying to import files for the new 10D course I've created from the 10X course and it's getting as far as backing up the 10X files but dying thereafter. Have looked into privileges and nothing seems to be working

AAAAARGH!

Template change in the new year

In January I think I will change the main live site template to use the "autumn" template that the los alamos site uses cos it looks nice. Also it allows anyone, like Brian, who is currently using the Los Alamos site for development to easily create resources to introduce their pupils to the site in the new year as it looks the same.

Any objections?

One for the chemistry types

Here's a list of pretty much every question ever written in multi-choice for chemsistry types. I'm going to start putting some into a hot potatoes format.

Any suggestions on multi-choice banks of physics questions much appreciated

Wimba Word development tool

Here's that wimba thing I was talking about earlier Rafa. The guy at the conference swoer by it and I could see why, it seemed to generate content bloody fast!

Alternative Open Source VLEs

I was originally going to call this post "How to save money AND not get the IT department to cock up our learning environment" but I thought that would be a bit harsh.

In trying to avoid what I see as the inevitable balls-up that is the IT department sticking their nose in and getting a crap VLE, I have started to look through the alternatives myself and stumbled across this white paper from the EPIC blended learning people on the top five Open Source VLEs.

That should make happy bedtime reading and hopefully will help me to sleep peacefully through the nightmares of IT-department takeover that I am having far too often these days.

Filters enabled on both sites

I have enabled algebra filter and glossary linking filter as well as TeX notation filter on science heaven moodle to enable writing maths equations and have also enabled swf filter.

Parental access to VLE and MIS

After the ECIS conference on Friday I came away with a couple of insights.

Firstly we do not have a Management Information System (MIS) that is in any way helping us as teachers in the school. I have previously used one called ePortal. provided by a company called SERCO and it was excellent and I will be trying to twist some arms in management to get this installed. Me and Rafa have already discussed on moodle my hopes and fears on this one.

At the moment I am looking into using something called FREEMIS, which is presently used in one or two schools in the UK. BECTA has recently discussed the importance of a decent MIS in schools and it is vital we get this right first time. My money is on the SERCO product actually.

However, their VLE is crap.

Anyway, after looking at some VLEs on the market and also at some MIS's I realised that we were missing one thing.

We were missing the parental link, which both SERCO and a VLE called studywiz provide.

I wonder if there is any way to include parents into this loop and if so, I think that a presentation to interested parents would serve much better than a letter home, or both should be considered in series. I would be happy to present, and I presume that you Rafa would be translating/presenting.

How do you feel on this issue Rafa?

Resubmission of work

One thing came up from todays e-lesson. When a pupil submits work and it's graded it is impossible for them to resubmit a piece of work for regrading, so the benefits of getting it in early are lost.

I looked this up on moodles help site and it seems that this is not an unknown issue. I will be looking to install a fix on los alamos soon.

Well that was certainly unexpected

I was off with a cold today from being too damn stubborn to use an umbrella.

Turns out that I didn't actually miss school all that much though. I had my year 10 chemistry class and my year 11 physics class booked into IT and took the lesson from my bed! Kept an eye on who was logged on and asked some of the pupils via the chat function to see to it that the ones not logged on were getting busy.

I then say back and watched as work came in, being on hand from my sickbed to assist when trouble came up, log-on issues (only 2 surprisingly) and questions on tasks.

Turns out a valuable lesson was learnt today. The lesson was well planned and structured so I didn't have that much to do. The pupils got on with the task from what I can tell and the results came rolling in.

If anything, an e-lesson must be as welll planned if not more so than a real face to face lesson. And when it is, there is still a small amount of supervision to be done.

A good learning experience for all.

I'm going back to bed now.

Gradebook query

Over lunch with Rafa today he mentioned that there is no way to view all results from all subjects, for example if the form tutor is interested and I agreed, but I am sure that there is some gradebook modules on moodle plug-ins.

I am installing "All my Grades - Gradebook hack"

Also I have put Certificate module on there too. Knock yourself out with that thing!

Quizstar year 7 rollout

I think that moodle is a little too complicated for year 7 to get started on but have been using quizstar with my year 7 IT classes to give them online assessment experience and also to break up the monotony of IT lessons.

It's worked a treat with the 2 classes I teach and I am beginning roll-out across all 6 year 7 classes as of next week.

This week I need to create classes and populate them in quizstar so that all pupils are ready to log on next week, where the quizzes will be instantly accessible.

I'll be in the lesson where I'll be introducing the system to the pupils and thereafter I will be writing the quizzes and assigning them for all of year 7.

On top of this, the year 7s will also have access to science quizzes in preparation for official testing. Teachers of these IT/science classes just have to ask and I will assign tests already made.

External and internal server issue

I was chatting with Aiden today and he mentioned that, with the amount of sensitive information on moodle, it would be prudent to check the situation with regards to what the legal situation is on this. In theory, if I could trust the school IT to get things working, I would obviously set up the databases there, but as it stands I can't and so I have had to use an external system.

I have been advised to talk to DF about the situation and find out where the school stands on this.

Not that it will make me change this system at all, but it's just good to know where we stand.

Biology starting to be created

Have added Brian as a course creator with his own area in Los Alamos where he can proceed to wreak havoc in a biology-stylee.

Certificate activity module installed on losalamos

Just testing this out.

Also am having some trouble with the lightbox module. It seems to work fine on the test course but not on the main course. Any help appreciated.

50th post already! Moodle local install

Just curious - Even though we've got our own web space to play with have you been tempted to play with the local install of moodle on an Apache server yet Rafa? And if not why not!?

moodle use as a school-wide information tool

Just read this on TES and it gave me some ideas about the use of moodle as a way to go beyond purely teaching.

I liked the idea of making the moodle into a full environment for learning as the name suggests and getting people to contribute photos and polls to do with general school life on there.

Maybe on the next school election or something, or the next school trip it would be a nice idea to take pics and put them up.

I may have to look at gallery modules on the moodle site to be able to best present this.

Category visibility

mmmm Just discovered category visibility! Lush! Teachers area is now hidden from view completely. Much better!

Glitchey import

Just writing my first course for year 10 for the next unit (well actually as a revision of this unit and practice for me and have found that the library import creates a few ghost modules which need to be deleted. Even though the library does save a lot of time it does need to be double checked after import to ensure that the right stuff has been copied over. Also there's an issue that, unless you know your materials there's no way of knowing (except by feel) which resource will appear in each chapter. It's not a major glitch, just ensure you double check all resources when imported.

Backup

Just done a backup and restore from Losalamos to moodle.Scienceheaven.

Doddle.

As if physics alone wasn't enough...

Have started to develop EFL resources on losalamos to test out mp3s and importing to the main site.

Also have uploaded all the chemistry stuff for the present year 10 unit and Rafa has done a course on technology in Spanish for year 12.

Hot Potatoes as an introduction to e-learning assessment

Thinking about further expansion into the department I am going to suggest to the biologists, and also Nick that they download the Hot Potatoes application and make some quizzes using that.

This way they can get used to making some quizzes for electronic use and they will be able to add them as soon as we allow them to go live so it's not wasted time. I think that Hot Potatoes provides the perfect intermediary between fully online and offline quiz making.

In the meantime I will upload some resources into a biology bank for the next units for them to use when they do come online.

I say this because there has been a bit of interest coming in from biology about the VLE and I would love to feed on the enthusiasm while it's still there. I think we'll be about ready to let them loose on it after we've done this first unit, so perhaps in December?

Training moodle explicitly

One recent issue that has arisen is that some pupils are finding the moodle interface more difficult to use than anticipated. Rafa has suggested that perhaps we need to spend a few lessons actually explicitly explaining the use of moodle before we move into the topic.

We are lucky in that the science department has this year adopted the teaching of IT as well, so we are in the computer room anyway once a week with some of our classes and I would probably make use of some of these lessons to teach the use of moodle as an IT skill.

On top of this I am currently looking for some ready made tutorials on the use of moodle for secondary level students. I may have to make them myself.

I think that the opening page course page will be a decent place to put these so they are accesible immediately

Oops

OK I've figured out why only 2 courses were displayed. I was logged in as a student and the third course was invisible.

Feel free to give me a slap next time you see me.

Strange glitch when 3 courses are put into a category

Rafa

I've just added another course to year 10 Teachers area and the strangest thing has happened. Moodle has hidden one of the two courses in that category!

Am trying to iron this out. Any ideas?

Database stats

Nerdy corner - We've only used 1.25MB of the available 100MB storage for our moodle site. Not quite sure how that works considering that most of the worksheets are about 1MB. What does one need to do to overload the mysql database one wonders.

I'm not too sure on this infrastructure stuff but thought that you might want to know anyway Rafa

Hot potatoes

Just been looking at the Hot Potatoes website after my curiosity was piqued seeing a Hot Potatoes module on moodle. I have made the Hot Potatoes module visible and am now researching how to run Hot Potatoes quizzes. Looks like this may be the solution for our Economics query, as it will be perfectly possible for Anthony to develop Hot Potatoes quizzes first, then to export them into moodle at a later date.

Journals

I've added a journal to the year 11 and year 10 teachers libraries for the coruses we're teaching this time. I want to experiment with this this unit.

Podcasting and galleries

I'm interested in using different media for learning and am interested specifically in using podcasting and putting up a photo gallery in the courses so that the pupils can record their progress in different ways. Still getting my head around how to add modules.

Themes

Been messing about with new themes on the beta site. "Autumn" looks really nice.

Looks like a fairly easily customisable thing, CSS and the like, and some themes, like "ImagineV2" give full instructions on how to modify the pictures and things, so it looks like this would be an ideal template to customise if this were to go official.

Enthusiasm

Year 10 Chemistry class the other day was in the computer room and as we headed up there was a tangible enthusiasm to use moodle. I was asked a number of times if they would be using moodle today. Seems it's doing the job.

Glossary

Have added a glossary to replace the wiki dictionary. The dictionary has the added bonus that in a course you can make a main dictionary and secondary dictionaries. This means that for each lesson you may want to add a new word into a glossary and the main dictionary for the course will be updated.

Unfortunately this does not update a central dictionary in the front page. Maybe I was asking too much.

New layout of front page

I've tinkered with the layout to add a combo instead of the course categories in the central section - I think you'll agree it looks much better.

Also I have chosen to force users to log in before they can see anything. They can still click guest access but at least the front page is not as visible immediately.

At the moment I am trying to work out how to hide blocks from guest users, and ideally I want to turn the guest function off completely and force everyone to log in. At least for now I am pretty sure they can't browse the course material until they are logged in.

Nerves!

Holy crap I thought I had just deleted all my files in chemistry year 10!

Be very careful when importing assignment uploads, as I tried to import an advanced assignment upload from the teachers library into my year 10 chemistry course and very nearly killed the whole thing!

I'm not yet sure what happened, but it created a backup copy and I can now breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe it's safer to just make an assignment upload locally, loathe as I am to do so.

Wiki glossary and forum added

I've just added a wiki and a forum to the main page. I thought that the main page was looking a little like a navigation page to courses only and wanted to add a bit more interactive toys on there.

So I've added a general chat forum for science chat for all and also a wiki on which the pupils can add vocabulary.

Can we point these out to the pupils, and perhaps ask them to contribute to these when they have finished assignments.

View change

Very impressed with the view change facility in moodle - really lets you develop stuff at an administrator level and work out what's going on.

Hmmm with great power comes great responsibility Peter Parker...

Confusion on the assignment of roles in moodle

Rafa

I am totally confused with where the roles apply to in moodle. There seems to be so many levels at which you can apply roles that it is not always clear where their powers and privileges extend.

For example you are a teacher in my 10X class apparently, and I've tried to remove you but I've no idea at what level to do that! I have looked in a few obvious places but it's not easy to work out what powers you have, how they were granted and how I am going to wrest control back from you!

Progress report - glitch

Just a note for the records about the groupings.

We're having a little trouble with separating classes between me and Rafa as each class has needed an entirely independent set of resources and quizzes and other things.

Although we initially had the idea that we were going to run the same course between us using groupings, this hasn't worked and hence we have settled for a template course, which contains shared resources. These are then copied to each course of our own using moodle's import function within the area of the class that we are teaching.

Planning ahead I would ideally like to find a way that all resources are put into this template class (we are calling them meta-classes at the moment but we're not sure if this term is quite correct) so that resources would be shared rather than developed independently by teachers in their own course and not seen by anyone else.

I see one of the strengths of moodle is it's ability to do act as a shared resource bank on which teachers can share and develop ideas and simultaneously test them in class, but if a strict template system is not adhered to there will be disarray with resources scattered far and wide.

Any ideas on this Rafa? Is it worth forcing import of resources at the expense of individual course development? I think that in a 2 person system our present system works fine, but looking ahead I worry that importing resources from a central bank may prove a little too complex, but I do think it's necessary, especially as teachers may not have access to each others courses directly

Year 10 course uploaded

Alright so it took a while, but the year 10 next course library is up and ready to use.

Now you can access any worksheet you like and add to the course for distribution to the pupils.

It takes ages to do, but eventually this job should really be in the hands of a course creator who sits above the teacher in the course creation hierarchy, providing resources ready to use. At the moment I have uploaded these to demonstrate how moodle (or any other VLE) can be used as a mobile resource bank for both teachers and students)

So let's see if it works then huh...

Sundays

Was nice to log on today and see someone in year 10 working on the course. More proof of it's effectiveness as if we need any.

Zipped files of chapters

Discovered this week that it is much easier jsut to upload a zipped file of resources for a whole chapter and unzip it on the site then assign the files when they're on there. Yippee! Time-saver!

The library of worksheets is coming along nicely so far, in the background/teachers (meta-)courses and, at least in my eyes this helps me to see what there is available to us to help inform my (virtual) lesson planning.

More year 10 lessons to follow, I will be unleashing this on them in 2 weeks time, I am a bit behind schedule, due to slow start when settling in at the start of term, so I am playing catch-up now.

TLA/GTC

I take it you have to be a member of the GTC to do TLA?

Econmics department multiple choice

I have been asked by the Economics department about multiple choice quizzes. So far I am able to run multiple choice quizzes on quizstar, which is a premium site I have been signed up to for a number of years, and on moodle.

He is thinking of using MC quizzes with year 10,11 and 12, and these are the years that will already be logged on to moodle by the time our project is in full swing, so I thought that moodle would be the best bet.

The actual spec that he wants is to be able to quiz the pupils on current affairs, perhaps to get some feedback/reports. I think that this should go a little further and that the pupils should be writing current affairs quizzes for each other using moodle, but at present, the multiple choice quizmaker in moodle is hell to use.

I am searching on the moodle site for an easier quiz maker and hoping that there is some way to deploy a pupil to pupil testing environment. That could be a lot of fun!

Accreditiation

Thanks for the heads up that we can get TLA recognition on this project Rafa.

This blog with tags will likely form much of the submission. As far as I am aware then, this counts for the planning and execution part of the course no? Where do we get these forms from then for getting this together and to what extent does this project go in order to qualify for level 1?

From my understanding, level 1 is showing that we have developed our own understanding of a teaching idea/concept. This stage is any time from 2 to 3 weeks to half a term.

If this is the case, then in theory, we are eligible to submit our project at the end of this term no?

Anyway, in keeping with the six core dimensions mentioned in the TLA spec, I think we need to add tags here that help to classify which of the six dimensions we are covering in our reporting through the blog.

The six dimensions are

• Engaging with the knowledge base


• Coaching and Mentoring


• Planning your learning


• Carrying out your plan


• Sharing your learning and influencing practive


• Evaluating your learning and it's impact

Learning from students

One thing I am finding as my students try to access the site is that maybe we have taken too much for granted that they know how to navigate around a place like this. I am now trying to get feedback from them which I hope to incorporate when we are teaching others how to log in.
Some problems arise from my attempt to use groups in a sensible way, which of course is not a Moodle way. Since I had made some of my activities "Separate groups", they couldn't submit unless they were part of one - which they didn't know how to.
Also I found that some students were browsing through the course without actually having enrolled, which again was fine until they tried to see or submit an assignment or grade. My learning from that is that we should very much limit guest access to the courses - probably to zero!
They will always tend to click on the links without reading them - we should probably try to make better use of the site news forums to provide help with the different options in the course.
Some get the hang of it rather quickly, but I am worried that the learning curve will deter some students from using the site, so we must make sure they are all with us!

How do we use the VLE?

Linked to the previous post is the discussion as to what level we want to use the VLE.

Our main drawback at the moment is the lack of computers in our lessons - even if each lab was equipped with a teacher's PC, there would be no way for students to log in to the VLE during a lesson, and booking the IT Rooms is not always possible.

Therefore, I believe that the contents of the VLE should support the students' individual learning at home, and the teacher's monitoring and assessment of a student's progress. Here are some ideas of what the VLE could include:

• Revision sheets with the highlights of each unit (possibly compiled by students?)


• Links to external sites providing support material, or interesting connections to the topic.


• Quizzes or other self-assessment material, especially at the end of a unit


• Homework assignments to be submitted online - hence testing ICT skills


• Students' self-reflection of their progress (possibly by means of a learning diary/blog)

However, I don't think it is necessary to have:

• Worksheets or questions to be done in class - unless an IT room is available


• Experiments

Any further thoughts? Over to you, pal!

A step back

I think over the last few days we both got a bit carried away trying to invent a structure that would accomodate all other members of our Department and even beyond. This is extremely valid, but it is taking a lot of our efforts and at least I know I am not focusing enough on preparing a decent pilot test for my current students.

I believe we should stop for a while and reconsider our timescale for deployment. Here is a proposal:

Phase 1: Andy and Rafa create a basic working structure and prepare full content for ONE unit for each of their Physics courses. In the process, we share resources and record problems we or the students encounter in the handling of the site. The process is fully documented (hence this blog) and students are asked to feed back at the end of the unit. Timescale: however long one unit takes (5 weeks?)



Phase 2: The results of the pilot group are shown to the Science Department (possibly at an INSET) and to relevant members of SMT (Aiden McCoy for accreditation in the TLA scheme?). The structure is made available to other willing members of Science, while we continue to develop our own resources and assisting others in their course creation. Timescale: to be decided (a term? half a term?)



Phase 3: Once a solid structure is in place for the Science Department, the VLE is shown to other members of staff, particularly SMT and IT Administration. If the project is to be used school-wide, it will have to be a school-wide decision and probably cannot run on a private server like scienceheaven. It will then be up to school leaders to decide on the implementation of the whole thing; if they don't want to go the full route but don't object to us doing it, we continue working our ways smoothly and quietly. Timescale: what is the age of the Universe again?

Other sciences need resources too

I have noticed some good websites being used by other members of staff in our department, especially Helen. I'm going to ask them to send me links and I'll start building up the resource pool there too so that it will make the transiation from geeky and techy physics to the other sciences a bit easier.

Ya know. Give em a head start and all that...

Upload of resources for next year 11 course complete

Year 11 P2.10 resources completed on teachers resources site and ready for importing into your own sites for next course. We need to work on some quizzes and put more websites and interactive stuff on in support.

Other roles

I think that the fact that we are both administrators is not the best idea in the long term Rafa. How will we ever know what it feels like to be among the riff-raff if we maintain this sort of loftiness?

I think that when we get the hang of this, we should at least create another account and start pretending that we're of the great unwashed so that we can get our heads around what the average man in say the biology department would need from moodle.

That's not to say I'm about to give up my admin privileges you understand...

Oh no! New grouping procedure means new course names needed!

This is turning into a bit of a nightmare because the groups/classes don't function properly.

Obviously having 3 copies of the same course is not the ideal solution and I've just stumbled across another problem. When naming the 5 letter course code I've added a T for the teachers metacourse and now that I've had to make the same course for year 10 in my area, I've stumbled across the repeated name issue, as two courses can't be called P1a29.

On a small scale like this I could name a course H1a29 as there is no course that will exist with that name but on a whole school scale this will obviously clash with some subject called history whatever that is.

Any ideas?

Los Alamos up and running!

Los Alamos is live!

Log on and I'll admin you for some extra fun and customisation! Let the good times roll!

Admin

Oh dear - I've granted you admin priveleges here too! Am I mad?!

Some help on the Testing beta site on Friday would be much appreciated. I quite like the idea of a new skin on the site, maybe something more physicsy like on the scienceheaven site - you up for it?

Better with group or teacher first?

I think it should be Year 11 > Mr Hoangs Courses > Courses, rather than Mr Hoangs Clases > Year 11 > Courses as the course needs to take precedence over the teacher.

And so it begins..

Grouping by category

Due to the total breakdown/failure of the group system it's clear that we'll have to find a way around this and I propose subdividing the categories into teacher categories below the year category.

So this will thus lead to
Year 11 > Mr Hoang > P2.10 - Blah blah blah
and
Year 11 > Mr Ribas > P2.10 - Blah blah blah

Both of these should be sourced from the Teachers area course, which I guess would be some sort of "meta"-course, insofar as it will not be a TAUGHT course as such but merely a store that will function to hold every resource you could possibly use for each topic/page, filed in the correct places.

Also Rafa you should have a crack at making quizzes - I found the drop down cloze exercises a great laugh to develop!

RSS

I can't seem to be able to add the feed url of the blog to my RSS reader. Is it because of the privacy setting? Are we too deeply under ground?
It might be nice to have the RSS for comments as well...

Rethinking the structure

After all I have read about groups, I think we have to completely lose the idea of publishing a course together and sharing it with students - all assignments get muddled up.
I think we should consider changing the categories to "11D2 Physics", "11D3 Physics", etc. I am not sure how easy it is then to copy resources from one to the other, but if we both have admin rights it shouldn't be too hard?
Groups could then be used internally in the class, for example for lab partners, or if we do any more extended project work, groups could be used for students to share resources within a project but not with the rest of the class.
First consequence of this: we get a much larger site. This is when metacourses could come into play, but I will need more reading first...

Naming for worksheets uploaded

I'm giving them the page number first, followed by the name a the top of the worksheet if in the 360 folder - this means that we can refer to them ourselves from the folder.

For example the first sheet from P2.10 is called "Doing Work" and is from page 306 so I have called it

306 - Doing Work

This gives each page a unique reference number as well and distinguishes from resources that come from 360 and elsewhere.

Wooo-hoo! Shine on you crazy diamond!

Resource files

I can't find a way to upload all the files I want in one go i.e. the whole unit of P2.10 and have to upload them one a ta time.

This seems to be one weakness of the present approach and an argument for Frog or moodle on a local network (I'm not sure that will make much difference but it may)

Copyright issue

Just wondering Rafa - if we upload worksheets from the 360 Science folder is this an infringement of copyright? Probably is but should it concern us? It will be only available in a password-protected environment to pupils and teachers who are using them to study the 360 course and have paid good money to do so, so I can't see any problem there.

Naming convention for resource area

Rafa

I'm naming the teachers area courses (the shortname course identifiers) the same as the pupils course shortname but with a T on the end.

Also naming all courses with the word "Unit" at the start before the course name. I know it's inefficient but it sort of looks nice.

Whatever that's meant to mean.

Uploading into teachers area

I'm uploading resources like worksheets into the teachers area.

What I'm doing is using a topic view rather than a week view so that it doesn't expire every week and I think we want to consider a topic view if we are to run a joint course to overcome that expiry date problem you mentioned today.

Resource area

On the moodle live front, I am going to add a teachers course area and upload loads of worksheets and links categorised by unit etc.

This will allow us to just copy resources to the appropriate course when necessary. It is also a showcase of the capability of a VLE for storage and applicability of stored educational resources so that we can make a case for getting our VLE online here.

Test site to go up

Also I am working on putting up a new moodle test site to be found soon on http://losalamos.scienceheaven.com/ (the obvious underground development link in there) - just having a few problems with the config.php at the moment as you can see - any help would be appreciated. This will allow us to mess with settings and other toys in a non-live kind of way.

2 Blogs

I will be sending you invites for two blogs in a second - one is my present scienceextra blog that I'm hoping to work on with my classes as way to keep the parents and other pupils informed of stuff in class and just to give out a learning award or two to the Geeky and Techies. The aim is to pick a small web team from each class, maybe 2 or 3 people to keep the blog updated at the end of the week, with RSS feed to go to the moodle site too obviously.

I am also giving you an invite to another blog that is private as a development site to run alongside our moodle. The idea of this is that we will have a ready-made list of tagged and categorised development notes when we have to present this to anyone. We can obviously filter by tag to find all messages regarding development or ideas for teaching or site developments etc and it will be an online resource rather than having to scour our inboxes at a later date.