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