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?

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.

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

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.

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.