KS3 resources being moved from Los Alamos to live site

I have begun the process of making the KS3 resources live. This has so far taken me all night and I've completed the Year 7 resources. Any assistance labelling them 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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!

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...

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.