eLearning

Two new toys are battling for my attention at the moment. Both have huge potential for eLearning.

At the moment I’m using a suite of Mac Laptops with various bits of software including the fabulous Apple Remote Desktop which gives me complete control over what my students are doing at any time. Unfortunately MacBooks are expensive and not as portable as our students favourite device – the mobile phone.

I’ve been looking for a device that students can carry from lesson to lesson, use at home or in the canteen and will give anywhere, anytime access to learning. It’s a while until the Apple iPhone so I’ll have to wait to see whether this works with Remote Desktop. If it does it’s worth the hype but as it’s more of a personal device than a network machine I doubt it.

So I’m back searching. The two devices that are showing promise are the Neo1973 and the Nokia N800. They’re different beasts but with similar potential. I’m not going to do full reviews (others have done them better) but I do want to look at they’re potential in the classroom.

As an Internet Tablet the N800 can provide students with access to a Learning Platform for a much more reasonable price. Retail these things are about £280. Ex Vat and on a bulk order that would probably come down to around £200. Now a class set is looking more reasonable. Given the 800×480 screen and wifi connection this could be a really good way to get use of the Learning Platform into more lessons. The big drawback is lack of teacher control. Unlike PCs there is no software for remote control of these devices. With Apple Remote Desktop I can lock down all the computers in my classroom. I can’t currently find a way to do this with an N800 (if you have any ideas please let me know). However they do have VNC built in and people have used them to access their PCs over the internet do the potential is there.

The Neo1973 is a different animal. Designed as an Open Source mobile phone this will function as an internet tablet (albeit with a smaller screen) and so much more. This is the kind of device students might buy for themselves (I’m amazed by what they’re prepared to spend on phones). Again the one big downside is teacher control – how do we stop students texting and surfing off-task?

This issue could be overcome by the Open Source nature of the platforms these devices run on. Both have VNC technology so in theory both could be set up as clients to on a network? The platforms they use (Maemo and Openmoko) both have very active developer communities but are at early stages of development.

If a Linux developer somewhere out there wants to try their hand at putting together some control software for either of these we might be able to find a small financial reward for their services to the Open Source community!

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a Local Authority conference on leading transformation in schools.

We were taken through some of the new technologies that are finding their way into schools and discussed the impact that these will have on learning and leading learning.
For me and my colleagues the key experience was the work we did on developing our school vision. All schools have a written statement that lays out their grand plan. Most of these are wordy, overlong and rarely reviewed documents written in a rather bland and generic style, developed by a small team or sometimes one person.

We are determined that ours should be more relevant, immediate and shared.

We’ve started work on a mind map, constructed in a FreeMind that will be shared by all our stakeholders: Leadership, Governors, Staff, Students, Parents and the Wider Community. A three side ,typed document is never going to be owned by all the different groups that need to be included in this process.

Instead our vision will be just that – words and pictures on a mindmap showing what we want our school to look like. Projected in the lobby of the school this will be a document that will be under constant development by all our stakeholder groups. Students will be responsible for creating the images that illustrate it and we intend that it becomes the driver for school development.

It will never be finished but when it’s at a suitable stage of development I’ll post a link.

Haven’t posted for a while.

I’ve been working hard to get a really good scheme of work up on Fronter (our Learning Platform).

I’ve written a Media Studies Learning Path for Textual Analysis and am testing it with Year 12 students (16/17 year olds).

Their reaction so far has been excellent. I’ve done some student evaluation of what they they liked and didn’t liked:

Liked – that topics are broken down into small chunks, the amount of feedback and interaction they get (mostly though voting and forums), the very visual nature of the Learning Path (lots of animated gifs and movies) and the fact they they can learn whenever they want rather than when they’re told.

Don’t like – In a classroom situation some race on and others feel left behind, initial learning curve for the software itself.

I’m quite pleased with that feedback and it gives me a lot of guidance to take back to staff when they start writing their own.

The London Grid for Learning have announced that they have adopted Fronter as their Learning Platform.

This is fantastic news for us since we started to implement it last year.

As I have written previously I have had some concerns about our decision. My biggest problem is that Fronter does not integrate with our MIS dynamically – data can be manually exported from CMIS into Fronter but there is no active link. Secondly we have been worried that Haringey may decide to go with a different and incompatible Learning Platform and the resources we have created would go to waste.

Given that the LGFL are going with Fronter I think it’s very unlikely that Haringey will do anything else. Opting for a different Platform would close many doors to partnership with other London schools.

My concerns about Fronter’s lack of dynamic integration are starting to be eased as well. I understand that since they won the LGFL bid the MIS providers have started to make contact to discuss integration.

Things are looking up.

Developing eLearning is as much about effecting change within an organisation as providing the technology and resources. For anyone trying to promote change two groups of people make all the difference: Sponsors and Champions.

When developing the whole-school vision we started with leadership and the governors. Two of our governors have taken this project on with huge enthusiasm and a willingness to get their hands dirty. They are both sponsors, in that they govern our school, and champions on the governing body.

The crucial champions have arisen within the staff. Specific teachers in Science, ICT, D&T and PE have all taken a proactive approach in eLearning. All have very focused and clear objectives about what they want from eLearning for their departments. At this stage I am simply a facilitator, providing them with the tools. Unfortunately they are as stymied as I am. A slow network connection is hampering our efforts to make use of the learning platform. This kind of technical threat to development could be very destructive. Fortunately we are in the early stages and our eLearning Champions are robust enough to roll with it and coming back fighting.

Last week I spent too much time at BETT listening to people talk about how to promote and develop eLearning in schools. Most of them were able to use just enough management jargon to convince their audiences that they knew what they were talking about. Only a few were really credible and even fewer had solid case studies and practical strategies they could point to for guidance.

One who did was Mike Cameron from the SSAT. I’ve heard Mike before and he is hugely knowledgable and spends a lot of time visiting schools and sharing practise. I’ll be referring to his work quite a bit in future. Becta had a panel of school leaders who all started with the words “shared vision”, “whole-school strategy” and “integrated approach”. However some of them did then move on to practical methods for developing these ideas.

Much as I hate the jargon it really is necessary to have a “whole-school vision” for ICT and eLearning and that’s something I’m trying to develop. It’s no good me telling everyone what to do. I don’t know what they want from ICT and eLearning and I don’t fully know how it can help them. I need to find out what they want and find ways for them to share their thoughts and opinions. I also need to show them examples of what is possible and what might become possible. Most teachers and parents are too busy running classes and families to research the latest eLearning innovation! It’s best their students and children do that for them.

I’ve identified key groups five that I need to address:

• Students
• Staff: Teachers & Support Staff
• Senior Leadership Team
• Governors
• Parents

Building a whole-school vision for anything should be a transparent exercise – hence this Blog.

However we’re talking about a lot of people. More than 3500! Somehow we need to give all of those people a way to express their enthusiasm, concern, ideas and interests. eLearning has the potential to change the ways schools work and students learn. Everyone must be encouraged to contribute.

I’ll be blogging about how we develop the Whole-School Vision for eLearning over the next few months. Please let me know your thoughts.

According to Mike Cameron from the SSAT 30% of schools that have installed a learning plaform installed Moodle.

The Open University (the biggest higher ed. institution in the UK) has chosen Moodle as their new learning platform and are investing a great deal of time and resources into developing it.
However Becta has concerns about its sustainability and has not approved (for want of a better word) its use in schools. It doesn’t fulfill the criteria of its framework.

But Moodle has a huge advantage over other learning platforms. It works same way as other technologies that our students are used to. Any student familiar with MySpace (and most are) will pick up Moodle very quickly. Its horizontal structure much more closely resembles the social networkiing sites and video resources.

Unfortunately for schools Moodle does not currently integrate well with information management systems. Whilst this may not be a problem for a department implementing it on their own it could be a breaker for anyone implementing it at a whole-school level.

Now that the frenzy of excitement and self-congratulation has died down it might be time to look at what the iPhone means for education.

I’ve been looking hard at ways to integrate mobile technologies into school-life during the past year and have seen some excellent examples. Our Design & Technology department is taking part in a trial with PDAs in the classroom and the P.E. dept. is next in line.

However Smartphones and PDAs aren’t quite there yet. The Apple iPhone offers another level of sophistication and integration. Here are some of the questions that I keep asking myself:

• Will our students buy them? They’ve got ipods and mobiles and the iPhone will be a lot of money. It’s only available on contract – our students are invariably PAYG.
• Should we provide them? Can we afford to ignore them?
• It runs OSX – will it work with Remote Desktop?
• Will it run Office?
• If it can access the full version of Google Docs and Spreadsheets does this matter?
• How will teachers feel about having them in their classrooms?
• How do we manage their use in schools?

Sooner or later schools will adopt mobile technologies. This will present us with a huge number of challenges and benefits. Currently many schools ban mobile phones on the basis that they cause a distraction to learning. When mobile devices are proved to aid learning will we then invite them into our schools? How will we then deal with the thefts and the breakages?

I spent yesterday touring BETT and attending seminars.

One of my objectives was to talk to as many people as possible about how they use their learning platform and how it integrates with their MIS. Specifically I want the learning platform and the MIS to talk to each other all the time – sending data in both directions. Usually when I start out on this the sales person will tell me that grades from the learning platform can be exported into the MIS to help with tracking and reporting. However this is only half the story. Teachers write meanignful comments on assignments – this is the data that needs to end up in the MIS and on the target tracking system. This is what I went looking for at BETT

Briefly these are my rather disappointed conclusions:

• No-one offers the level of integration we are looking for yet. Everyone has this as their “next project on the roadmap.”
• The companies who have an MIS and a Learning Platform are in a better position to leverage this. Companies with only the Learning Platform tend to offer “integration” that is actually only a one-way migration of data.
• There is hope for Open Source – SIMS are working on integration with Moodle.
• We’re just not quite there yet. 2007 could be an exciting year.

So I’m still looking and hoping. What worries me most is how the borough-wide BSF programme will deal with this. As a borough we should be adopting a single MLE. I can’t see how this can work if each school hangs on to its (heavily-invested-in) MIS. All the management information systems will simply not integrate with the all the learning platforms.

Where do we go from here?

I love MindMaps. They help me organise my thoughts and show my students how ideas grow and are interconnected.

My frustration with MindMaps has been that they are so transient. Get a piece of sugar paper, draw a great MindMap, put it on the side, where it gets tattered and torn and ends up in the bin.

I was delighted to discover software like OpenMindand Inspiration for use in the classroom. My only concern was that they cost money. For my students to really use this kind of tool it must be on their computers at home (ideally on their mobile phones as well!).

Enter FreeMind an open source, cross platform mind mapping package.

The more I use this software the more it amazes me. My students pick it up immediately and create the most beautiful ( and meaningful) pieces of work. The way the software works encourages students to make links and expand their analysis. The more you produce, the more satisfying the result.

One feature that has really impressed me is the ease with which one can turn a map into a web page.

I’ve gradually gone over to this method for planning all my schemes of work and am building a site entirely in FreeMind: MediaEducation.tv

When my students put together revision maps I put these on the site too. Ideal for exam prep.

Let me know what you think and how it could be improved (other than just by doing more!).