Strategic Learning

OLAP is dead (Long Live Analytics)

2011-12-07T16:38:00.001Z

OLAP is Dead (Long Live Analytics)

Posted by Timo Elliott on Friday, November 27, 2009 · 12 Comments

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

The term OLAP or Online Analytic Processing was coined in 1993 by relational database technology pioneer Ted Codd (my claim to fame: we went to the same high school, Poole Grammar).
The term was chosen to contrast with OLTP or online transaction processing, and was prompted by some clever marketing folks at Essbase, who wanted to promote their multidimensional database product. Codd was famous for his twelve rules defining the relational model and duly came up with twelve rules for analytic systems.
The term was quickly taken up by the rest of the industry, and spawned new definitions (Nigel Pendse’s FASMI test) and multiple variations (MOLAP, HOLAP, ROLAP, Huey, Dewie and Louie, etc.).
Over time, these multiple definitions started muddying the meaning of the term (was it a technology? a user interface? an approach to analysis?), and Gartner decreed that it was ‘just’ part of a larger market called business intelligence. The result has been a long slow decline of the use of the term OLAP, as the Google Trends chart below indicates.

Only Nigel Pendse of the OLAP Report tried to side-step this trend, and continued producing OLAP-specific analysis for many years, but “business intelligence” was clearly the mainstream industry term. A few years ago, Nigel sold the OLAP Report to the German BARC group, who initially continued under the same name, and tried vainly to convince everybody that OLAP was still a “hip term”, but finally succumbed to the inevitable and announced last month that they would be changing the name of the report/site to The BI Verdict.
(Sadly, at some point in this process, BARC decided to lock one of Nigel’s best articles — “How not to buy a BI product” – behind their subscription firewall. All I can find on the web is a far-less-entertaining summary of the main points here. [UPDATE: thanks to a tip from Florian Bahr, I can point you to the full article on the WayBackMachine: How not to buy an OLAP product)
Since BARC were the last group using the term with any frequency, it’s now fairly safe to say that OLAP’s days are over, but interestingly, the group seems to have chosen to shift to the wrong term. The chart below shows that the search trend for “business intelligence” has been slowly drifting down over the last five years.

And the decline is even more pronounced for another standard industry term, “performance management”

Since BI and performance management remain fast-growing markets, this trend is a little surprising – until you look at the search figures for the term analytics. Starting in 2005 (perhaps prompted by the introduction of Google Analytics?), the term has skyrocketed in use.

Possible reasons for this may include:

Popular books and articles aimed as business people tend to use the term, such as Thomas Davenport’s 2007 book “Competing on Analytics”. This is perhaps because there’s more ambiguity for a business audience, who associate the term “business intelligence” with industry data vendors like Reuters and Thomson (now both part of the same company).
The acquisition of the mainstream BI vendors by larger organizations (Hyperion by Oracle, Cognos by IBM, and BusinessObjects by SAP) has meant that the industry has been increasingly using other, more generic terms, such as “embedded analytics” and “analytic applications” to explain the same functionality. And the largest remaining independent vendor, SAS, has proclaimed themselves the leader in “business analytics”

My conclusion? By the time you read this, this blog might well be called “Analytic Questions” instead of “BI Questions”…

A Headteacher (S. Wheeler) writes

2011-12-07T13:39:00.001Z

Source: http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/12/head-teacher-writes.html

We have had pencils in our school now for some time, and we were one of the first to adopt them, but it has been an uphill struggle. There aren't enough to go around, and often several of the children have to crowd around to use the pencils at the same time. But we are better off than many schools. We have a well equipped pencil suite where the chained desktop pencils are used in special sessions, and often, as a reward for good behaviour children are allowed to come into the suite (under teacher supervision of course) to use the pencils to draw fun things.

Pencils were resisted by some of the teachers at first, because they complained they would have to change their practice if they adopted them. And they were right, pencils are in fact a game changer. Others were worried that they would not have enough time to learn to use them properly.

I have a wider vision than a pencil suite for our school. I'm considered a bit of a maverick and many of my staff look at me and shake their heads sadly. You see, I have a vision for pencils that I think will transform our school and enhance learning for all our students. Wait for it - I am advocating one pencil for every child in the school! And even more radical than that, I want to introduce pencils that can be used by students while they are on the move. Yes, I know it sounds absurd, but I think it will work. Needless to say, I have had many objections and lots of opposition from all quarters.

Some teachers, led by our school pencil co-ordinator, have complained that we made a considerable investment on the pencil suite, and it's being used regularly for very important teaching. OK, so there is only one pencil between every four children, but at least the pencils are being used consistently, she argues. Some occasionally break and have to be sent away to be fixed, but we also have a parent who is familiar with pencils, and has one at home. He comes in occasionally to fix them, which saves us some money.

My idea is for the school to invest more money so that each child can walk around while using their pencils, and that they can even take them home with them! Yes, I know it's an extremely radical idea, and that's the very reason I am receiving so much opposition. Some of my teaching staff are arguing that we could better spend the money on more chalk for the blackboards. Others are warning that children will either damage the pencils or worse, lose them if they take them out of the school. Pencils are meant to be used for education, they say, not for fun.

Even the parents are complaining. Some have written a very strong letter to the governors, suggesting that if we give a pencil to each of the children to bring home, they will need to revise their home contents insurance, in case any disaster occurs, and the child damages the pencil in some way. Some of the richer families don't seem to mind, as they have better pencils at home than we could possibly buy for the school. It's a kind of pencil envy I suppose. There does seem to be a pencil divide across the local community. I am confident though that giving one pencil to each student will address this problem.

Then there are the objections from the Tax Payers Alliance, and other pressure groups who have even gone on to the local TV station to complain that we are being irresponsible, and are wasting valuable tax payers money on purchasing a pencil for every child. 'In my day', said the TPA spokeperson, 'we used slates and styluses, and shared them around, and we were happy. One pencil per child is simply a gimmick'. To be blunt, I think they are missing the point. I strongly believe that pencils are the future of learning, and the more untethered they are, the greater will be the flexibility of learning for all subjects across the curriculum.

One of the strongest arguments from some of my teaching staff though is that they claim to be pencil immigrants, while the children are pencil natives. The kids seem to have such an affinity with the pencils, whilst the staff struggle to use them and get embarrassed when they accidentally use the wrong end, or the point is blunt, and they don't know how to sharpen it. Some teacher have warned that increased use of the pencil can be addictive, and will cause all sorts of problems such as writer's cramp, eye strain, raised incidences of graffiti in the school toilets and rude cartoons of teachers passed around the room. Such dangers though, are far outweighed by the benefits of mobile, personalised pencils.

So we will forge on with my new one child, one pencil scheme, and as a school, we will make it work. We will actually purchase the new second generation (2G) pencils, which have erasers attached, and in so doing, these multi-functional tools will offer a revolutionary approach to learning. They are also much faster and last longer than the old pencils. I will close with this inspirational quote: 'Any teacher who can be replaced by a pencil... should be! - Arthur C. Chalk.

(Inspired by the Twitter #pencilchat hashtag)

Image source

A head teacher writes... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

QA? Get real...

2011-10-19T14:48:00.002+01:00

Baroness bemoans ‘poorly focused’ efforts to measure quality

19 October 2011

By Matthew Reisz

A former president of the British Academy has argued that universities are subject to “elaborate forms of accountability that reveal little about how effectively students are taught or how much they learn on different courses”.

Philosopher Onora O’Neill was speaking on “University and Diversity” at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities earlier this week, as part of a 10th-anniversary lecture series on “The Idea of the University”.

Today’s “standard systems for assessing what is described as the quality of universities”, argued Baroness O’Neill, tended to rely on “rather abstract features of universities”.

These included the proportion of their activity that is laboratory-based, the proportion of students who are “residential” and the proportion who are mature, she said.

Largely ignored, however, were “many matters of substantive educational and cultural significance”.
By way of example, Baroness O’Neill noted out that “although we learn how many overseas students each university recruits - supposedly a great indicator of academic success and reputation, and hitherto a genuine indicator of financial success – [standard measures] say nothing about the proportion of their entering or exiting students who are competent users of any second language…It is striking that something that so evidently bears on the work they can do at university and beyond should not be recorded or reported, but passed over in silence when university quality is publicly judged.”

Similarly, she continued, “there is no attempt to judge or record how well the students on any given course can interpret or criticise demanding texts, or how fluently they can write in varied and demanding registers, or how far they have developed their understanding of ethical, social or religious issues”.

She concluded the lecture by calling for “more specific and substantive forms of accountability, that would actually aim to judge the quality of education provided and achieved”.
matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com

The skills based curriculum

2011-10-06T00:11:00.001+01:00

The drive for a skills based curriculum is more and more prevalent. How to deliver such curriculum remains a challenge for a number of schools.

The key to success is not logistics.

Two main structures support such drive. In one structure, the skill based curriculum is about mapping where the fundamental skills are delivered. It is a hidden skill based curriculum. This is the way to deliver the least changes in the 'traditional' curriculum. The key to success here is always whether this brand of curriculum is driven by the teachers (Cross-curriculum work anyone?) or by a manager in his/ her office. You can guess which one is more successful.

The other more honest structure represents the traditional 'circle within a circle approach'. The Welsh Bac and International Bac both use this structure to explain their curriculum. Put the core skills in the middle, surround them by the curriculum and you are done. It will work with the IB because they make sure it will. It will work with the Welsh Bac as it is integrated in the assessment structure.

It does not always work when this circle is mirrored elsewhere. The key to success here is always a management issue. Does the management give itself the means to implement their skill based curriculum? When it represents just a fad or a marketing ploy, the skills which are supposedly at the heart of the curriculum are in fact peripheral to it. It is a traditional curriculum with added 'bits'. Whilst the departments (in secondary education) are mostly run as tight ships, the skills area is run by whoever is unlucky enough to be volunteered and delivered by whoever is available. It is a 'left over' approach. Surprisingly this has little impact on results (because it does not really improve any skill).

If you are not in the market for the IB or Welsh Bac, you could do a lot worse than considering the EPQ as a cornerstone of your skill based curriculum post 16. The experience you will gain there will easily be transferable to KS3 and 4 later on. The project approach can be tailored to your curriculum needs and the support it requires can be integrated within the pastoral support. It can easily be the central component of your curriculum around which organise themselves the different curriculum areas. This will easily evolve in line with what your school requires, but at least you start from a solid base.

You get your circle within a circle curriculum and the skills are clearly at the core.

Procurement?

2011-09-23T00:17:00.001+01:00

Cut down exam costs by getting rid of exams used as practice: check.
Feed-in tariffs going down until 2014 make solar energy not the obvious choice it might appear: it all depends on how your LEA sees hiring out your roofs: not a straight forward check.
Electricity/ Gaz: Did you know a company can tout your business around and ask the main suppliers to bid for your business. The bidding itself does not cost you anything: check
Refuse: ethical refuse collection can be the green way forward, and cheaper: check

Effective e-Learning

2011-09-15T18:49:00.000+01:00

If you follow this site, you will have been integrating your interactive exercises with your SOWs and therefore into the feedback loop (3D mapping) for a long time. Check this out from Microsoft HE blog

Kingswoodonline update 15/09/11

2011-09-15T15:18:00.001+01:00

The content of all classes on Kingswoodonline will be removed from last year's classes and merged into groups. This will be done by late 15th September.

On the 16th September the new classes will be uploaded.

As soon as this is done the content from the groups will re-populate all the relevant classes KP wide. This will be done by the 21st September. On the 21st and 22nd all relevant students will receive their new passwords via letters.

Intelligent data

2011-09-08T21:53:00.002+01:00

Having a quick look at IBM's approach to data analysis (David Loshin, March 2011), it is quite obvious that the education world is not dealing with the growth of unstructured data in the way businesses do.

Whereas businesses are developing competitive business intelligence solutions, schools either reach "analysis paralysis" or chose the data they want to support a gut feeling decision.

Data is about delivering actionable intelligence and yet most schools are still dealing with posthumous data. Data that reports on the past. Schools must move on to the analytics sphere to develop strategies that will drive student progress forward (at least!).

Reports have to focus on what needs to be done in order to achieve.

The result of predictive analytics formulated as actionable intelligence can be integrated directly into the existing reporting process by synchronising data from different sources:
•SOWs
•Specifications
•Class based assessments
•vLe interactive exercises results

This requires a robust architecture tuned to the framework for reporting.   It must be coherent and this has a direct impact on how raw data is mined.   It is all about delivering actionable intelligence. It requires an architecture which enables a continuous synchronization of data from multiple sources.

Alternatively it requires you to bring the functionality of your SIMS database to the 21st century rather than going on automating 20th century processes.

Do not use your data manager to crunch data, use him/her to deliver processes which will deliver data at any time. Get him/ her to bring SIMS into the 21st century.

Intelligent data is what it is all about.

By adding multidimensional data analysis to this architecture schools will be able to link another set of data sources:
•Class/ teacher results
•Contextual results
•SOWs
•Line manager
•INSET/ CPD record
•Examiners report

Rather than creating more data, this technique identifies patterns. Patterns are a good foundation to drive organizational optimization (as IBM puts it).

This optimization is driven by a series of questions:
•What? Use multidimensional mapping to see what is what. If you deal with student progress, where are they?
•Why? Why are those patterns present? Why are students under-achieving?
•What if? This is where managed innovation comes in
•What next? What is the objective?
•How? What needs to be done to meet this objective

Opening the way to analytics will open the door to profiling. This will enable schools to model student progress in different situations...   Profiling will enable you to predict problems and make sure they do not occur.

The really amazing thing is that these tools are here right now. They are not magic. Businesses have been using them for a while. The key issue is management. Is management ready to let analytics rip and present them with a real picture of their school?

As usual, the answer has nothing to do with technology. It is about managers lowering their guard in order to be able to...learn.

Click view/ Clip bank or GCSE pods?

2011-09-08T21:14:00.001+01:00

Multimedia:

Click view is about recording what is on TV. Make sure you also buy the 24/7 box. Once the material is recorded centrally (who will run this? You need to make it part of someone's job description), you then need the teachers to integrate the resource in their SOW. There is a lot of development time needed here. If your processes of teaching and learning are solid, worth considering. Only for those with good SOWs and who use TV recordings as a matter of course. If not, after the initial 3 months, it will not be used as much as the money spent on it warrants it.
Clip bank uses tv programmes but they are already integrated within the specs, have exercises, transcripts etc... It is very teacher friendly and all the resources can be made accessible overnight. The way forward if you have little or no multimedia content. Can be integrated into your vLe.
GCSE pods are revision podcasts. They are directed straight at the students. Again, they can be used overnight. Quick fix if you don't have anything in-house.

Tech stack for tomorrow?

2011-09-06T18:18:00.003+01:00

Talking about the tech stack of the near future This is how analytics will take off. Can you see the hint of the magical element?

The A level Sociology heaven?

2011-09-06T16:02:00.002+01:00

Check the link for Sociology resources. I think you might like some of it...

http://www.sociology.org.uk/rsoft.htm

3D mapping?

2011-09-06T16:02:00.001+01:00

Yes, ok...It is Multidimensional data analysis.

Bit too much of a mouthful for me...

So 3D mapping it is

Infrastructure in house or external: the fundamentals...

2011-09-06T16:02:00.000+01:00

Dick Carlson says:

December 12, 2009 at 12:58 AM

Do you keep lots of soup in your pantry, or eat out when you’re hungry? If your car breaks down, do you fix it yourself or have it towed to the shop? When you’re looking for a mate, do you hire a matchmaker or just start asking people out?

The relationship between keeping your IP inside the tent (very secure, lots of control, known situation) to having someone store it down the road in a dark, mysterious cave has always been a balance. And I suspect that it will continue to be a balancing act for many years to come.

You’ve done a good job identifying many of the issues that confront enterprise buyers as they think about whether or not to rely on someone “outside the tent” of their network to support their IP. But probably the biggest question is “What happens when it goes wrong?”

INTERNAL
Your e-learning system won’t work, and you can fire the network admin and hire a new one. This is the “Blame The Dude” model of employee management, practiced by many companies.

EXTERNAL
Your e-learning system won’t work, and you have to pay $100,000 to move your content, it takes six months, and might not even all belong to you — depending on the TOS that you have in place.

This is one of the first conversations I have with a client when they want to talk about where their precious IP will live. Once they’ve gotten over the philosophical hurdle, it’s all downhill from there.

Get up to speed with data analytics

2011-09-01T20:44:00.000+01:00

Having a quick look at IBM’s approach to data analysis (David Loshin, March 2011), it is quite obvious that the education world is not dealing with the growth of unstructured data in the way businesses do. Whereas businesses are developing competitive business intelligence solutions, schools either reach “analysis paralysis” or chose the data they want to support a gut feeling decision.

The use of data in a lot of schools is very poor.

Data is about delivering actionable intelligence and yet most schools are still dealing with posthumous data. Data that report son the past. Schools must move on to the analytics sphere to develop strategies that will drive student progress forward (at least!). Reports have to focus on what needs to be done in order to achieve.

The result of predictive analytics formulated as actionable intelligence can be integrated directly into the existing reporting process by synchronising data from different sources:
SOWs
Specifications
Class based assessments
vLe interactive exercises results

This requires a robust architecture tuned to the framework for reporting. It must be coherent and this has a direct impact on how raw data is mined. It is all about delivering actionable intelligence. It requires an architecture which enables a continuous synchronization of data from multiple sources. Do not use your data manager to crunch data, use him/her to deliver processes which will deliver data at any time.

Sustainability is also the watch word.

By adding multidimensional data analysis to this architecture schools will be able to link another set of data sources:
Class/ teacher results
Contextual results
SOWs
Line manager
INSET/ CPD record
Examiners’ report

Rather than creating more data, this technique identifies patterns. Patterns are a good foundation to drive organizational optimization (as IBM puts it).

This optimization is driven by a series of questions:
What? Use multidimensional mapping to see what is what. If you deal with student progress, how well are they doing compared to the SOW?
Why? Why are those patterns present? Why are students under-achieving?
What if? This is where managed innovation comes in
What next? What is the objective?
How? What needs to be done to meet this objective
Opening the way to analytics will open the door to profiling. This will enable schools to model student progress in different situations... Profiling will enable you to predict problems and make sure they do not occur.

The really amazing thing is that these tools are here right now. They are not magic. Businesses have been using them for a while. The key issue is management. Is management ready to let analytics rip and present them with a real picture of their school?

As usual, the answer has nothing to do with technology. It is about managers lowering their guard in order to be able to...learn.

About Strategic Learning

2011-08-25T16:06:00.000+01:00

Over the last 20 years I have been lucky to work directly with over 30 schools directly. I either worked for them or with them as Advisor, Inspector or freelance. I also have a foot in the business world.

What is striking is that, consistently, the failing schools fail because of poor leadership. Again, consistently, poor leadership is about keeping your eye off the ball, not focusing on the fundamentals. SL will help you ask the right questions.

Good management always comes from strong leadership. But, for some, strong leadership is often a way to survive without actually getting to grips with the job or having any impact on results. It is about telling people what to do without actually listening.

But how do you reach those who do not listen and still can't understand why they get bad results?

Good management comes from a strong strategic leadership. It is about plugging yourself into reality, however unpalatable it is, and using the proper tools to deal with the real issues. Modern data analysis tools is invaluable.

It is about knowing who you are, it is about doing well what needs to be done well (effective management) and planning for change to future proof your institution (strategic outlook). It is important that experimentation does not lead to answers to problems that do not exist.

To do this you cannot afford to delegate key tasks. Data analysis, Compliance (rather than QA) and CPD must become your daily bread.

3D mapping?

2011-08-22T10:45:00.003+01:00

Yes, ok...It is Multidimensional data analysis.

Bit too much of a mouthful for me...

So 3D mapping it is

Data mining/ OLAP

2011-08-21T12:31:00.000+01:00

Data mining or On Line Analytical Processing is about extracting hidden predictive information from databases.

This will enable you to find out what to do... really? In all cases, the issue is rarely about what to do next, it is about understanding the situation as it is and acting accordingly.

Creating clear processes that focus on fundamentals.
Deploying these processes through CPD.
Using QA to make sure that what we mean to do actually happens. Actually, I often think that, as far as education is concerned, to get top results for kids now, we need more a compliance officer than a QA one.

Anyway, forget about OLAP and use 3D mapping instead. Get a snapshot of your reality. Replace the word 'vision' with 'focus'.

3D mapping

2011-08-21T12:25:00.001+01:00

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Donald Rumsfeld

3D mapping is about unknown unknows. 3D mapping will ensure that fundamental issues do not go un-noticed.

3D mapping is different from data mining. Data mining is about predicting the future, 3D mapping is about linking different sets of data to present an accurate graphical representation of the present. It is factual.

3D mapping links:
* Exam results
* Teacher
* Teacher CPD record
* Line management structure
* e-Learning support
* Student voice
* Teacher voice

The final result is a 3D graphic representation of the patterns behind all these data sets. In an ideal world 3D mapping confirms exisitng issues. If, however, you are working hard but results aren't improving, 3D mapping might open your eyes to something you might not have been aware of...

Then again, if Donald Rumsfeld had used this system, he would not have come up with this wonderful sentence...

NQT? Food for thought on e-learning

2011-05-10T15:57:00.000+01:00

The Kingswood Partnership launched e-learning KP wide and I had a special session with Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs). The bottom line if you want e-learning to have an impact on results?

1) Putting resources (power point, worksheets etc…) online has no impact on learning. It makes sense to organise your resources online but it won’t have any impact on learning. Organise your cutlery cupboards by all means, but don’t think it will improve the food.

2) If you neither have a detailed quality Scheme of Work nor an assessment structure, give e-learning a miss. e-Learning is about supporting what you do in class. If you don’t know where you are going, there’s no point calling for a taxi.

3) Having information online isn’t important, it’s what students do with this information which is important. This brings you to interactive exercises and online assessments integrated with feedback (automatic or teacher led).

4) You cannot have brand new interactive exercises for all levels in one go (even if the Kingswood Partnership will do them for you). So, at what level do you target these interactive exercises? At the high end to stretch students or at the C/D border for GCSE and C/B border for GCE?

5) Take on board experience and work on supporting a base line. The last audit we conducted on exam performance shows that students are more often let down by gaps in their basic knowledge rather than gaps at the higher levels. If they cannot cope with the higher levels it is always because of gaps of understanding in the basics…Ergo…Focus on the basics.

Useful e-Learning tools

2011-05-10T15:56:00.000+01:00

Here are some tools you might not know about:

Audacity: Free cross-platform audio recorder, useful for creating MP3 files.
Issuu: Free web-based digital magazine creation.
Jing: Free screen capture and screencasting.
Ning: Make your own wiki portal
Palbee: Free web-based video conferencing, meetings, and chat rooms.
Schooltube: Student video and media sharing for entertainment and classroom use.
Screenjelly: Free desktop recording with audio. Runs in browser, nothing to download.
Screentoaster: Free screen recording with audio. Runs in browser, nothing to download.
Teachertube: An online community for sharing instructional teacher videos.
WizIQ: Free web-based video conferencing and desktop and screen sharing.

AR and geo-tagging

2011-05-10T15:53:00.001+01:00

Augmented Reality
The growth of Geotagging is enabling web 3 to take off and bring the web to the individual via the mundane camera app on your G3 phone. Point your screen and admire the scenery… with the relevant items on your view finder highlighted on an overlay and information displayed as well as links to the internet… When you point your camera at a great building, you can access information by a simple press of the screen. It places you physically at the heart of the information network. This is also available for geography (Wikitude), specific places (Nearest tube, London bus routes,), buildings and things (SREngine), and even…people (Polar Rose)!
If you want to find out who is twitting what around you, just use TwittARound and suddenly your screen comes alive with information about your immediate twitting world.
Using http://qik.com/ you can use your camera to send your reality to others 1000’s miles away…
When the levels of inquisitiveness are getting lower and lower all the time in our classes, AR might bring the the zing back into learning.

Augmented reality is here

2011-05-10T15:51:00.002+01:00

Scribblers is linking some of its books to an AR layer for extra interactivity. Top marks to keep booksat the cutting edge of knowledge!

www.scribblersbooks.com

Change of interface on Kingswoodonline

2011-05-10T15:38:00.000+01:00

Comments that quick navigation was essential were heard loud and clear. As a result the interface in Kingswoodonline is changing.

There is now no need to move folders around. They all appear and you just click them (or not) if you want them to be seen by your students. This is the 'Publish' function.

To enable 1 click access from the home page you can feature specific resources (folders or actual exercises).

To enable smooth delivery of the content, the icon representing your subject is the icon representing the current module. Click the module and you access current resources.

To enable smooth delivery you can now also order the resources in which they are seen.

KP Mobile phone platform

2011-05-10T15:31:00.001+01:00

The Mobile platform has been up for 6 months now and works hand in hand with the 'can-do' curriculum checklists (Check out our nuggets if you are not up to speed with them).

Go there to see our Phone platform and get involved developing it!

Update on Curriculum content available on Kingswoodonline

2011-05-10T15:27:00.001+01:00

The following subjects are up and running in at least on school in the Partnership. If you want access to these resources, or want your subject set up, you just have to ask...

As/A2 Biology
As/A2 Business Studies
As/A2 English Language
As/A2 English Lit
As/A2 English
As/A2 French
As/A2 Geography
As/A2 Psychology
As/A2 Sociology
As/A2 Technology (TP)
Level 3 EPQ
Level 2/3 BAF
GCSE Science
GCSE PE
GCSE Maths (Mathswatch)

Update on Schemes of Works

2011-05-10T15:22:00.000+01:00

The quantity and quality of SOWs has risen tremendously in the Partnership. If you pass on a copy of your SOW to me then your area in the e-learning area will be set up along its lines.

Don't worry if it is not 'neat'. I won't publish it. I am just after the structure of your modules.

The announcement that this blog was dead was premature!

2011-05-10T15:21:00.000+01:00

Just when I thought this blog was dead and that people got their info from our different feeds on Twitter and Facebook, people complain that there are no update.

So we are back!

Kp Update: Nuggets are in!

2011-05-10T14:30:00.000+01:00

KP nuggets are very short (from 30 seconds to 2 minute 30) presentations on different facets of the Partnership e-Learning work. Each Nugget is about providing you with support.

They are an effective, digestible, source of CPD.

Check them out, or ask for more...

About e-Learning in the Kingswood Partnership (2 minutes 30 seconds)
About Kingswoodonline (1 minute 30 seconds)
About KP Help Desk (30 seconds)
About KP You Tube channel (1 minute)
About 'Can-do' checklists (1 minute 30 seconds)

Memo to HoDs:learning is top priority;Middle Managers;Secondary;School Management

2010-04-08T07:47:00.001+01:00

12 years old but still relevant in some cases... The highlights are mine.

Daniel Esteve
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Article
Published in TES Magazine on 20 March, 1998
By: Virginia Makins

Section:Article

..Middle managers are now seen as the key to improving our schools.

Virginia Makins looks at what makes a good head of department.

It is remarkable that the school improvement movement is only just beginning to recognise the importance of the middle managers in secondary schools - all those heads of department, heads of faculty and heads of year who are responsible for the quality of teaching and learning day to day.

Now the message is getting through. Those who have been working for years to provide better training for middle managers have been backed by the official voices of the Office for Standards in Education and the Teacher Training Agency. A recent report from Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector, highlights the importance of middle managers: too many department heads take "the narrow view that their responsibility is for managing resources rather than people".

Last year, Ofsted published Subject Management in Secondary Schools. It describes the qualities it believes middle managers need to develop (see box below). In the inspectorate's judgment, about one in five schools has weaknesses in this area that frustrate their development.

"Until quite recently, being a head of department was about managing physical resources and writing schemes of work," says Mike Tomlinson, Ofsted's head of inspection. "Now, it's about managing staff and assessing their performance, and the performance of the department as a whole against other subjects with the same pupils. In many schools the challenges have not been met with training." But he added that even schools that see such training as a priority are not always able to find money to do it. The debate around the proposed new National Professional Qualification for Subject Leaders (see page 8) has also helped to raise the profile of middle management.

The Teacher Training Agency's list of criteria for a good middle manager may be daunting, with heads of department asked to be skilled data analysts, human resource managers, judges of good practice, leading-edge subject specialists, curriculum developers and demonstrators of fine teaching. But the agency has consistently emphasised that the only purpose of middle management development is to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

[...]

Both associations, whose members have big managerial responsibilities with expensive capital resources, health and safety risks and support staff, already provide quite extensive training for heads of department, but the humanities subject associations consider that a frequently updated handbook will serve their members well.

[...]

"You do need to look to the future and have some sort of vision, to visit lessons and look at pupils work. But most people do that now. One of the good things about Ofsted is that lessons no longer take place behind closed doors. Anne Barnes believes that the way you manage a department "depends on your subject, your clientele, the school ethos and the staff in your department".

Research by Alma Harris at Nottingham University suggests that management style is one crucial difference between good and bad heads of subject departments and personal style is very hard to change. Her work is based on studies of departments in similar schools. "Ineffective departments are not just mirror images of effective ones; they have particular cultures and ways of working."

Poor managers either had a laisser-faire approach or were very authoritarian. Both styles generated frustration, and even hostility, among the colleagues they managed. There was no shared vision, meetings focused on trivial administrative details, schemes of work had not been collectively developed and approved and were regarded as unimportant, and there was no sustained professional conversation in the departments. Furthermore, the head of department's teaching and subject knowledge was not respected by colleagues.

In contrast, the effective heads of departments stressed the importance of improving pupils' learning and experience in ways that "went beyond the usual rhetoric".

They used data in a formative way, to sharpen targets and practice. They had a clear vision of the nature of their subject, how it should be taught, and where the department should be going. They ran "talking departments", marked by constant professional discussion, both formal and informal, and were seen as leading professionals in their field.

One conclusion of this research is that very different improvement strategies are needed for heads of departments at different stages of development. It also implies that the capacity for growth of some poor heads of departments who manage to produce adequate results may be limited. In some cases, schools may have to work around long-serving middle managers rather than through them to raise quality in their subjects.

Anne Gold at London's Institute of Education believes that "people's situations are so different it is no good telling them 'how to manage'; you can't reduce management to bullet points. Each school is different and has different systems in place. "Heads of department are often appointed because they are good teachers, but they have little management experience. They need time to think, to work out ways of developing trust, teamwork and a shared vision in their department, and to try things out and evaluate them," she says.

[...]

Middle management cannot be tackled in isolation. Only senior management can set a framework that develops and encourages teachers' talents and motivation, and disseminates good practice throughout the school. A good head of department in a badly run school can do no more than create an island of good practice in a sea of muddle and incompetence.

Research shows that even failing schools have some good subjects and year heads (conversely, even highly successful schools have poor middle managers). But, if pupils in the school as a whole are not to drown, that good practice needs to be widely shared and disseminated to their colleagues.

[...]

The best way of promoting more effective middle management seems to be to devote a great deal of collective in-service time to it. That has recently happened at Clapton School for Girls in Hackney, east London. The school devised and ran its own 40-hour management course accredited by London's Institute of Education for teachers and support staff with at least two years experience. Seventeen members of staff - one-third - signed up and five of them, including the school bursar, acted as facilitators and organised the training.

It was clearly an exciting experience for all concerned. Clapton's headteacher, Cheryl Day, says that all those involved became more skilled and confident managers, good at managing their own time and stress as well as other people's. But there was also a marked whole-school effect. "People were more willing to take on management roles.

"We had good systems in place anyway, but it strengthened understanding of the rationale for them and made people want to improve systems further. The whole atmosphere of the school is better. There are more professional conversations. The course raised awareness that individual teachers can make a difference," she says.

A less welcome result was that several teachers moved on to promotion elsewhere, so the staff as a whole are less experienced. Luckily, the remaining middle managers are now well able to cope.

Staff at Anthony Gell school in Derbyshire also decided to spend in-service time and money on middle management. It's a small comprehensive, with 600 pupils aged 11 to 18, that volunteered to take part in continuing research for Alma Harris. The school raised money for four heads of departments, who felt they had never had any proper training as managers, to meet regularly over several months. It was a self-help group, tackling the management issues in their departments revealed by Alma Harris's research. According to the headteacher, Rod Leach, the group has already shown results.

"It has helped them to establish priorities, enlist the support of other staff and get on top of the merry-go-round of paper," he said. "There is a danger that it could still all peter out. But we have already seen much stronger development plans for those departments, and more clarity about who does what and how it is evaluated. There is evidence of renewed vitality and self-confidence."

Longstanding problems have been solved. However carefully national criteria and qualifications are set, there is no substitute for senior managers having set negotiated and well-accepted, whole-school procedures for assessment and evaluation of results, making time and money available for their middle managers to set and deliver their own agendas for improvement to fit the requirements of their particular school, subjects or year groups, teams of staff, and above all, students.

[...]

From Subject Management in Secondary Schools, OFSTED 1997

KP Update 11th March 2010

2010-03-11T19:30:00.003Z

Things are moving faster and faster...

Studywiz: We stopped counting the new classes who now have access. All the schools in the partnership now have access to it apart from...

CBC: Blackboard development team is being formed as we speak

Techies corner: KP is finally getting the experts together.

Ultra Thin trial: Is going ahead in nearly all schools.

Sharepoint is being trrialled with a number of classes in SBL and Mangotsfield. We are also pushing the resources side of things via the SBL Maths project.

CPD platform... The urge to get to the nitty gritty (Execs' urge...) and get ready for the harsher OFSTED inspections is focusing the mind. Hanham, Mangotsfield, SBL are leading the way with using Studywiz as a CPD platform to train teachers. The focus is on using the existing technology effectively and link it to SOW, Assessments and marking...

Webex will be able to be integrated as soon as the CPD platfrom is launched from Easter.

The new website is coming on.

Diplomas are coming on song in terms of development for the vLe...

Video storage/ access? We are working on it and are evaluating some options...

Blogs in Studywiz now accessible and being trialled with German trip.

Notebook experiment in one school complete. They work well but without a suitable network they just cannot work.

The future? Imagine having all the Web developpers together...working for their own school... but able to share their expertise... Now that would be progress.

New school: contact has been made with SEN school to see if they want to benefit from Partnership work.

You Tube: The KP channel is going from strength to strength...So much that the schools that ban YouTube are re-considering.

Issues: Still one or two people asking for a new platform- They still are missing the point. Studywiz (whether you think is good or not) is better than anything...purely because it integrates the whole of KP.

Google: We are developping a ghost platform to see how it could enhance our existing structure.

Augmented Reality: Hanham is now on the Wikitude layer and is AR ready... We need to see if it is of any use...

Today? Managed to go to all schools in one day!

The tools shouldn't matter

2010-02-08T21:04:00.000Z

The tools shouldn't matter

KP update 4th February 2010

2010-02-04T18:52:00.002Z

A first for us: a newsletter the old fashion way which will be distributed in all schools. It includes some ideas about basic class practices (Death by Power Point, Is your interactive board...interactive?) plus news on our main site currently being re-specced. Loads of new ideas (Wordle, Augmented Reality...) and all the necessary links to our You Tube channel, our blog, linkedin, Twitter etc... Some basic but interesting number crunching... 1 example:

Let’s say that the average AS student is 17 years old...
• S/he was born in 1993

• The MP3 player turned up in 1997 when s/he was 4

• Facebook was started in 2004 when s/he was 11

• You Tube was star ted in 2005 when s/he was 12

• Twitter started in 2006, when s/he was 13

• Gmail & the iPhone arrived in 2007 when s/he was 14

New technologies? They don’t know anything else...

Make sure you get your newsletter!

Sun Global Desktop demonstration

2010-01-19T10:48:00.000Z

Best presentation of SGD

2010-01-19T09:41:00.004Z

Click for a flash presentation

More on Sun Global Desktops

2010-01-19T09:30:00.001Z

Sun Global Desktop

2010-01-19T09:25:00.001Z

Online Learning Complements College Lectures

2010-01-16T21:41:00.001Z

From Maureen Downey, mdowney@ajc.com.

Bowen advises fellow academics to stop wasting precious class time on announcements and logistical details. Instead, they should e-mail that information to their tech-savvy students, he says. Professors should also rely on e-mail to send follow-up comments from class discussions and to point students to relevant articles in the media or school newspaper.

But Bowen’s most provocative suggestion is that professors deliver more lectures to students via podcasts — a pre-recorded audio program posted to a Web site and available for download — prior to class. Professors can check on whether students have watched the lecture through Internet course management systems that allow them to quiz students online.

By handling the nuts-and-bolts material on the podcast, professors are free to save their good stuff, their “aha” moments, for live lectures and create more time for debate, discussion and problem-solving, Bowen says.

“Most of the lectures on campus are terrible,” Bowen tells the Chronicle in a video segment. “And you’d be better off watching somebody at Stanford or Harvard give the same lecture or give the same content in a way that was really top-notch. If everybody had to write their own textbooks, most textbooks would be lousy. Having fewer good textbooks is better for every discipline. Having fewer and better lectures would be better for every discipline.”

With the surge in cheaper online learning alternatives, Bowen says residential colleges must recognize that their franchise is under siege and find enticements to keep students coming.

“If your students are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars extra to come to your campus and live there and eat there and sleep there, there better be more than Monday-Wednesday-Friday at 10 o’clock lectures,” he says.

As Bowen knows, those lecture classes on comparative politics or world religions will be increasingly accessible to students online at steeply discounted prices. To protect their relevance and their appeal, residential colleges must introduce more discussion and more group projects — more reasons for students to physically interact with each other and their teachers, Bowen says.

That means extending academic discussions and contact beyond the classroom and into residential halls and campus life. Otherwise, Bowen warns that students will simply find the cheapest course from online sources anywhere in the world and then take it.

Although many colleges brag about their classroom computers and their interfaces, students still place great value on human interactions. A survey in a recent British Educational Research Journal found that six of 10 college students complained that class lectures and PowerPoints were boring.

Asked what they enjoyed most about learning, students gave the highest marks to seminars, group discussion and practical sessions — the classroom activities that typically don’t involve a computer screen or projector.

Research also suggests that students may actually retain more from basic college lectures delivered via podcasts. A study by the State University of New York in Fredonia — “iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace professors?” — found that students who downloaded a podcast lecture and took notes earned much higher test scores on the material than peers who attended a traditional lecture.

In the study, the authors offered a possible explanation:

“After the in-class lecture was over, students ... could only refer to notes they had taken during that session and copies of the PowerPoint slides that were presented. Those students could never go back and hear the lecture again as many times as they wanted. The students in the podcast condition were not given any specific instructions about how to use the podcasts to study. The majority of the students took notes from the podcasts, and they listened to it multiple times.”

The increasing efficiency of the Internet in delivering information faster and cheaper to students may have greater ramification than most of us realize to the traditional role of education.

“Traditional education has been built on the basic premise that information is scarce,” Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers cautioned last year. “But with the first phase of the Internet, information became anything but scarce. ... In this next phase, where information is available in real time to any device, in any mode, it won’t be the lack of information but how quickly educators and students can sort it, analyze it and use it.” 

Handy PowerPoint to Flash Converter

2010-01-16T21:40:00.001Z

From Nicole Fougere

I've been sending a few Litmos clients over to the iSpring Solutions website lately to make use of their very cool PowerPoint to Flash converter and eLearning Authoring tools. These guys were part of the DevLearn09 Expo so I saw them there strutting their stuff.

If you haven't checked them out yet, they're definitely worth a look. They have some big featured customer names on their site (Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, IBM, Greyhound - just to name a few) and some great testimonials too. Here's what one customer is saying and I think this may well give some insight in to what makes these guys tick -

"iSpring is the only product out there that achieves almost 100% faithful conversion of even the most complex animation sequences, along with incredible ease of use, extensive customisation options and world-class technical support."
For more information on screen recorders - free or pay for, web-based or by download - check out the post called Top Screen Recording Tools.

Great Workplace eLearning Posts from 2009

2010-01-16T21:39:00.000Z

Great Workplace eLearning Posts from 2009

Mobile Learning Makes Kids Better Behaved

2010-01-16T21:38:00.000Z

Mobile Learning Makes Kids Better Behaved

Screenr: Create screencasts and broadcast them on Twitter

2010-01-15T20:14:00.001Z

Go to http://screenr.com/

According to them:
"Now you can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet. Just click the record button and you'll have a ready-to-tweet screencast in seconds"

Using Twitter to spread multimedia...excellent!

AR and teaching today...

2010-01-15T20:06:00.000Z

The growth of Geotagging is enabling web 3 to take off and bring the web to the individual via the mundane camera app on your G3 phone. Point your screen and admire the scenery... with the relevant items on your view finder highlighted on an overlay and salient information displayed. When you point your camera at a great building, you can find out about its history with a simple press of the screen. AR places you physically at the heart of the information network. This is also available for geography (Wikitude), specific places (Nearest tube, London bus routes,), buildings and things (SREngine), and even...people (Polar Rose)! If you want to find out who is twitting what around you, just use TwittARound and suddenly your screen comes alive with information about your immediate twitting world. Using http://qik.com/ you can use your camera to send your reality to others 1000's miles away and augment their reality...

Is AR relevant for teaching?

When traditional subjects are being shot and when basic knowledge (culture anyone?) is fast disappearing, AR might bring the zing back into learning by pushing information to the students' screen.

Anyway, why mention AR and make everything even more complex? Despite all the amazing technological solutions out there (solutions to problems that don't exist often, but that's another story), few percolate down to the class environment. Death by Power Point is still often seen as evidence of one's ICT heightened literacy level. But cuts are coming up in the education world...

Isn't it time to set in stone what has already been achieved in terms of teaching in a Teaching curriculum? The National Curriculum has focused the content, let's now focus on cementing the delivery... Let's push forward documents making clear how to use the interactive board effectively, how to use power point, how to use social platforms, how to use data etc... Once this is set in stone, we will be in a good place to see what AR can offer.

Update: 12/09/2011

Well, with new schools and academies, the National Curriculum has lost its foundations. So it seems that we are going backward. The strong leader will ensure that his/ her staff keeps moving forward. This is when a strong set of values come in handy to support your vision...

What is Geotagging?

2010-01-15T17:52:00.003Z

geotagging

From http://www.eye.fi/how-it-works/features/geotagging

what is geotagging?
With geotagging, your photos are labeled, or “tagged”, to show where they were taken. What does that mean, exactly? View photos on a map. Search photos by location. And, 2 years after coming back from Venezia, you can see that it’s in Italy (without resorting to Wikipedia!)… all without lifting a finger.

search. view. share.
With an Eye-Fi card, the photos fly right into iPhoto, or Flickr, or any other geo-friendly service. They automatically become searchable in Places or on a map by city name or country.

geotagging on your computer
Desktop applications like iPhoto ‘09, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6 (PC only), Google’s Picasa (PC only), Ovolabs Geophoto (Mac only) and Microsoft’s Pro Photo Tools (PC only) allow you to browse, search and organize photos according to where they were taken.

happens automatically
With Eye-Fi’s Geotagging Service, you take the photos, and let Eye-Fi do the rest. You won’t have to spend your time downloading, importing, or entering the info for every single photo. Just turn your camera on, and photos fly wirelessly, embedded with their geotags. Snap photos. Turn your camera on. Voila!

lifetime service included
Eye-Fi Geo, Eye-Fi Explore Video and Eye-Fi Pro X2 cards come with free, unlimited, lifetime geotagging.

upgrade your card
Don’t have an Eye-Fi Geo, Eye-Fi Explore Video or an Eye-Fi Pro X2 card? No worries. You can upgrade anytime for only $14.99/year.

geotagging online
Websites like Flickr, Picasa, Nikon myPicturetown, PhanPhare and SmugMug allow you to browse through your photos on a map, search by location, and transform your latest trip into a journey friends and family can partake in.

so how does Eye-Fi’s Geotagging Service work?
Geotagging is made possible through Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) technology. Using built-in Wi-Fi, the Eye-Fi Card senses surrounding Wi-Fi networks as you take pictures. When photos are uploaded, the Eye-Fi Service then adds the geotags to your photos.

the technology behind WPS
Our partner, Skyhook Wireless, has mapped millions of geographic coordinates around the world. The Eye-Fi Service adds the geotag to each photo’s metadata section (the EXIF header) when photos are uploaded.

no need to be at a preset Wi-Fi hotspot
WPS works whether you’ve added the wireless network to your list of uploading networks or not. This means that you don’t need to be at hotspot, and you don’t need to have the network key, for your photos to be geotagged. There simply needs to be Wi-Fi networks within range.

» Remember – the Eye-Fi Geo, the Eye-Fi Pro X2 and the Eye-Fi Explore Video cards include unlimited Geotagging.

Bett 2010 Interview with Professor Stephen Heppell

2010-01-15T17:30:00.002Z

RIGHT STUDENTS RIGHT COURSE A PARTNERSHIP APPROACH TO PRE DIPLOMA -

2010-01-15T15:25:00.002Z

RIGHT STUDENTS RIGHT COURSE A PARTNERSHIP APPROACH TO PRE DIPLOMA -

Kingswood Partnership Blog Cloud Overview

2010-01-15T14:49:00.000Z

created at TagCrowd.com

Augmented Reality, Geotagging and e-Learning

2010-01-15T10:31:00.001Z

Augmented Reality

The growth of Geotagging is enabling web 3 to take off and bring the web to the individual via the mundane camera app on your G3 phone. Point your screen and admire the scenery… with the relevant items on your view finder highlighted on an overlay and information displayed as well as links to the internet… When you point your camera at a great building, you can access information by a simple press of the screen. It places you physically at the heart of the information network. This is also available for geography (Wikitude), specific places (Nearest tube, London bus routes,), buildings and things (SREngine), and even…people (Polar Rose)!

If you want to find out who is twitting what around you, just use TwittARound and suddenly your screen comes alive with information about your immediate twitting world.

Using http://qik.com/ you can use your camera to send your reality to others 1000’s miles away…

When the levels of inquisitiveness are getting lower and lower all the time in our classes, AR might bring the the zing back into learning. How about transforming your class into a physical learning environment... Point your mobile platform at a topic title and access the interactive exercises automatically? Access the lesson notes? A classroom with information hotspots? The mind boggles...

KP update January 2010

2010-01-14T18:30:00.000Z

List of course running on the vLe. Key interactive exercises are up and more content ia available in the background ready to be activated.

Biology

12B/Bi-DD

12C/Bi-DD
12D/Bi-MM
12A/Bi-GG
12A/Bi-GG
12B/Bi-DD
12B/Bi-DD
12B/Bi-SS
12B/Bi-SS
12C/Bi-DD
12C/Bi-DD
12C/Bi-DD
12C/Bi-KK
12C/Bi-KK
12D/Bi-MM
12D/Bi-SH
12D/Bi-SH

English

125/En1a
125/En1b
125/En2
12A/En2-K
12D/En-DD
12D/En-DD

French

12C/Fr-DH
12A/Fr-HG
12C/Fr-DH

Geography

12A/Gg-MM
12D/Gg-DD
12A/Gg-MM
12C/Gg-HH
12D/Gg-DD
12D/Gg-DD
12D/Gg-KK
13A/Gg-HH
13A/Gg-HH
13B/Gg-KK
13B/Gg-KK
13C/Gg-MM
13C/Gg-MM
13D/Gg-DD
13D/Gg-DD

History

12A/Hi-DD
12B/Hi-SM
12A/Hi-DD
12A/Hi-DD
12A/Hi-DD
12B/Hi-HH
12B/Hi-SM
12B/Hi-SM
12B/Hi-SM
12B/Hi-SM
12C/Hi-GG

12C/Hi-KK
12C/Hi-KK
12D/Hi-DD
12D/Hi-DD

Italian

11p/In1
11p/In2
12A/In-SS
13K/In-GG

Physics

12A/Ph-KK
12A/Ph-KK
12A/Ph-KK
12B/Ph-HG
12B/Ph-HG
12B/Ph-HG
12B/Ph-HG
12C/Ph-MM
12D/Ph-DD

Psychology

12A/PzaMM
12A/PzbMM
12B/Pz-MM
12C/Pz-DD
12C/Pz-SS
12A/Pz-DD
12A/Pz-HH
12A/PzaMM
12B/Pz-GG
12B/Pz-GG
12B/Pz-GG
12B/Pz-GG
12B/Pz-MM
12B/Pz-MM
12C/Pz-DD
12C/Pz-DD
12C/Pz-SS
12C/Pz-SS
12C/Pz-SS
12C/Pz-SS
12D/Pz-KK
12D/Pz-KK
12D/Pz-KK
13A/Pz-GG
13A/Pz-KK
13A/Pz-KK
13B/Pz-DD
13B/Pz-SS
13B/Pz-SS
13C/PzaMM
13C/PzaMM
13D/Pz-DD
13D/Pz-SS
13D/Pz-SS

Sociology

12A/So-HD
12B/So-SS
12A/So-HD
12A/So-HD
12A/So-HD
12A/So-HD
12B/So-SS
12B/So-SS
12B/So-SS
12B/So-SS

Useful tools you might not know...

2010-01-13T19:44:00.002Z

Here are some tools you might not know about:

Audacity: Free cross-platform audio recorder, useful for creating MP3 files.
Issuu: Free web-based digital magazine creation.
Jing: Free screen capture and screencasting. For Windows and Mac.
Ning: Make your own wiki portal
Palbee: Free web-based video conferencing, meetings, and chat rooms.
Schooltube: Student video and media sharing for entertainment and classroom use.
Screenjelly: Free desktop recording with audio. Runs in browser, nothing to download.
Screentoaster: Free screen recording with audio. Runs in browser, nothing to download.
Teachertube: An online community for sharing instructional teacher videos.
WizIQ: Free web-based video conferencing and desktop and screen sharing.

Microsoft vision of 2010

2010-01-13T13:11:00.001Z

Get up to speed with what Google offers.

2010-01-12T19:36:00.000Z

Even if the 1st part might not be your direct concern, the rest will be gold dust! Well worth watching. Best Inset if you are not up to speed with Google.

Create resources

2010-01-12T16:12:00.000Z

You know you need to create content, but what does that really mean?

View more presentations from Barbra Gago.

Myth 1: Rapid E-Learning is not E-Learning!

2010-01-06T18:19:00.001Z

Myth 1: Rapid E-Learning Is not E-Learning! »

From Rapid e-Learning blog

In this series, we’ll look at some popular myths about rapid elearning.

Because the tools are easy to use and just about anyone can create “elearning” with them, some assert that the tools create bad elearning. It’s the same argument you hear about PowerPoint. While this might be true about some of the elearning courses developed with rapid elearning tools, noted elearning archaeologist, Werner von Oppelbaumer, is quick to point out that crappy elearning existed years before the rapid development tools came on the scene. In fact, he goes on to say that crappy training existed before elearning was a form of training.

This isn’t just a recent phenomenon either. Apparently, thousands of years ago, men in bed sheets would pull productive farmers from their fields and bore them with lectures on the nature of justice and the ideal republic.

Look, I’ll admit there’s a lot of bad elearning out there. I’ve even created some. However, it doesn’t exist because of the tools. It exists because the training isn’t designed well. You cannot blame the tools for poor learning design. The secret is learning to use the tools appropriately.

The reality is that having rapid elearning tools and a strategy to use them is important in today’s business climate.

To get the most out of the tools you need to include sound instructional design and use the tool’s multimedia capabilities to create engaging and interactive training.

Use a template. One problem with poor e-learning modules is that you have users who aren’t trained instructional designers. It’s important to help them learn some basic instructional design principles. If you cannot spend a lot of time with them, at least create a simple template to help them organize the information. You might not get the most dynamic training course, but it will help move it in the right direction. In addition, don’t underestimate the abilities of your subject matter experts. Most want to do a good job; they just might need a little help.
Look at what others are doing. You’ll get a better idea of what’s good and bad if you look at what others are doing. There are a lot of examples of elearning online. In addition, look at industry award winners.
Burgers and fries. If I’m in a hurry, I’m more apt to stop at McDonald’s than at a fine French restaurant for a seven-course meal. I wouldn’t make a regular meal of fast food, but many times it’s just what I need….or all I want to invest in. The same can be said for training. Maybe there’s a time where simple click-and-read training is all you need.

Rapid doesn’t mean crapid! You are in control and can determine the quality of what you produce.

Top tips for Twitter

2010-01-06T18:16:00.000Z

By David Hopkins

Once people have found out I’ve been using Twitter for all of about 4 months now they think I’m an expert (I’m not, and do not profess to be) and keep asking me; what is it all about, then?

Good question, and not one I’ve really been able to answer for myself, let alone answers for someone who hasn’t spent time trying different things to see if it works for them or not.

So, in an effort to work through my own thoughts, and to provide something for others to benefit from, here are some ‘top tips’;

Work out what you want to get out of Twitter. If you don’t do this, then Twitter will be a waste of time. if you are an eLearning specialist, or you are developing new mobile learning (mLearning) technology, or you just want to talk to people who like to run marathons, then these are the kind of people you should be looking for. Use the Twitter Search to find instances of that word, and use the Profile Search to find people with interests that match or complement the reason why you are on Twitter. Without a purpose you will find Twitter confusing and worthless.
Read this: Twitter Search to Become Real Search
Make sure you put some relevant and interesting information in your Twitter profile. I often ignore and block people who put things like “mum, sister, daughter, and friend to everyone” as it means nothing to me and why I might want to follow you. I am using Twitter to find like-minded professionals (and amateur eLearners) so look for people who use the profile to advertise their eLearning prowess.

You can put a picture of yourself in your profile, use it wisely! I don’t like seeing pictures of people drunk, so it isn’t a good look on your profile. Also, using a picture that looks like you’ve taken it from your passport may not be the best way to ‘advertise’ yourself (unless it’s the best picture you’ve got).
Read this: 6 Tips for Using Your Twitter Profile to Get New Followers

Share and share alike. When you find something that you like, and want to share it with your own network of followers, don’t be selfish and pass it off as your own work, use the ‘RT’ (re-tweet) and acknowledge the originator. This ‘kindness’ will also mean that people will click through to you if someone retweets one of your post … thus you will gain more followers as a result.
Read this: The Infectious Power Of Word Of Mouth

Use URL shortening service. There are a few services online that will give you a new URL that is shorted than your original, much better for using when you’re limited to 140 characters (see above image for example). Good services to use are TinyURL and Bit.ly.
Look at people who follow someone in your network. Look at the people who follow someone who you already follow, there could be a few good contacts for there too.

Don’t be afraid to ‘block’ people who you don’t think you want following you. These can be anything from businesses trying to sell something, automated accounts that don’t have any visible purpose, someone who has nothing in common with you. You can identify these kinds of accounts by looking at their follower/updates list; if they are following 10,000 people, have 20 followers, and only 1 update then I’d safely say it’s an automated account and can be ignored!
Don’t worry about numbers. Don’t worry about the fact you have only 5 or 6 followers, this will grow the more you use Twitter, the more people you follow, and the more you use/post to Twitter. Remember that everyone started off with no followers at the beginning. If you know colleagues or friends on Twitter then find them and start testing things with them.
Use a desktop service to manage your Twitter account. I use Tweetdeck as I can have some ’searches’ saved that pull back results from Twitter (not just those people I follow) on any search term (eLearning, mLearning, Blackboard, etc) as well as quickly and easily see retweets , mentions, and messages. I can also group my followers into different colums so I can follow different people from different specialities.

Use #Hashtags. Hashtags are great for pulling people together on a specific topic. They are being used to pull conferences and/or training together. Finding a hashtag for a chosen specialisation will also find you more people to follow (and can follow you, if you use it).
Read this: Twitter and hashtags at conferences – organiser-user viewpoint
Do more than just tweet about yourself. If all you do is tweet about yourself and what you’ve just done (work, home, hobby, etc) then you will probably find your list of followers drop. By engaging your followers on their content, by retweeting (see above) and adding links to web articles you find you will be “adding value” to your network and the people in it.
Be polite. No one likes a smart-arse, and no one likes to be flamed. You will make contacts and a network from all around the world, but it takes time and this relationship is likely to be tentative for longer than a traditional networking opportunity that was made face-to-face.
OK, that covers the ‘how to use it’ elements of twitter .. now on to the ‘why should I use it?’

Enhance the classroom experience. Yes, that even means letting your students online with laptops and other devices when they’re in your classroom. Use a hashtag and ask your students to use it on each tweet; this means you can easily collate tweets together at the end of the alloted task/activity/time.
Read this: Twitterati in the academy
Read this: Professors experiment with Twitter as teaching tool
Read this: Twitter Conference Ideas : eLearning Technology
Bring student ideas, reading, emotions, etc into your world. Whether Twitter is used in the classroom or just around each timetabled seminar/lecture time, Twitter and it’s use can add value to the contents or your teaching, and you’ll end up learning from your learners.

Widen your network. By finding and following people in different parts of the world I am getting different ideas and techniques for eLearning that I would not have necessarily worked out on my own. Twitter can improve your working knowledge if you let it.
Read this: Twitter: A Tool for Academia to Connect, Share, and Grow Relationships
Remember, Twitter has been described as “the largest staffroom you’ll ever find”. Use it wisely!

Read more: http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/twitter/twitter-tips-for-teachers-educators-2/#ixzz0brDQh9UJ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Share Alike

The internet semantic web 3

2010-01-06T18:11:00.000Z

The Advantages of eLearning

2010-01-06T18:06:00.002Z

The Advantages of eLearning
By Karen L. Jones

Technology has revolutionized business; now it must revolutionize learning.

In the 21st century, people have to learn more than ever before. Especially for global organizations, live classroom-based training is becoming too costly and cumbersome. Even if employees had the time to attend all the courses and seminars and to read all the books and reports they should to remain up-to-date in their area of work, the cost of such learning would be prohibitive. The need to transform how organizations learn points to a more modern, efficient, and flexible alternative: eLearning. The mission of corporate eLearning is to supply the workforce with an up-to-date and cost-effective program that yields motivated, skilled, and loyal knowledge workers.

Anywhere, anytime, anyone.

The Internet can offer the logical solution for a company’s education and training objectives. Approximately 80% of the professional workforce already uses computers on the job. Technical obstacles, such as access, standards, infrastructure, and bandwidth, will not be an issue in a few years. The growth of the World Wide Web, high-capacity corporate networks, and high-speed desktop computers will make learning available to people 24 hours a day, seven days a week around the globe. This will enable businesses to distribute training and critical information to multiple locations easily and conveniently. Employees can then access training when it is convenient for them, at home or in the office.

Substantial cost savings due to elimination of travel expenses.

When delivered through technology based solutions, training is less expensive per end user due to scaleable distribution and the elimination of high salaries for trainers and consultants. The biggest benefit of eLearning, however, is that it eliminates the expense and inconvenience of getting the instructor and students in the same place. According to Training Magazine, corporations save between 50-70% when replacing instructor-led training with electronic content delivery. Opting for eLearning also means that courses can be pared into shorter sessions and spread out over several days or weeks so that the business would not lose an employee for entire days at a time. Workers can also improve productivity and use their own time more efficiently, as they no longer need to travel or fight rush-hour traffic to get to a class.

Just-in-time access to timely information.

Web-based products allow instructors to update lessons and materials across the entire network instantly. This keeps content fresh and consistent and gives students immediate access to the most current data. Information can be retrieved just before it is required, rather than being learned once in a classroom and subsequently forgotten. Training Magazine reported that technology-based training has proven to have a 50–60% better consistency of learning than traditional classroom learning (c-learning).

Higher retention of content through personalized learning.

Technology-based solutions allow more room for individual differences in learning styles. They also provide a high level of simulation that can be tailored to the learner’s level of proficiency. With 24 x 7 access, people can learn at their own pace and review course material as often as needed. Since they can customize the learning material to their own needs, students have more control over their learning process and can better understand the material, leading to a 60% faster learning curve, compared to instructor-led training. The delivery of content in smaller units, called “chunks,” contributes further to a more lasting learning effect. Whereas the average content retention rate for an instructor-led class is only 58%, the more intensive eLearning experience enhances the retention rate by 25 – 60%.1 Higher retention of the material puts a higher value on every dollar spent on training.

Improved collaboration and interactivity among students.

In times when small instructor-led classes tend to be the exception, electronic learning solutions can offer more collaboration and interaction with experts and peers as well as a higher success rate than the live alternative. Teaching and communication techniques which create an interactive online environment include case studies, story-telling, demonstrations, role-playing, simulations, streamed videos, online references, personalized coaching and mentoring, discussion groups, project teams, chat rooms, e-mail, bulletin boards, tips, tutorials, FAQs, and wizards.

Distance education can be more stimulating and encourage more critical reasoning than a traditional large instructor-led class because it allows the kind of interaction that takes place most fully in small group settings. Studies have shown that students who take online courses are typically drawn into the subject matter of the class more deeply than in a traditional course because of the discussions they get involved in.2 This engagement is further facilitated by the fact that instructors do not monopolize attention in an online environment. Another study found that online students had more peer contact with others in the class, enjoyed it more, spent more time on class work, understood the material better, and performed, on average, 20% better than students who were taught in the traditional classroom.

Online training is less intimidating than instructor-led courses.

Students taking an online course enter a risk-free environment in which they can try new things and make mistakes without exposing themselves. This characteristic is particularly valuable when trying to learn soft skills, such as leadership and decision making. A good learning program shows the consequences of students’ actions and here/why they went wrong. After a failure, students can go back and try again. This type of learning experience eliminates the embarrassment of failure in front of a group.

With all of these advantages of taking classes online, it is hard to imagine why anyone would opt to sit in a lecture to learn new information. There are online classes available free on a multitude of topics, just start surfing, find one to your liking, and start learning!

ENDNOTES

1 Jack E. Bowsher, “Revolutionizing Workforce Performance: A Systems Approach to Mastery,” 1998; D. Peoples, Presentations Plus, 1992; Training Magazine, 1998.

2 Greg Kearsley, A Guide to Online Education, 1997; Dennis A. Trinkle, “Distance Education: a Means to an End, No More, No Less,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1999; Colin McCormack and David Jones, “Building a Web-based Education System,” 1997.

For off-the shelf and customized eLearning programs, visithttp://www.bryanttraining.com/elearning.htm Sign up today for an Office course for only $50.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karen_L._Jones

http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Advantages-of-eLearning&id=603386

Here are some awesome e Learning templates to help you quickly build online courses. (and they will look great!)

KP e-Learning development cycles

2010-01-06T11:45:00.000Z

Push = Put resources on-line

01/12/09 to 04/12/09 Meet And Greet cycle

07/12/09 to 18/12/09 Meet And Push cycle

04/01/10 to 29/01/10 Push cycle and training (Massive 'push' to have all AS resources ready for 28th January -KP e-Learning stakeholders meeting-, including training at BETT, work on Cloud Computing with Sanako.)

01/02/10 to 12/02/10 Meet And Greet cycle (Assess impact of previous push)

22/02/10 to 05/03/10 Meet And Push cycle (Start working on creation of next focus: A" and Diplomas)

08/03/10 to 19/03/10 Push cycle

22/03/10 to 02/04/10 Meet And Greet Cycle

19/04/10 to 30/04/10 Meet And Push cycle

04/05/10 onward Push cycle to update AS resources, get SW ready for next year and deal with parental data access for 09 2010

Cloud computing: a reality

2009-12-22T10:21:00.000Z

When the buzz in schools is: to what extent should I virtualise? Do I go thin or ultra-thin? How do I reduce my ICT costs? Can I share my infrastructure with other local schools? Thinking ahead might be a good idea.

Infrastructure in house or external: the fundamentals...

2009-12-13T20:18:00.003Z

Dick Carlson says:

December 12, 2009 at 12:58 AM

Do you keep lots of soup in your pantry, or eat out when you’re hungry? If your car breaks down, do you fix it yourself or have it towed to the shop? When you’re looking for a mate, do you hire a matchmaker or just start asking people out?
The relationship between keeping your IP inside the tent (very secure, lots of control, known situation) to having someone store it down the road in a dark, mysterious cave has always been a balance. And I suspect that it will continue to be a balancing act for many years to come.
You’ve done a good job identifying many of the issues that confront enterprise buyers as they think about whether or not to rely on someone “outside the tent” of their network to support their IP. But probably the biggest question is “What happens when it goes wrong?”
INTERNAL
Your e-learning system won’t work, and you can fire the network admin and hire a new one. This is the “Blame The Dude” model of employee management, practiced by many companies.
EXTERNAL
Your e-learning system won’t work, and you have to pay $100,000 to move your content, it takes six months, and might not even all belong to you — depending on the TOS that you have in place.
This is one of the first conversations I have with a client when they want to talk about where their precious IP will live. Once they’ve gotten over the philosophical hurdle, it’s all downhill from there.

Online teaching improves classroom

2009-12-13T18:59:00.002Z

Online teaching improves classroom teaching

By Tony Bates, on December 7th, 2009

Kolowich, S. (2009) Learning from online Inside Higher Education, December 7

Well, duh! I’m sure that anyone with instructional design experience who has worked with classroom teachers to develop online courses has heard that this also ends up in improving their classroom teaching as well. However, this is now being formally researched at Purdue University at Calumet.

The real significance of this though is how badly prepared for teaching are university professors. “Most of the professors who teach at the university level have had no experience with pedagogy or instruction in general,” says Janet Buckenmeyer, chair of the instructional technology master’s program at Calumet. “They’re content experts, not teaching experts.”

We all know this, of course, but why does the system continually fail to address this issue? Welcome to the only profession where you need no training for half your work

The basics of e-learning: Quick guide for Newly Qualified teachers

2009-12-03T16:48:00.003Z

Kingswood Partnership just launched e-learning at The Grange and I had a special session with Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs). The bottom line if you want e-learning to have an impact on results?

1) Putting resources (power point, worksheets etc...) online has no impact on learning. It makes sense to organise your resources online but it won't have any impact on learning. Organise your cutlery cupboards by all means, but don't think it will improve the food.

2) If you don't have a detailed quality Scheme of Work nor an assessment structure, give e-learning a miss. e-Learning is about supporting what you do in class. If you don't know where you are going, there's no point calling for a taxi.

3) Having information online isn't important, it's what students do with this information which is important. This brings you to interactive exercises and online assessments integrated with feedback (automatic or teacher led).

4) You cannot have brand new interactive exercises for all levels in one go (even if the Kingswood Partnership will do them for you). So, at what level do you target these interactive exercises? At the high end to stretch students?

5) Take on board experience and work on supporting a base line. The last audit we conducted on exam performance shows that students are more often let down by gaps in their basic knowledge rather than gaps at the higher levels. If they cannot cope with the higher levels it is always because of gaps of understanding in the basics...Ergo...Focus on the basics. Have wheels? Will travel! Have will to travel? Where are my wheels?

6) Next step: You contact me with your SOW, I develop the Interactive content, we launch, we review with students and students take in charge the running of the information highway between your school and KP.

Are learning management systems doomed?

2009-12-01T18:52:00.000Z

By Tony Bates, on November 16th, 2009

As usual, George Siemen’s blog is being provocative in his November 10, 2009 posting: Futue of learning: LMS or SNS, in which he argues that Facebook is the model for education in the future, not Moodle. The discussion following his blog is also worth following.
My only comments on his blog:
1. Why does it have to be either/or? An argument can be made for a tool for managing content, as well as giving learners tools to build networks and connections. For instance, I’m using a content management system (WordPress) which I find very helpful for structuring and organizing information, so I can find stuff easily, fitting my requirements (not Google’s). The same would apply to teachers (and students) using LMSs.
2. It doesn’t matter what tools are provided if teachers don’t have a suitable philosophy of teaching to exploit fully the tools. An instructor well versed in constructivism can teach in a learner-centred way with an LMS such as Moodle, but a teacher with only a transmissive model of teaching will be lost with Facebook. So without a suitable understanding of pedagogy, it doesn’t really matter what tools you use.

Kingswood Partnership update 01/12/09

2009-12-01T16:50:00.004Z

These are why, according to Tony Bates, e-Learning is a tool to be reckoned with:
* because it’s ‘cool’
* to enhance the quality of teaching
* to increase access and flexibility
* to provide the skills needed in the 21st century
* to improve cost-effectiveness
As he seems to be the god of e-Learning, I thought it worth adding our perspective...

I don't know how cool it actually is, but it fits better with the ways students learn. A good e-Learning platform (ie any platform used properly... Let's move away from mine is bigger than yours...please!) will enhance the quality of teaching by enabling teachers to have quick access to their resources. The real fundamental impact of e-Learning is that it will enhance Learning... We already have examples in KP where the vLe is directly responsible for students taking responsibility for their learning.

As far as improving cost-effectiveness, e-learning is the way forward as it does indeed increase access and flexibility. As far as learning 'bang' for e-learning 'buck' though, it is worth noting that research is in agreement that most e-learning platforms have had no discernible impact on achievement... unless they hosted interactive exercises which were totally in sync with teachers' Schemes of Works and boards' requirements. In other words most vLes don't work because vLes are still misunderstood and badly deployed...(If you have no intention of reading the whole blog, now is a good time to jump to the last 2 paragraphs!). The real impact on cost effectiveness will be realised when we accept that current networks are no more scalable, are over complex and will need to move to ultra thin clients... When this happens, e-Learning will have an altogether better impact on the bottom line (whether the new n wireless standard delivers or not...But that's another story- See other posts).

So it seems that Tony Bates' comments are broadly spot on.

That's enough of the context... As far as KP is concerned most of the schools have re-launched. All the schools that have re-launched with full management support are reaping the rewards already. 100S of new folders, 100s of new interactive resources, 100s of students benefiting at http://www.kingswoodonline.org.uk/ ...but it should be thousands. Still, early days. When teachers provide top quality Schemes of Works (Business in Kingsfield and Geography in Downend for example), sorting out the vLe component is easy. If you have no SOW, why not call me in for help and we'll jump a level and go straight to a student friendly interactive one...

The KP site (http://www.kingswoodpartnership.org.uk/) has new additions all the time, if you keep up with our Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/kingswoodvle) you will know. If you go to the curriculum area, there is now a section where you can find out who else in the partnerships teaches the same course from the same board. You are not alone! The news corner on the home page is getting busier so the KP site is becoming the normal means of disseminating information fast.

We are working on integrating Survey Monkey to our site so that everyone can actually cope with crunching data linked to promoting the student voice. Should be done any day now.

Infrastructure? Well as hinted at above the future is clear, it is thin/ ultra thin. The real question is do the schools go there individually or do they go there individually with KP in the background to buy the kit? I think this is the moment where KP will be worth its weight in gold as it will be able to support individual schools SDP's whilst bringing muscle to the buying market.

Talking about weight in gold, I believe some nice heavy KP plates will soon be making their way towards each centre... Pride is one's institution is a necessary step towards success.

Visits? Some of them but to be fair we know what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are. We know the answers, we just have to learn to work together to implement the solution. One exception though... I visited 1 college with outstanding results... How did they do it? Simply by focusing on the basics of teaching. You will have had a blow by blow account on Twitter if you follow us. Anyway, amazing clear SOWs, INSET led by examiners, amazingly clear assessment structure, not one teacher experimenting with anything unless it was properly managed (There are too many teachers playing with peripheral issues when they should be concentrating on the fundamentals of teaching...), clear monitoring leading to tutoring, and, last but not least (cue drum roll) a vLe focused on supporting the fundamentals of the subject (I know, that's what I have been pushing for a while and it's nice to see that it's the correct way forward!).

Overall update? Simple, when we work together, as a partnership, we have a direct impact on our students. When we refuse to share, when we refuse to learn from each other, when we don't have schemes of works, then we fail our students. I am pleased to report that this attitude is disappearing fast!

Daniel
(Known as E-Steve I gather!)

Thin client computers

2009-11-20T15:11:00.007Z

Benefits:

Less energy is consumed
Streamlined computer security
longer lifespan
reduced it costs
reduced purchasing costs

Risks:

Not feasible for graphic intensive applications
uncertain lifespans after 3 years
additionality - only reduces if replacing)
Consumer preference
Thin clients have multiple benefits that help to make this project sustainable. In addition to lower energy consumption, streamlined computer security reduces the IT costs. Also a longer lifespan decreases the material used in comparison to a traditional desktop. Thin client units cost less than their desktop equivalents and need to be replaced less often, which lowers the purchasing cost for departments. In total this project will reduce the carbon footprint of the campus, and drastically reduce costs.
This project is not a panacea for all computing environments. It will not work well in graphically intense situations, it is therefore important that these are implemented in appropriate locations. Initial user impressions will affect its acceptance throughout the campus. The actual units are rated for 10 years of use, but field experience will dictate the true lifespan. Carbon savings rely on the fact that thin clients will replace old desktops and not be additional.

The future of Wireless has started. N and the Edge network

2009-11-20T14:51:00.004Z

Google Wave in education (As we are trialling Webex!)

2009-11-16T20:21:00.003Z

from:
David Hopkins eLearning 2009-11-16

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

Not necessarily about Wave in education, but a damn fine place to start to understand where it came from and where, possibly, we could take it.

Jane Hart: Google Wave Reading List

Again, not a link for Wave in education specifically, but Jane has put this list together of a fairly comprehensive list of reading material. Jane is keeping this list current so be sure to revisit in a month or two as more and more people use, and perfect the use of, Google Wave.

Science Blogs: Surfing the Google Wave

“The best way that I’ve managed to think of a ‘wave’ is as a unit of on-line communication. The clever bit is that a wave can be an e-mail conversation, an online chat, a collaborative document, or a blog post, or even a little bit of all of them, depending on how you and others choose to interact with it.”

Donald Clark: Learning Waves from Google

“Waves are hosted conversations combine email, messenger and social networking and media sharing – faster, more like real F2F group conversation with playback, drag and drop from desktop to browser.”

Read Write Web: Google Wave Use Cases: Education

“… it is clear that Google Wave has potential to be very useful in the education system, particularly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. Three students experimented with just that in a lecture; the resulting notes were said to be “more complete” than if Wave hadn’t been used.”

So You Want To Teach: The Power of Potential: 19 Educational Uses for Google Wave

“What is the potential? Well, clearly it has some pretty far-reaching possibilities in the use of collaborative education and group work in computer-enabled classrooms. But I’ve been thinking about some other school implementations that could be possible:

Curriculum planning
Departmental communications
Intercampus
Plan parent conferences with multiple teachers and multiple schedules
Share links to web resources
Campus improvement planning
Schoolwide calendar / scheduling”
… please read the article for the full list of 19 uses.

Dan Stucke: Google Wave – the beginning of the end for VLEs?

“Many seem to have dubbed it the ‘new email’ already. The collaboration possibilities in and between classrooms look fantastic. I’ve been a big fan of using wikis as collaborative documents and this looks like it will take the concept of a wiki to a new level. The ability to drag and drop files into a collaborative document in a browser for instance lowers the technical skills required for working with these kinds of technologies considerably.”

Ben Parr: Google Wave – a complete guide

“One possibility: Google Wave Embeds may be a real-time replacement to static comments. If Google perfects wave embeds, you could even see YouTube.com comments replaced with waves, although it is way too early to make any calls on the potential of this.”

Chris Duke: Google Wave & Education, First Impressions

“Over time my initial impression may prove to be exaggerated, but at the moment, I’m fairly comfortable saying that Wave may represent the next step in the evolution of online collaboration and communication, and the impact on and relevance to the education sector could or should be rather significant.”

Brandon Buttars: Google Wave in Online Education

“Google Wave will speed up communication and make communication more interactive, real, and more clear. I can’t wait to see how the internet evolves as Google Wave development becomes stable and releases. Be ready for the internet to change as we know it! Along with the change in the internet will come a major change in education and business.”

Educause: 7 ThingsYou Need to Know abut Wave

“Whether Google Wave replaces existing [VLE] applications, it will [likely] move communication from text alone into a wider environment more in tune with the variety of options we have come to expect from Web 2.0 technologies that enrich the human exchange of ideas.”

Kingswood Partnership update 02/11/09

2009-11-02T17:23:00.005Z

Today we have just re-launched the Kingswood Partnership site at www.kingswoodpartnership.org.uk . It has links to curriculum content held on different platforms. So far we have Hanham, SBL and Kingsfield in the loop. We hope to have The Grange and Downend next.

Unfortunately the content is not linked to the actual sites. The point for now is for teachers to be aware of what is going on elsewhere in the partnership to promote the sharing of ideas.

When we are ready to share ideas we'll use Webex as our video conferencing facility if the current trial works well. In the short term our Twitter feed www.twitter.com/kingswoodvle will keep individuals updated as far as possible in real time. If you don't have time to read these updates, twitter is for you.

The new site has also started to focus on parents, we'll see how this develops in the future.

Dan Kingdon from Hanham has joined the e-Learning team and is busy helping out with the new site for now. He will soon move to helping out with the development of the Studywiz platform.

Studywiz? Well it is now better organised thanks to a lot of help from Jo (SBL). It is not a free for all anymore. Whilst anyone can jump in, it probably would better to contact me so that I can sort out passwords and classlists for all.

I am looking forward to doing the different launches in the Partnership over the next two weeks. In the meantime I am also busy advertising the forthcoming Kingsfield Internet event. They have asked for KP help and KP will help make this event a success.

Mathswatch is now up and running for Mangotsfield and we are looking forward to see how it impacts the learning. CBC is pioneering e-learning with the Hair and Beauty diploma, Downend is developing work in Art, Physics, EPQ, Geography and electronics. Kingsfield is forging ahead with its own vle but their work is now echoed on the Kingswood partnership site. The Design and Technology work they are doing with lasers is something I want to follow more closely as they are using ICT to have a direct impact on results. The Grange is leading the way with Photography, History and Technology whilst Hanham has French up and running and the work is going forward with the World Development A Level. SBL is developing the English,Italian, History Psychology and Business & Finance diploma. All these developments are at different stages...Some are just starting, others are already in place.

Something else that Kingsfield is keen on: a partnership e-bay! If you have anything to sell, let us know. The first item is a set of CADcam machines from Kingsfield!

That's it for now!

Daniel

Google Chrome thin client?

2009-09-29T19:56:00.001+01:00

By http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/chrome/

When I first heard of the release of Google Chrome I thought that this was probably one browser too many. When I tried it this morning (I’m writing with it now) I was really amazed at the simplicity and – above all – lightning fast display of the new Google browser. Besides, there are interesting features like window drag and drop, the ‘most visited’ page and ‘recent bookmarks’ box which are automatically updated when you open a new tab, its ‘full screen always’ mode and many others.

Above all, it’s a no frill, and incredibly quick browser, straightforward and – eventually – a really thin client. So much so that I then started to wonder whether it was really Miscrosoft who had to fear Google’s new release or rather Firefox. The once preferred browser of many a geek and Web enthusiast – including yours truly – has been enhanced with piles of new functionality, addons, skins and such like until it became hardly usable. Now, my Firefox 3 browser loads far slower than my IE7 and sometimes it freezes my PC to a point that I have to kill it and start IE to browse the web. The final straw I should say. Besides, many sites aren’t displayed properly with Firefox, a bug which never was corrected and is now wearing thick (the useful IETab addon can somewhat circumvent that problem, but only to an extent and besides, it contributes to the bulk of Firefox).
As per the question raised by ZDnet (see linked article at the bottom of this post and here) I don’t think that Google Chrome is an IE killer (IE still accounts for more than 80% of usage) but I would certainly rate it as a potential Firefox killer. At the end of the day, Google Chrome is promising not because of its development kit or any such complex features but because it delivers on the real and fundamental promise of the long awaited but never seen thin client. And one can remember 1997 and the way that Google killed Yahoo! in no time not just because its search engine and indexing was superior, but because it had managed to strip its user interface of all the unnecessary bells and whistles.
Google Chrome is Google’s back to basics browser and therefore I think it has a good chance of succeeding. Now the next question is: Is Google Chrome the future Android browser for mobiles? Wait and see, we’re thrilled!

Using SharePoint as a tracking system by Mike Herrity

2009-09-25T11:21:00.000+01:00

Using SharePoint as a tracking system to support Online Reporting to Parents.
September 25, 2009 by Mike Herrity ·

Filed under: Online Reporting, SharePoint, Twynham School
One of the things many schools have moved over to in the last few years is full registration of tutor time electronically. Increasing numbers are moving over to also electronically registering individual lessons as part of the Online Reporting to Parents agenda. We are now a year into compulsory registration of lessons online having decided to make this data available to parents through our Parent Gateway. The big issue of course is teachers forget to register lessons. I certainly did yesterday with my year 11 class and with over 400 lessons a day at our school it only takes a small percentage of missed registers and data that parents are reading on the Parent Gateway has gaps.

How does a school combat this? Well for us we have two systems which work within SharePoint to act as reminders to staff. The first is an area on the Gateway which triggers when a lesson has not been registered. This is simply called ‘lessons not registered’ and appears in a very visible place opposite timetable and cover.

Lessons not registered appear on specific staff homepage- click to enlarge

When a teacher forgets to register a lesson the details will appear on their page in black. I mention the colour because if the register is not moved by the following day it turns red to be more visable (and this genuinely works when we ask staff).

Of course in the busy times even a reminder on the site can be missed if a teacher is running around with full days. To help with this we have an administrator who spends 15 minutes a day sending out second reminders. How do they know who has not done their registers? On the Staff Homepage of SharePoint their is an area called lesson by lesson registration. By clicking on this the screen below appears.

Administrator tool to check lessons not registered- click to enlarge

This shows a calendar with 3 options, Key Stages 3.4 and 5. Clicking on a radial button the administrator can then click on a date and it brings all missed lessons up. The administrator then sends an email reminder out to staff. This has proved hugely successful in giving us near perfect data for parents and making single lesson truancy almost impossible.

eLearning Sucks

2009-09-18T08:56:00.002+01:00

Let's remember why we do e-learning

Death of VLEs is announced prematurely

2009-07-09T14:18:00.001+01:00

From http://moodlea.blogspot.com/2009/05/does-ofsted-really-understand-vles.html

what’s a VLE?
Paul (who blogs at planetpda.net) who was responsible for much of the development of the VLE at BPS, now works part-time at the Royal Latin with a special focus on ICT as well as transition – and is uniquely placed to see how a VLE might work in both environments. His experience of how Ofsted react to the existence of a VLE may not be indicative of all inspectors but it’s worrying – especially in the light those elements of Ofsted’s own report on VLEs which refer to schools. Is it simply that Ofsted aren’t expecting schools to use VLEs - so they don’t ask about them? The report visited six primary schools and described the use of VLEs as “very limited”. There’s no doubt that in those schools the use was limited, but does that become the measure of how all schools should be inspected? To visit a school like BPS where the VLE is used widely across the whole curriculum and ignore it, or simply not be aware of it, makes me wonder what’s happening – it really would require a deliberate decision not to address it (because it’s not seen as ‘real learning’? because Ofsted visitors don’t feel comfortable with it?) or simply not be aware that it was there. Well, let’s eliminate the second of those possibilities– I know that that many staff who spoke with the Ofsted team throughout the inspection mentioned the VLE and that it wasn’t until nearly the end when the Lead finally asked “What’s a VLE?” to a teacher who had mentioned it (again). So why was it ignored?

Switch to the end of 2007 and Chalfonts Community College has an inspection. Greg at the school prepares a dossier on how using the VLE has engaged with disaffected students, broadened access to the curriculum for all students – all of the things you’d expect even a half-decent implementation of a VLE to do. Evidence from site logs of the commitment of students to working outside of school, assignments and work done online, you name it. What does the inspector want? “Give me a paragraph on how it’s affected attainment”. As you can imagine, the significant provision that the school makes (and made at the time) was not mentioned in the report.

The irony of this all is that both Chalfonts & BPS are featured in Becta’s Learning Platforms in Action DVD as examplars of how to use VLEs/Learning Platforms efficiently. Now, I know during the filming of those videos that students, staff and parents were instructed to use the term “Learning Platform” rather than “VLE” to fit in with the focus on the former – but however you put it and whichever term you use, these tools can be fundamental to enabling effective learning and all sorts of other “good things” which would characterise a good school. Reading paragraph 5 of the Ofsted VLE survey it appears that “a sample of 34 school inspection reports, published between September 2005 and December 2007, that had references to VLEs” was the basis for some of the background to the report. It’s not immediately clear if “only 34 reports” from that period mentioned VLEs or if these 34 were merely representative of a much larger number which mentioned them but weren’t included. Given the way Ofsted reports appear to ignore online learning even in schools which have carefully and thoughtfully used it to enhance, I think I tend towards the former.

What does Ofsted really think

Teaching with Clickers

2009-07-09T12:03:00.001+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Teaching with Clickers

View more presentations from Sidneyeve Matrix.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR GOOD PRACTICE IN UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

2009-07-08T09:37:00.001+01:00

SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR GOOD PRACTICE

By Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson
From The American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, March 1987

Apathetic students, illiterate graduates, incompetent teaching, impersonal campuses -- so rolls the drumfire of criticism of higher education. More than two years of reports have spelled out the problems. States have been quick to respond by holding out carrots and beating with sticks.
There are neither enough carrots nor enough sticks to improve undergraduate education without the commitment and action of students and faculty members. They are the precious resources on whom the improvement of undergraduate education depends.

But how can students and faculty members improve undergraduate education? Many campuses around the country are asking this question. To provide a focus for their work, we offer seven principles based on research on good teaching and learning in colleges and universities.

Good practice in undergraduate education:

encourages contact between students and faculty,
develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
encourages active learning,
gives prompt feedback,
emphasizes time on task,
communicates high expectations, and
respects diverse talents and ways of learning.
We can do it ourselves - with a little bit of help...
These seven principles are not ten commandments shrunk to a 20th century attention span. They are intended as guidelines for faculty members, students, and administrators -- with support from state agencies and trustees -- to improve teaching and learning. These principles seem like good common sense, and they are -- because many teachers and students have experienced them and because research supports them. They rest on 50 years of research on the way teachers teach and students learn, how students work and play with one another, and how students and faculty talk to each other.

While each practice can stand alone on its own, when all are present their effects multiply. Together they employ six powerful forces in education:

activity,
expectations,
cooperation,
interaction,
diversity, and
responsibility.
Good practices hold as much meaning for professional programs as for the liberal arts. They work for many different kinds of students -- white, black, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, older, younger, male, female, well-prepared, underprepared.
But the ways different institutions implement good practice depend very much on their students and their circumstances. In what follows, we describe several different approaches to good practice that have been used in different kinds of settings in the last few years. In addition, the powerful implications of these principles for the way states fund and govern higher education and for the way institutions are run are discussed briefly at the end.

As faculty members, academic administrators, and student personnel staff, we have spent most of our working lives trying to understand our students, our colleagues, our institutions and ourselves. We have conducted research on higher education with dedicated colleagues in a wide range of schools in this country. With the implications of this research for practice, we hope to help us all do better.

We address the teacher's how, not the subject-matter what, of good practice in undergraduate education. We recognize that content and pedagogy interact in complex ways. We are also aware that there is much healthy ferment within and among the disciplines. What is taught, after all, is at least as important as how it is taught. In contrast to the long history of research in teaching and learning, there is little research on the college curriculum. We cannot, therefore, make responsible recommendations about the content of good undergraduate education. That work is yet to be done. This much we can say: An undergraduate education should prepare students to understand and deal intelligently with modern life. What better place to start but in the classroom and on our campuses? What better time than now?

Seven Principles of Good Practice.

1. Encourages Contact Between Students and Faculty
Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement. Faculty concern helps students get through rough times and keep on working. Knowing a few faculty members well enhances students' intellectual commitment and encourages them to think about their own values and future plans.

2. Develops Reciprocity and Cooperation Among Students
Learning is enhanced when it is more like a team effort that a solo race. Good learning, like good work, is collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated. Working with others often increases involvement in learning. Sharing one's own ideas and responding to others' reactions sharpens thinking and deepens understanding.

3. Encourages Active Learning
Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.

4. Gives Prompt Feedback
Knowing what you know and don't know focuses learning. Students need appropriate feedback on performance to benefit from courses. When getting started, students need help in assessing existing knowledge and competence. In classes, students need frequent opportunities to perform and receive suggestions for improvement. At various points during college, and at the end, students need chances to reflect on what they have learned, what they still need to know, and how to assess themselves.

5. Emphasizes Time on Task
Time plus energy equals learning. There is no substitute for time on task. Learning to use one's time well is critical for students and professionals alike. Students need help in learning effective time management. Allocating realistic amounts of time means effective learning for students and effective teaching for faculty. How an institution defines time expectations for students, faculty, administrators, and other professional staff can establish the basis of high performance for all.

6. Communicates High Expectations
Expect more and you will get more. High expectations are important for everyone -- for the poorly prepared, for those unwilling to exert themselves, and for the bright and well motivated. Expecting students to perform well becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when teachers and institutions hold high expectations for themselves and make extra efforts.

7. Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning
There are many roads to learning. People bring different talents and styles of learning to college. Brilliant students in the seminar room may be all thumbs in the lab or art studio. Students rich in hands-on experience may not do so well with theory. Students need the opportunity to show their talents and learn in ways that work for them. Then they can be pushed to learn in new ways that do not come so easily.
Teachers and students hold the main responsibility for improving undergraduate education. But they need a lot of help. College and university leaders, state and federal officials, and accrediting associations have the power to shape an environment that is favorable to good practice in higher education.

What qualities must this environment have?

A strong sense of shared purposes.
Concrete support from administrators and faculty leaders for those purposes.
Adequate funding appropriate for the purposes.
Policies and procedures consistent with the purposes.
Continuing examination of how well the purposes are being achieved.
There is good evidence that such an environment can be created. When this happens, faculty members and administrators think of themselves as educators. Adequate resources are put into creating opportunities for faculty members, administrators, and students to celebrate and reflect on their shared purposes. Faculty members receive support and release time for appropriate professional development activities. Criteria for hiring and promoting faculty members, administrators, and staff support the institution's purposes. Advising is considered important. Departments, programs, and classes are small enough to allow faculty members and students to have a sense of community, to experience the value of their contributions, and to confront the consequences of their failures.

States, the federal government and accrediting associations affect the kind of environment that can develop on campuses in a variety of ways. The most important is through the allocation of financial support. States also influence good practice by encouraging sound planning, setting priorities, mandating standards, and reviewing and approving programs. Regional and professional accrediting associations require self-study and peer review in making judgments about programs and institutions.

These sources of support and influence can encourage environments for good practice in undergraduate education by:

setting policies that are consistent with good practice in undergraduate education,
holding high expectations for institutional performance,
keeping bureaucratic regulations to a minimum that is compatible with public accountability,
allocating adequate funds for new undergraduate programs and the professional development of faculty members, administrators, and staff,
encouraging employment of under-represented groups among administrators, faculty members, and student services professionals, and
providing the support for programs, facilities, and financial aid necessary for good practice in undergraduate education.

The horizon report

2009-07-08T09:06:00.002+01:00

You must read the Horizon report if you want to develop your strategic awareness

Cloud computing

2009-07-08T09:04:00.001+01:00

Cloud Computing in Institutions July 7th, 2009

From http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/cetisli/2009/07/07/cloud-computing-in-institutions/

In the 2009 Horizon Report, Cloud Computing is anticipated as one of the key technology trends that is likely to have a significant impact on teaching and learning environment within a year’s time. The term cloud computing has become another buzz word in the tech industry, IT press and increasingly popular within the education sector. What does cloud computing really mean for institutions? How is it best to broach the benefits and risks that cloud computing may bring to Higher Education Institutions? A CETIS cloud computing activity group has been set up to look at the various issues facing institutions when it comes to considering the educational uses of cloud computing. My colleagues Wilbert, Mark and I have carried out some initial activities around cloud computing to explore how it has been used/might be used in education. As a result, we have gathered a collection of resources, including blogs, articles and academic papers which provide the latest discussions, developments and applications of cloud computing in education which are available at delicious with a tag #cetis-cloud-wg. We also conducted an online survey to collect some basic data on the use of cloud computing in institutions in order to help us understand the current situations and the main issues that institutions are facing when considering adopting cloud computing. Around 58 people participated in the survey and the full survey report is available here. Furthermore, a cloud computing session has been proposed to gather ideas and initiate more in-depth discussions on the issues at the CETIS conference in November this year. We have also planned a CETIS public event on cloud computing to provide opportunities for IS managers and anyone who is interested in cloud computing to share their thoughts and experiences on developing and using cloud computing services.

Based on the literature review and analysis of the current cloud computing service provisions and applications in institutions, we are also busy producing a briefing paper to introduce cloud computing to educators and help them to gain a better understanding of the conception of cloud technology and its impact on teaching and learning in institutions. The briefing is near complete, and will be presented in printed form later. We very much welcome you input and suggestes at this satge. For more information about the CETIS cloud computing activity group contact Wilbert Kraan at w.g.kraan@ovod.net or Mark Power at mpower6@gmail.com.

Want a YouTube video without the YouTube environment? Kick it!

2009-06-24T14:35:00.005+01:00

If you don't want the link to youtube just choose your video, add the word kick before the youtube word in the address and bingo, it 'kicks' you to another software where you can download the video to re use it as you wish!

or go to http://kickyoutube.com/watch/

Sociology can benefit from the testing facilities on vLes! A quick example made with My Studiyo

2009-06-24T14:31:00.001+01:00

mass_media

Just a demo!

The A level Sociology heaven?

2009-06-24T13:24:00.003+01:00

Check the link for Sociology resources. I think you might like some of it...

http://www.sociology.org.uk/rsoft.htm

Ode to Moodle

2009-06-24T13:18:00.003+01:00

Taken from http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=9359

Why should you be interested in Moodle?

. Moodle is magnificent.
∙ Moodle is the epitome of a web 2.0 application.
∙ Moodle is the most used virtual learning environment (VLE) in the world.
∙ Moodle enables your students to have their own personalised learning environment opening up an immense range of possibilities.
∙ Moodle is a quick and effective means of exploiting the Anytime Anywhere Learning potential of VLEs
. Students and parents can access the range of learning materials and assessments in school, at home or anywhere.
∙ Moodle enables staff to collaborate not just within one school, but across local schools, counties and even countries sharing expertise, resources and development opportunities.
∙ Moodle allows students and staff to complete tracked assessments, setup and use online courses, create their own blogs, experiment with wikis, develop their own websites, access all their learning materials online, collaborate and communicate with each other, and much, much more…
∙ We believe that Moodle is an ideal solution for schools looking for an effective virtual learning environment as it can plug-in and collaborate with any other future solutions
. As Moodle has been developed directly by the academic community it has specific features and functions for us as educators.∙ We fundamentally believe that Moodle provides better opportunities that any other learning technology
. Moodle changes the traditional cost model – the free open source nature of the software means valuable funding can be directed towards the actual content. This means schools can focus on developing engaging, appropriate and tightly-focused materials to support truly added value personalised learning.

My comments: I have used Moodle and it can be excellent. I have also seen it used very badly. This comment can be geared at most vLes. Not too sure about the 'across schools comments' and it only works if you have a good person in the background. As usual, the way it is integrated with the Management Information System is key to its success or failure... So a management with vision is key here.

Quiz generator

2009-06-23T14:48:00.001+01:00

Good for quizes if you are fed up with hot potatoes!

http://www.mystudiyo.com

Evolution?

2009-06-18T15:04:00.003+01:00

Nothing to do with WikEd... As a biker it made me smile, that's all.

institutions vs. collaboration

2009-06-17T20:06:00.003+01:00

I am really interested in the idea of fluid collaboration...but I lost the will to live (and gained the will to leave!) half way through the presentation. If anyone makes it to the end, let me know what happens!

Go there if you want to convert videos from a format to another!

2009-06-16T19:22:00.001+01:00

http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Converter.aspx?type=GoogleImageAds

Can you walk in someone else's shoes?

2009-06-16T15:49:00.003+01:00

Are we in control of our decisions?

2009-06-10T20:20:00.005+01:00

Dan Ariely is a fascinating speaker and I just can't resist!

I often wonder why so many weird decisions are taken in the education world. After having seen this video I have decided I will refrain from invoking stupidity and put it down to people taking the path of least resistance without even being aware of it. The book version of this is obviously the 'Tao of Pooh' which explains Taoism... I am starting to think that Taoism is a lazy way of thinking!

Sir Ken Robinson: School and creativity (repeat)

2009-06-10T19:46:00.002+01:00

With all this Web 3 talk, I thought I'd bring this little video back so that we don't forget what education is all about!

This makes me laugh and cry (well, almost), I used to be a language teacher, now, like so many of my colleagues, I am a manager/ exam passer. Students notice...One last year said we were a 'machine to pass exams'... This blog fights this and contends that with judicious use of technology, some real creative teaching can still happen... Education is too important not to take risks.

Daniel

Web 3.0 explained with a stamp

2009-06-10T19:07:00.011+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation- For those who want to understand how it works rather than what it is

That's too much info for me!

Daniel

Web 3.0

2009-06-10T19:07:00.010+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation which might answer the classic 'We think' video by explaining how Web 3 leads to monetization

So when the next Teacher geek comes on the stage pushing the virtues of Web 3, he's just out to make money (it's bound to be a 'he'). You can fall asleep easily knowing full well that what he's got to say is unlikely to have an impact on helping your students pass exams...

Daniel

Web 3.0 this time it's personal

2009-06-10T19:06:00.006+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation- It's long but very well explained and well worth it.

I was just going to say that!

Daniel

The Evolution of Web 3.0

2009-06-10T19:05:00.002+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The Evolution of Web 3.0

View more Microsoft Word documents from Marta Strickland.

Why Web 3.0?

2009-06-10T19:03:00.002+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Why Web 3.0?

View more Microsoft Word documents from Sabin Buraga.

Definitions of Web 1,2 and 3

2009-06-10T18:58:00.000+01:00

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

How to succeed in the MFL oral according to AQA!

2009-06-10T14:28:00.003+01:00

"the skill of the teacher as examiner continues to be the most important factor in achieving success "

So should we spend our time on them...?

Daniel

The web in numbers: Twitter, You tube and facebook

2009-06-09T13:29:00.003+01:00

June 9th, 2009 by Stan Schroeder

Taken from http://mashable.com/2009/06/09/web-in-numbers-may/

It’s time for our monthly number-crunching, and the month of May definitely brought some surprising results. While YouTube () is attracting an ever increasing audience, and Facebook () is still growing fast, Twitter’s growth has suddenly stopped, at least according to the numbers from Compete.
We’ve been covering the steep, steep curve of Twitter ()’s increasing visitors for the last () couple of months, and it was obvious that it cannot go on forever. However, seeing Twitter’s growth flatline with only a 1.47% increase (up to 19,728,619 monthly visitors) is surprising, especially since Twitter-mania has all but stopped. Monthly visits to Twitter, however, have increased by a healthy 6.99%, up to 134,536,240. Of course, Compete’s numbers are not guaranteed to be fully accurate, but they are confirmed by the numbers from Quantcast, for example. It will be interesting to see how Twitter performs in the following months.

Twitter does, however, have some nice numbers to show; according to Nielsen Online, total minutes spent on Twitter rose by a staggering 3712% from April 08 to April 09. In the same period, total
minutes spent on Facebook increased 699% year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion
minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.

YouTube is also doing well. Although Compete shows a minor decline in YouTube’s unique visitors, comScore’s analysis shows that YouTube contributed heavily to the huge increase in video viewing in the US.

U.S. Internet users viewed 16.8 billion online videos during April, a 16 percent increase over March; on YouTube alone, 6.8 billion videos were viewed, which is a 15 percent increase compared to March. Looking at audience, comScore estimates that Google ()’s video properties have had 107.9 million video viewers during April.

Finally, Facebook has continued its tremendous growth; according to Compete, it grew from 104 million to 113 million monthly uniques; an 8.54% increase. Visits grew from 1,63 billion to 1,74 billion, solidifying Facebook’s position as the number 3 site on the internet. Once the biggest social network around, MySpace (), has recovered some growth, with a lukewarm 0.46% increase in overall visits and a 2,39% increase in unique visitors (the number of total minutes spent on the site fell dramatically by a 31% year-over-year). One of the reasons for Facebook’s continuous growth is its international success; there’s still a lot of room for growth internationally, and we can expect Facebook to continue growing even when it saturates the US market.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Dalaj; DNY59

Source http://mashable.com/2009/06/09/web-in-numbers-may/#disqus_thread

Twitter for educational purposes -A tutorial

2009-06-01T13:47:00.002+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Twitter for educational purposes -A tutorial

View more Microsoft Word documents from Maggie Verster.

Michelle Obama's speech on Education

2009-05-28T11:16:00.003+01:00

JISC & e-Learning in Wales

2009-05-23T23:22:00.003+01:00

Check http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/05/the-jisc-e-learning-show-podcast/ out!

And have a look at that too if you have time

http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/2009/05/21/explaining-the-risks-and-opportunities-framework/

Twitter & Microblogging

2009-05-21T19:01:00.001+01:00

The following was taken from here, follow this blog to keep up to date!.

What an interesting process looking at an existing course and considering all the technical/people factors when deciding how to use Twitter and SL with overseas students in countries with less access to technology.There were a number of factors we needed to look at including:
Learners access to technology including possible paid for services such as SMS
Learner ability or inclination to technology (international)
Learner inclination to social or non-course activities (international)
New services provided by Twitter for learners
Possible cross community communication using Twitter
Time available for teaching learners
Likelihood of learner acceptanceIn terms of the first two points, ArriveUK learners abroad are less likely to have access to broadband connections, the computer specification needed for SL and free SMS. This group is likely to have a smaller cohort that are ready, willing or able to use SL. Usually a whole group of ArriveUK students is around 90, and there are two groups, so this would seem a better option.Twitter's main focus will therefore be to link to the podcasts which are posted each week. ArriveUK students will be able to subscribe to the Twitter feed from within Moodle, which will potentially answer questions posed relating to the podcasts. We're aiming that students will want to reply to the questions using Twitter rather than the forum as the Twitter feed and interface will be ubiquitous in Moodle, and show all new tweets and comments. The simple interface should also help to make the service less daunting. Twitter has a limited set of characters for each Tweet and we're hoping this will encourage debate and interaction. All posts and questions will continue to be posted within the discussion board as usual.It's an interesting observation that ArriveUK students aren't interested in discussion threads, and there is usually a long lists of posts. Replies to previous posts are generally found as later entries rather than within a thread. This will suit Twitter's chronological nature. However, by using Twitter learners can interact with their learning community using a variety of technologies including mobile phones (SMS), Google Talk, www.twitter.com, browser plug-ins, RSS feeds, widgets, Moodle itself and Second Life for those students taking this option.Time has to be allocated to train and orientate both the MA and ArriveUK students. This involves both technical and social skills. These learners are very focussed on their learning, and involved in the visa application process for entry to the UK. Any new technology will have to ensure that these two factors are primary considerations for the technologies to work. It may well be that Twitter will offer an important service to learners with busy schedules by enabling learners to personalise their content delivery.

Wiki Education (repeat!)

2009-05-21T13:22:00.001+01:00

I thought this might need to come back to the top!

Teachers have been using Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for a while but it is only recentlyi that they are getting to grips with the teaching tools associated with VLEsii. More and more teachers who seek to widen the accessibility of their subject to a wider ability range and push the more able even harder using wikisiii, podcastingiv and personal broadcastingv to enhance their communication with students. By entering the world of the “VLE” students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning and are pushed to drive their own performance upward by collaborating with their peers. In other words they are taking advantage of the “wiki workplace”. Why review our practice? The aim is not to improve what we do well (teach the 'good' students), the aim is to improve our methodologies and Individual Student Support Structures so that we can teach well to more students by capturing their imagination and providing ways of destroying the academic barriers which stand on their way to achieve success.
Already we can see that the VLE is introducing a paradigm shift in education. There has always been a 'gate keeper' in charge of the educational content, controlling things from the “top” of the education chain but now the hierarchies are being challenged. Advisers are not wanted and are replaced by self help networksvi. Beacon colleges put their success down to the interaction between their staff and staff from other colleges, not to any professional organisation's inputvii. While the hierarchies are not vanishing, profound changes in the nature of the VLE capabilities and student psychology are giving rise to powerful new teaching methodologies based on community, collaboration, and self-organizationviii. Students can now co-create pieces of work rather than simply regurgitate the lesson content. Instead of 20 essays, the teacher can ask the whole class to collaborate on writing one... The quality of the resulting work can break free of any individual's expectations and the results are truly amazingix. Using Google Document Share, Wikis or VLE exercises, every single contribution can be identified, marked and challenged without affecting the overall work. Students are taking ownership and positive peer pressure is breaking any low expectations... Homework is dying and work at home (nicely monitored by VLEs: the focus on the single individual never wavers) is exploding.
But as this process unravels, many teachers refuse to accept that students (who don't remember what happened before 2003, who navigate their life via Facebook and who are used to accessing info at the click of a mouse) think... differently! The 1960 student is closer to the 1990 student than the 1990 student is to the modern one. The gate-keepers of soon to be obsolete approaches to teaching often use the example of Wikipedia as a fount of misinformation to conclude that the new student collaboration is far from benign. The fact that Wikepedia has no more errors than the Encyclopaedia Britannica is conveniently ignored (http://www.frozennorth.org/C2011481421/E652809545/) ... Teachers still pride themselves on how much they can stuff down a student's throat without really wanting to know how a student will make use of this information. Parrot teaching is still alive and kicking...standards are not rising in real terms and more and more departments limit themselves to teaching to the test... By refusing to accept the challenge, not only are they missing the whole point of teaching (moral and spiritual dimension anyone?) but if teachers abdicate, who will create the citizen of tomorrow?
Yes, there are examples of pain and suffering in schools where the development of ICT has been removed from the imperative of raising standards of T&Lxii. The bottom line is that most schools have so far failed to grasp the new education logic: harness the wiki power of VLEs as well as the new phenomena such as MySpace, InnoCentive, YouTube, and you will revolutionise teaching yet keep in place the educational golden standards (GCSE, GCE etc...)
Education is too important not to take risks. Smart schools and Universities are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of massive online communities to create dynamic student focused education platforms. MIT is leading the way by proposing access to all its courses online for free to as it is actually seeking criticism in the wiki world to make improvements to its curriculumx .
Even schools competing for the same students are collaborating on initiatives that accelerate innovation in the field of education. Indeed, as a growing number of teachers see the benefits of mass collaborationxi, this new way of organizing knowledge will eventually displace the traditional lesson structures as the education system’s primary engine of success... The teacher is now the driver rather than the gate keeper...

Wiki-Education promotes collaboration between teachers to innovate and create first class resources delivered along the 'lean' methodology to create real value for students who can have the tools to enjoy a truly phenomenal success as a result. VLEs are now able to look at the student's progress profile and propose tailored educational pathways whilst presenting the teacher with an up to the minute feedback on all the work done. Many schools are benefiting from this new education paradigm. Colleges such as St Brendan's have been around for the better part of a century and a number of teachers are doing whatever it takes to usher their school or college into the twenty-first century education environment: this site is a key component of this drive...
Daniel Esteve

iBETT show, January 2008. Sanako and Nokia
iiForums, Online assessments, online testing, self assessments etc...
iiiIn Moodle for example
ivUsing the Sony Play Station Platform (PSP)
vUsing the filming capability of the PSPs
viPembrokeshire Associate Adviser system, Bristol and Bath collegiate
vii
viiiUsing personalised quiz with results h

Windows 7 is upon us...

2009-05-13T20:43:00.002+01:00

If you use a PC a lot and often work with a word document and a spreadsheet at the same time, you probably use two screens. Windows 7 will make working with multiple documents easier as they will snap easily next to each other.

When there you will realise that having two screens is much easier on the eyes anyway, so Windows 7 will help you juggle these pesky documents easily.

Revolution? No
Evolution? barely
Will it require more power from your PC to essentially do the same thing: probably

Linux is still a viable alternative