Welcome
26 01 2007This blog has been created to allow for discussion and sharing of views on all aspects of Learning Platforms. When commenting on a posting please indicate the name of your school.
Shropshire Learning Platform
Further development of an online learning resource for Shropshire
Having spotted this blog while surfing, I thought I would give you my perspective. Hope you don’t mind.
Much of my experience of Learning Platforms is that they are NOT ‘learning’ platforms but ‘teaching’ platforms – for the most part used to manage administration and hold banks of resources for teachers. Local Authorities and Regional Broadband Consortia seem to me to be attempting to persuade schools and teachers to use a Learning Platform from this perspective when to make it an effective teaching tool, it MUST be approached from a ‘learning’ perspective and be there for the students.
The only Learning Platform that has allowed me to have this approach is Moodle and I notice this is NOT on your list. Although I realise it is also not on the Becta list, nor is Digital Brain, which you have included, so I would question why you haven’t considered mentioning Moodle, considering it is now extensively used in many educational establishments.
My work in our local City Learning Centre (I am the Deputy Director there) means that I often work on collaborative projects across several schools and although the Local Authority provides Net Media to our schools, this has not provided the teachers with the tools or ease of use we have required. Having looked at several Learning Platforms, we chose to use Moodle. We have found it easy to use, well supported and providing assessment and collaborative tools for learning, not just a place to store resources for teaching. I can provide many examples of how Moodle has extended the opportunity for students to learn and it is examples such as these which teacher should have access to rather than just a list of ‘services’. Perhaps it would be useful for your schools to hear more about Moodle and be given links to good practice in using it?
The issue for me is not ‘how can I use what the Learning Platform provides?’ but ‘can the Learning Platform do what I want it to do?’ and for me, Moodle allows me to do what I want it to do! Please let your schools have chance to consider this one too!
Val Brooks, BA, PGCE, MA
Deputy Director,
Stockton City Learning Centre
The site makes for very interesting reading, but I am curious as to why no reference for Moodle is to be found on your site. Has a section for this package not been uploaded yet? I presume that is to be added at a later date. It can’t be because Moodle is not on the Becta ‘list’ as Digitalbrain is not on that list either, yet it is on this site. I think you are missing a trick if Moodle is not to be included here. When attending the Bett show earlier this month it was clear that there was one ‘buzz’ word on many people’s lips, and it began with an ‘M’ and ended with an ‘e’!
Currently we have decided to post on the BECTA framework and have included ‘Digitalbrain’ as this is our current platform. We have no problem in hearing from users of any other platforms especially those who have sufficient knowledge and experience to make comparisons between platforms.
I will set up an area for this.
Having recently had a Talmos salesman visit and give us an overview on their VLE I am very excited about their system. For two years I have been using Digitalbrain and for two years I have hated it. DB is very confusing to navigate and is not in any intuitive however Talmos is and furythermore it has aded functionality that aids teaching and learning and communication. Talmos stuff I liked:
Blogging
online assessment…homework monitored and submitted online and marked as such.
interactive timetables
Personal pupil eportfolio’s online
etc…etc…
it’s all good….good price aswel….approx. £8500 per year for 3 years….
Oh…I forgot to say I’m HOD at Sundorne School
Thank you for providing the opportunity for people to contribute to this discussion. We had a interesting discussion with colleagues at the Shrewsbury Centre. I thought I would take this opportunity to try and present our school’s ‘wish list’ of features of a VLE.
1) Embrace Web 2.0 technologies. It seems to me a great pity if we are not providing tools to facilitate communication and collaboration between pupils.
I have to admit I am more than a little sceptical of the benefits of learning platforms which sell themselves on the ability to present ‘routes/pathways/voyages’ through poorly written content which is assessed by means of what is in a sense an English comprehension paper or wordsearch/crossword.
If, for example, a VLE can provide assessment for learning opportunities which would enable pupils to be involved in the assessment of their own/eac others work against jointly composed success criteria, this would enable teachers to provide something better to what is already happening in schools. We don’t need a gimmick, which does our present job badly.
2) Must be easy to use - because teacher’s wont use it if it isn’t. If a single platform is being considered how will it address the varied needs of a Year 2 class and a Year 10 geography class?
3) Make sharing resources simple. (through searching etc)
Hope this is clear enough. Thanks again for giving us all a chance to chip in.
Oh I’m from Hope School by the way.
I attended the briefing session yesterday and it became apparent that we are at the very early stages of this process. However, a concern that I raised with Steve Beard last night was that we seem to have a variety of different strands within the county all working to the same aim but without any real communication between them.
As Harvey mentioned, the SPET Heads of ICT have had a presentation from Azzuri about Talmos, there is a working party set up within SPET to bid for over a million pounds to be spent on ICT that is very interested in Moodle and we have the Procurement group that is looking at pretty much everything on the Becta list. I think that if there is to be real personalisation for learners throughout the county there needs to be more talking between the different groups otherwise a very real opportunity for a huge leap forward in collaborative working is going to be lost.
Alun Harding
Assistant Headteacher
The Priory School
Shrewsbury
I agree with Alun’s comments on collaboration - the SPET group needs to be working with the Schools/LA team - have you spoken to your representatives about this?
Have recieved (today 23/1/2007) a paper copy of the Learning Platforms document sent to Heads.
Have not time to fill in sheet, scan and email comments I am afraid. Could the checklist document be made availabe for download or is it too late.
Many of the ideas in the document are fantastic and I cannot think why I would not tick off all of the ideas. That said given the functionality of current LPs I have seen Db and Talmos many of the ideas are ‘blue sky’ (some might say Pie in the Sky) ideas. The suggested functionality of the system seems to me to be very ambitious and I would be surprised if it can be achieved especially so for the part about the interoperability with SIMS whic sometimes struggles to opperate with itsself let alone other apps.
There’s a lot going on in this area of the blog, and it’s great to see that Shrewsbury is using the technology to discuss the technology. I hope you don’t mind a colleague from another LA pitching in with a couple of thoughts based on long years (some very long years) implementing this technology in HE, FE and now schools, and on a good deal of time in Salford developing new approaches to these issues across the whole school estate. I’ll limit what I say here to direct replies to what’s in so far - but I could go on for ages so please forgive me if I do and ask me to say more if you think anything needs unpacking.
Here we go
Involvement of a CLC from Stockton - this is great to see, and is pretty much the same logic as we have in Salford. The Salford CLC is the core of development and delivery of our platform, and serves the solution across all 18 High Schools and 84 Primary schools.
Moodle and other non-Becta framework solutions - this is a really important feature of your work. The Becta situation is a difficult one, and our approach in Salford is as follows… Becta issue us with two sets of guidance. One is the framework and the other is the standard/guidelines, formally 2.5 and now public v1 and effectively the base line for the output spec for a BSF authority. The problem is that not all of the solutions on the framework are conformant with the standard, and that there are standard conformant solutions/combinations of solutions that are not on the framework. Solution - ignore one, the other or both. In Salford we take the standard very seriously, and in our discovery phase we have set up a group to create what we call Becta 2.5+Salford - this is a set of specs fed into BSF OS that provides the minimum guarantee on the functionality of the platform. It’s really ambitious, bought into by pretty well our whole community and a good test against which we can measure the market and do our own development.
Functionality, ease of use and web2 - this is a nice contribution, and echoes what I have been told as we’ve done the LP consultation and build work in Salford over the last 2 years or so that we’ve been doing it. I have a doc that I’d be happy to share on this - it comes from a workshop I ran on personalised learning and LPs for the National CLC Managers’ conference in Jan 07, so it’s pretty up to date.
Recent developments - integration with SIMS, and the ambitions you have for your platform. We’re really interested in the SIMS thing ourseleves, and we, our software dev partner and three other LA’s have now banded together to form a partnership that will enable us to integrate our solution with SIMS, as well as extend the ambition and vision we have for the product. On this business of the ambition of the product, I will say this - when we have run events to look at the market offer in the last year, and when we’ve done what you do in checking the horizon for stuff, I am personally disappointed by the lack of vision and ambition of the supply community. It’s been like this for a long time - I used to work on JISC projects in HE and FE, and we had the same thing there. If you think about it, you sign a three year deal with a supplier, and get technology that’s already not really up to what kids are using every day - it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Our answer to this in Salford has been to avoid the three-year supply type of model, and develop this partnership with other LAs, some colleagues in HE and our dev partner. It’s been great in bringing together professionals who care more about learning than technology, and more about children than systems.
As I said at the start, there’s always a danger I’ll bang on a bit when I start on this stuff, so please forgive me if I have. If anyone wants to know more, though, please feel free to ask. I’m always happy to share contact info, and indeed to come and talk to people about what we do if you want to use some old technology.
all the best
Kevin