Itching to get my Kodu project rolling, but not being able to use Kodu with our KS3 groups yet (they’re doing modelling with Excel up until mid December) I asked Joe could I hijack some of his Yr11s to get feedback from them on Kodu (and using them as technical guinea pigs to see how it runs on our network – you cant keep a good techie down!)

I printed off some cheat sheets from the Kodu website and some guides given to me by Microsofts Lee Stott (@lee_stott)and Perrins Schools’ Gideon Williams (@gideonwilliams) and hijacked his class Periods 1 and 5.

I’ll elaborate on the activities after I’ve had a few sessions with them but the whole class got stuck in and each student took to it with an eagerness I’ve not seen for a long time.

 It’s quite clear that from the get go that the just the mention of Xbox and game design engages both boys and girls. We literally are talking their language. Couple this immediate engagement with some good, solid lesson plans and I believe Kodu and game design could revolutionise certain modules in our ICT classes.

Here is a very quick vox pop with some of our students with their first impressions of Kodu, not scripted, not planed, purely just their thoughts.

Would love to hear your thoughts….

In a nutshell Popcorn extends on HTML 5 video and allows you to make web video as interactive as a conventional web app. Through the Popcorn framework the integration of external data and content sources such as Flickr, Google Maps, Google Translate, WordPress blogs, Wikipedia entries… the list is endless AND all this can be done on the fly as the video is streaming in your browser.

This Webmonkey article sums up some of the possibilities:

A demo video can be seen on the Drumbeat website – look at the widgets and check out the translation subtitles, all the content being pulled from source site is being done on the fly.

And to make to Popcorn a little more accessible for the non-coders out there Mozilla have released an Alpha browser app – Popcorn Maker – to let you literally point and click your way to making simple interactive video apps. Within a few click you can create simple video apps, so simple even I could do it… which leads me back to where I came in and back to Leon Cych who on his L4L blog has done a nifty little intro video to get you started..

On a wet, cold and generally miserable autumn afternoon @john_howarth at arrived at my school to give me a lift to a local primary school. The trip wasn’t for an LA led INSET session, or LA meeting this was going to be my very 1^st Teachmeet.

I arrived at Heathfields CP school, the home of the legendary David Mitchell (@deputymitchell) with a little trepidation. Teechmeets are where the ‘clever ones’ from Twitter meet and make people like me feel uneducated and as though I know nothing about educational technology, aren’t they?

No. Most certainly not!

In all of the time I’ve worked in the education sector – 12 years now – I’ve never met a nicer, more open and amazingly enthusiastic set of people than that night at Heathfields.

I grabbed a coffee, sat down and watched the hall swell in numbers with familiar and unfamiliar faces – matching real faces to Twitter avatars should be a new addition to a MENSA test. I sat waiting for the presentations to start not knowing what the format of the night would be.

Using the Random Name Selector by Primary Technology (it turned out the creator of the software – @johnmclear was sat right in front of me and what a nice guy he is too)  names of the presenters were chosen to decide the running order. The order was, iirc… (Apologies if I missed someone out!)

@ianemills
@chrismayoh
@reesiepie
@hgjohn
@ideasfactory
@deputymichell
@naiad7
@primarypete_
@raff31
@simonhaughton
@mister_jim
@frances1808
@ejf23

All the presentations were excellent most notable were @ianemills’ talk on using Xbox Kinect in the classroom which gave me the kick I needed to get a Kinect into my own school and lessons and the presentation by @mister_jim. A colleague sat at my table commented ‘why didn’t we have teachers like that when I was at school’ such was the highly engaging, natural manner that he delighted the room with. It was a true pleasure to watch.

As @dughall so rightly said early in the evening the presentations are only a small part of the evening. It’s the networking that occurs during the night I met people I wouldn’t normally meet  during the course of my normal working day – primary teachers, primary SLT, area consultants and co-ordinators, and other ed-tech professionals. I now have a few exciting projects on the horizon with some of the guys I met that evening and can’t wait to get @ianemills into my school to help me develop my own Xbox Kinect project.

The evening really did open my eyes to the work currently going on in primaries and I was amazed at the skills, knowledge and dedication to using educational technology in the classroom. I was also quite humbled that, after chatting with a few primary teachers, I found out that I had an IT budget more than 10 times that of their schools, yet they seemed to be doing 10 times more exciting and innovative stuff with their ICT. This made me reflect on what I spend my budget on and how it’s possible to do a whole load more with less. My purchasing decisions will change for sure now!

The night finished off in a traditional way for teacher types… having a pint or two in pub and talking for a couple of hours about work!

Overall, my first Teachmeet was an amazing experience and one I can’t wait to repeat.

@ideasfactory has persuaded me to conquer my fear of public speaking (odd for someone who works in a school, I know) and present at the next TM. I better start brushing up on my presentation skills!

In a nutshell DreamSpark is a selection of enterprise level, pro standard development tools that students in HE and now high schools can download and use for FREE.

When you look at the list of tools available it truly is a mindblowing project:

Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
XNA Game Studio 2.0
Expression Studio, including
Expression Web
Expression Blend
Expression Design
Expression Media
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
Windows Server Standard Edition

and 12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club

There’s even subsidised MTS Certification!

My school has just signed registered.. lets see how it goes!

Here’s Bill Gates on Microsoft Channel 8 discussing DreamSpark

The iPod Touches arrived on Monday and it was straight down to getting them on the network.

As we don’t want the students to have to enter user credentials before they connect to our Windows 2008 / Win7 network we’ve created a specific ‘iPod’ user account, with restricted network permissions, to automatically connect to our 3Com wireless network.

This took about 10 minutes to and we then got to play with the Touches. I must admit the iPod Touch blows me away and in my humble opinion is the best handheld device for educational use on the market today.

Tuesday saw the start of content creation… Period 2 meant a visit to one of our workshops to start filming the first two videos – training videos for the pillar drill and fretsaw.

Using just a humble Flip cam the filming went without a hitch and the Head of Creative Studies was an absolute star and pulled off both videos first take without any mistakes, stalls or drying up. A stunning effort!

Back in the office I started encoding the avi’s from the Flip to h264 mp4s ready to be uploaded to my IIS box and tested out on the Touches.

This coming week I’ll be filming the other two videos then the fun of preparing the php pages and back end content system begins…

I really can’t wait to get this project live!!

This is something that I’ve discussed at length with a few colleagues and we always ending up agreeing to differ.

To my mind a good Moodle course incorporates several features:

Concise support materials to reinforce the topics delivered in the classroom.

Moodle in my school is used to reinforce class based lessons. A simple follow up with a PowerPoint presentation can dramatically improve subject comprehension. I recently polled some Year 10 History students about what they’d like to see from Moodle and the second most popular request, after ‘more games’ was ‘slides from the stuff we did in class’. The students commented that this ‘would help us revise’.

A mix of informal (read into that fun) and formal assessments

Assessment is central to any learning activity on Moodle. Getting a balance of fun activities e.g. a quick 10 question Content Generator  Flash/SCORM quiz and more formal activities such as a Moodle Quiz or an Online Text Assignment  is a great way to vary student assessment. Using a tool such as Content Generator to create scormified  Flash games also allows the savvy teacher to introduce hidden student assessments, i.e. the student doesn’t actually realise they’re being assessed. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing… the jury is out on that one.

Mixed media content – embedded video, audio and materials suitable for offline consumption.

Too much of a single type of content will lead to pretty dull courses. I’ve seen course after course populated with nothing more than PowerPoints or embedded YouTube videos. While they provide a quick way to bulk out a course, students will get bored of ‘samey’ content very quickly.  Learning styles also play a big part in the decision of what content types to use, and whilst Learning Styles may be the subject of scorn in some quarters, taking the time to provide learning materials in multiple formats can produce great results and empower your students to try differing material formats and decide what works for them.

A forum for discussion, peer communication, feedback and peer review

This to me is critical for online learning. Students live in a connected, communicative world, where online communication via MSN, Facebook or texting is the norm. So why do we shy away from using these inbuilt skills 21^st Century students have when delivering learning?

Forums are the heart of Moodle and should be used as two-way communication channels between teacher and student and as n:n communication ‘areas’ for students. As well as providing a great opportunity for debate and conversation between students Forums can be used as very powerful feedback tools – get students to upload their work and request critiques – ask students who their favourite authors are and more importantly WHY etc etc! Get them discussing topics. Ignore minor indiscretions if the odd post slips into txt spk. Let the opinions and conversations flow. You’ll be surprised how responsible students can be if you give them a little freedom and faith.

The ability for the student to self-construct learning opportunities

Why not engage students, regardless of level or ability, in creating learning materials for other students? If a student can instruct a fellow student on a topic or process and create materials for that purpose they for want of a better term take co-ownership of the course.

How engaged will the student be when they’re studying a topic they’ve actively contributed to? In my experience, very!

One idea I introduced to my Maths department was to engage students in creating their own learning materials. I initially got top set Yr10s to create simple video tutorials for lower years / sets. Using nothing more than 2 Flip cameras and a Flip Chart we produced 6 excellent videos in a 50 minute period. The students, after the usual initial embarrassment of seeing themselves projected up on a whiteboard, all loved what they’d created and felt proud of what they themselves achieved and felt truly involved in their lessons.

And last but not least, an aspect that’s not very academic but in my opinion of upmost importance, it’s got to look attractive.

Get your Moodle looking fresh, inviting and easy to use. Make it lively but not overpowering. The old adage – content is king – still rings true and no matter how pretty your Moodle looks if it’s full of tat it just won’t cut it with your students.

I’ll admit that my Moodle platform still uses a default theme (Anomoly). It was chosen as it’s simple, plain and not a ‘marmite’ design. As Moodle is still new here I want all attention on content not on the colour scheme. But one of my priorities is to ‘pretty it up’ and I’ll be doing so as soon as I get chance. There have been comments from students that it does look rather bland (which I thought was a good thing) but a makeover is due soon. I promise

There you go that’s what I think makes up a good Moodle course. I’d love to hear your thoughts…

To go back slightly, last year I approached SLT with the idea that we should move away from the learning platform Uniservity and bring online learning in-house with a self hosted Moodle install. For a variety of reasons Uniservity just wasn’t working for us and a change was needed.

After 5 months of discussion, persuasion and pestering I got my wish and I bravely decided to commission a Dell server running Windows 2008 as my Moodle box.

I had the box setup within a day and testing began…

Skip forward a few months and after a rather spasmodic pilot (21 members of staff signed up, only 5 followed through with the goods) SLT decided to roll out school wide.

To say staff were coerced bullied into using Moodle would be a gross injustice, but SLT were savvy enough to incorporate the use of Moodle into staff’s CPD program – a very shrewd move for those who are about to immerse themselves into the world of Moodle.
The roll out didn’t just go well, I was overwhelmed with the response.

After 3 weeks of use we have now over 270 active classes using Moodle in some form, which equates to about 30% of all timetabled classes. There’s been over 920 resources added and several hundred forum posts.

The most staggering figure is that, according to Google Analytics (yes you can get a Moodle block for GA, but I added the urchin code to the theme footer) there’s been over 50,000 page views in the 21 days since the official launch.

Truly awesome figures and I’m both amazed and humbled by the commitment my colleagues have shown towards my project.

So after this outstanding start where do we go from here?

The next step is to keep momentum going and keep focussed on developing quality resources and pedagogically sound courses. Regular after school sessions are run by our ICT Co-Ordinatior @santarc and I provide an almost 24/7 support service (even answered emails at 12:34am) for staff as a way of showing I’m as committed as they are!

Long term plans are to provide community courses and to provided collaborative learning opportunities for our feeder schools.

The opportunities a school can have with Moodle are truly limitless!

Onwards and upwards!!

One of the best add-ons for Moodle has to be the Sharing Cart.

The Sharing Cart allows the Moodle user to literally ’copy and paste’ resources from one course to another. This addresses one of my bug bears with Moodle – its not very good at sharing or moving resourcess around!

Go and download it and try it… you wont regret it!

Here’s a video of Sharing Cart in action.