ICT in Education

Today was the third and final half-day training session for the current cohort of primary schools who are venturing forth into using a VLE (Moodle) with their children.

The focus of today’s session was on creating three different activities – a choice, a forum and a quiz. It doesn’t sound a lot to cover in two-and-a-half hours but the time seemed to whiz by. We did manage to cover more with the afternoon group though, which was probably down to them getting less distracted than the morning group.

I must say I am impressed at how well many of the teachers have taken to what we’ve covered in the last three sessions. Although a few need some direction still to get their VLE going, most have some ideas of what they want to do and I’m sure it won’t be long before they’ve got some of their own content to use alongside the content that other schools have shared with them. It’s also great to see the Infant schools getting into this. I had my doubts on how they would get on with Moodle and the relevance of a VLE to young children. Their enthusiasm and ideas is making me think twice – maybe VLEs can be of some use to Infant children after all.

There’s still a lot to do with these schools yet. Ian Usher did mention metacourses and how the use of these would save them having to enrol pupils time and again into each new course. We didn’t expect them to fully take this in and I’m sure we’ll have to tackle this again with many of the schools once they’ve developed several courses. There are other activities that haven’t been touched on – assignment, chat, database, wiki to name but a few. To some extent we’ve only just touched the surface of what Moodle can do and we’ve just given them enough to get started.

As the schools will need continued support, the plan is to arrange for after-school workshop sessions each term for teachers to come along to (unfortunately there just isn’t enough funding to continue to pay them for supply cover for half day sessions). The agenda for these meetings will be set by them in the Moodle Users’ Support Area on the BucksGfL website. We can then come prepared to the meetings and, where necessary, create some Adobe Captivate movies on how to do some of these things (not that I have Adobe Captivate yet, it can’t be ordered until the new financial year).

One other thing we need to convince the schools to do is to post their problems in the forums in the Moodle Users’ Support Area and to subscribe to them. I suspect that many don’t use forums elsewhere and are yet to discover the benefits of using them rather than an email to an individual. Once they can see that using the forums will open up their query to a larger group of people, that an answer is likely to come more quickly and that they’ll see others posting queries that they also have and can see them being answered, I think we’ll be well away. We’ll then have a community of Moodle users who are helping and supporting each other. Now that will be good stuff.

Today was the knockout round in Buckinghamshire for the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge 2006/7.

This is the second year that the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge has taken place in this county. In previous years our schools have not been able to participate because it was only open to City Learning Centres and the schools they supported. Last year the challenge was opened up to all schools, so I decided to get involved and persuade some Buckinghamshire schools to participate. As a Lead Centre I have organised how the challenge works in the county and kept schools informed throughout the year.

Cars Maths in Motion has been around since 1984 and started life on a BBC computer. It has gone through many iterations (and now works on a PC, of course!) and it continues to be developed each year by its creators, Brian Richardson and Ian Whittington. Brian and his wife Wendy are partners of Cambridgeshire Software House (CSH) which they formed in 1980 and Ian is their technical support. Note they term themselves as partners, which gives an indication of how down-to-earth they are (many others would give themselves grand titles such as managing director) and that they are in it not for the money but for the love of what they do, which is produce educationally relevant software that children and teachers love to use.

The Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge was set up several years ago as a way of engaging children of all ages in an exciting and motivating mathematics based project. It is sponsored by Jaguar, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and several other companies. Each year the Challenge has grown in size and now there are thousands of pupils in hundreds of schools that take part. The Challenge uses the Cars Maths in Motion software which is a simulation based on Formula 1 Grand Prix racing. Pupils work in teams to set up a racing car and to try to win a Grand Prix race. This involves a lot of maths – measuring angles, calculating percentages, working out scale lengths, making adjustments to the engine, the suspension, gear ratios, calculating the fuel required for the race, working out pit stops and tyre changes and much, much more. Schools compete in a knockout round by submitting their best team’s car to CSH. This is followed by a semi-final where a further car is submitted. Then in June of each year the 30-or-so schools finalists are invited by CSH to meet for a final race-off to find out the mational winners for primary, KS3 and KS4.

Last year we had 8 schools participate in Buckinghamshire. This year we have 15 schools participating. Now this may only be a small number out of the 240 schools in the county. However, I always planned on starting small with the hope that by word of mouth from those schools who have participated, the numbers will grow each year. So I am pleased that the numbers have nearly doubled for 2006-7 and hope to see even more taking part next year.

OK, moan time before I get on to this year’s knockout. Although I am pleased at the number who have participated this year, I am disappointed that 6 schools who started in the autumn term have dropped out. Most of these have not bothered to give a reason as to why they have dropped out (and most didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me they weren’t going to put in an entry to the knockout round, so this morning was wasted phoning these schools to find out what was happening). Three of these schools did exactly the same last year. One of these schools was, under the guidance of a different teacher, last year’s Buckinghamshire primary winner. It’s such a shame that the children in these schools have missed out on something which would be both beneficial to their mathematical development and a whole lot of fun too.

Anyway, back to this year’s knockout round. This event was for the primary schools to whittle them down to the top six for the final. As there aren’t enough secondary schools participating, they are all already through to the final. A couple sent in their cars to participate in the knockout for fun only and to see how they compared with the primary schools.

Once all of the cars were in, the race was run. I videoed this with CamStudio 2.0 so that the schools could watch the race with their pupils and see how they got on, which I think is so much nicer than just being told the results. I also screen captured the race report screen for them to see.

Race video (23 MB zipped)

Now I need to let the schools know who is through to the final on 26th April. If last year is anything to go by, this will be a great day as the children get so fired up and excited about it. Now who’d have thought that you could say that about children doing maths…?!!

Recently I sold an old edition of Microsoft Office 2000 Professional on eBay. I was rather surprised to get just over £50 for it. Yes, that much for a copy of M$ Office that is 3 versions before the current version on the market! I guess it achieved the price it did because the buyer could then purchase the latest version, M$ Office 2007, as an upgrade and therefore at a much reduced cost from the full version. But why do people insist on paying for M$ Office when they can have a good, free office suite instead – OpenOffice.org?

Open source software seems to be looked at with some suspicion by some people. This appears to stem from two incorrect thoughts – “if its free it can’t be any good” and “there’s no support”. Let’s take each of these in turn.

1. If it’s free it can’t be any good – well take a look at Firefox. Or OpenOffice.org. Or Audacity. Or GIMPShop. Or Moodle. Try any of these and you will see that these are decent programs. In the case of Firefox, some (me included) would say it’s a far better browser than Internet Explorer.
2. There’s no support – not true. There is support through forums, usergroups and the ability to contact the software author. OK, this isn’t the same as picking up the phone to a software manufacturer. However, with enthusiasts for the software out there, the response to a problem can often be quicker and is often solved by the community rather than the author. Not that the author doesn’t listen to the users. Feedback plays a crucial part in the development of open source software, with suggestions from those who use the software shaping the next iteration of the program.

Some countries have already woken up to the possibility of using open source software including the US and parts of Europe such as Germany. The UK seems to be lagging behind, as usual.

In the UK education sector there is some use of open source software going on. Moodle is being used by schools in some authorities (including Buckinghamshire). However, the uptake of open source software is certainly not huge.

A while ago I spoke to a well-known educational hardware and software supplier about the possibility of offering OpenOffice.org instead of M$ Office. The response I got was that they had considered this in the past but there wasn’t the demand for it. Rather than offer it as an alternative, no choice was given and it was (and still is) M$ Office for your office suite. I do wonder how much of this decision is commercially driven and keeps the company’s relationship with Microsoft sweet…?

Personally I think OpenOffice.org is a credible alternative to M$ Office. OK, it doesn’t look quite as pretty as Microsoft’s latest iteration but it is sound and would at least suit the needs of pupils in primary schools, if not secondary. The old excuse of sticking with M$ Office as it is the “industry standard” doesn’t wash – pupils leaving school now at 18 would have joined the education system when M$ Office 3.0 was being used (M$ Office 2007 is version 12). Many would have started computing in schools with a BBC Master 128 or Acorn Archimedes 3000. What they first used is nothing like what they will use in the workplace today. So there’s no reason for pupils today not to be using open source software just because it isn’t used in industry (yet!)

So am I saying that schools should just be ditching all commercial software for open source alternatives? No! Firstly there isn’t an open source alternative for all commercial software. Secondly, some commercial software is more suitable for use by pupils and teachers than open source software. For example, Audacity is a great sound editor and can be used to create podcasts (although you’d have to create the RSS feed yourself of use a separate piece of software to do this). However, Podium is a lot easier to use, especially for primary pupils and teachers as this creates the podcast and publishes it, so allowing the focus for the school to be on learning and teaching with podcasts rather than on the technicalities of publishing them. Before anyone points me to Odeo Studio (which is free but isn’t open source), I am aware of this but it isn’t as flexible as Podium, plus podcasts are hosted on the Odeo website and not on your own.

I think my mission this year should be to get schools to consider open source software as an alternative to commercial software. The main consideration in what software should be used is its fitness for purpose and whether it will allow pupils and teachers to focus on learning and teaching rather than on ICT technical issues. If the software that does that is open source, then great. If commercial software proves to be better in that instance, then so be it.

I must now get around to compiling a list of open source software. When I do, I’ll post it on a page in this blog.

At lunchtime today the BBC announced on their news site that they were suspending their BBC Jam service from 20th March.

BBC Jam was launched in January last year and featured prominently at BETT. It is an online learning resource for children and is designed to be used at home to support key areas of the curriculum. The BBC was to spend £150 million on it over five years and had already spent half of that amount.

The reason for its closure and the impending review is basically down to complaints to the European Commission from educational software companies and BESA, the British Educational Suppliers Association. They weren’t happy that large amounts of public funding (our licence fees) were being used to provide free content to children and they said the service was damaging their business.

So, are the educational software companies and BESA right and BBC Jam is damaging their business? I’m not so sure…

From my experience in Buckinghamshire schools, BBC Jam isn’t really used by teachers with their pupils. At least I haven’t come across a school who said they used it. So in that respect, it follows the BBC’s design which was not for use at school but for use at home. Educational software companies would therefore not be losing out on this front – BBC Jam is not replacing their software in schools. That only leaves the home market for BBC Jam to impinge upon. Again I’m not convinced that it has done that. Yes, there are 170,000 users registered with BBC Jam and, as it can be used without registering the number of users is potentially much higher. What I’m doubtful about is that this has made much of an impact on home sales of educational software. Many of the parents that I know just don’t buy educational software for their children. Their kids use the variety of free resources on the Internet instead. If software is bought for their children, it’s usually games for their PC or gaming console.

If the educational software companies are seeing a decline in sales, I think this is for other reasons rather than done to BBC Jam. Schools have had e-Learning Credits (eLCs) for several years now and I know that some schools are overloaded with software and struggling to spend this funding. Other schools are using their eLCs to purchase the software element of the new curriculum networks they are getting, so the money is going on software to cover the ICT curriculum rather than on software to support the other subjects.

So in a matter of days BBC Jam will disappear and the educational software companies will no doubt be toasting this. I wonder whether they’ll be celebrating a rise in sales in the coming months or whether the decline will continue…?

I do hope that at some point we get back the current BBC Jam content, even if there’s no further development to it. I’d hate to see £75 million of public money just go down the drain along with the individual home learning that BBC Jam brought.

Today was the second training session for the current group of primary schools who have joined Buckinghamshire’s growing ranks of schools with a Moodle VLE. The first session was a couple of weeks ago – details here.

The words in the title refer to some of the (short) names that some of these primaries are giving their Moodle VLEs. Spindle. Woodle. Boodle. Busy Bee. One school had called their Canoodle to start with but for obvious reasons have changed it and it’s now called The Cherries. Other names taken by schools that have been trained previously include Doodle and Hoodlums. I look forward to hearing other variations in the coming months!

Today’s session, led by Ian Usher and supported by Pat Trowbridge and me, focused on getting some content into Moodle from other websites. RSS feeds were looked at and all added the feed from CBBC Newsround. A few schools found other RSS feeds of interest including one on funny poems. Many in the room, including Pat, seemed new to RSS feeds and it was a bit of a revelation for them that, instead of going to a bunch of websites to get information you could have all of this information delivered to Moodle. I’ve been using RSS feeds for over 2 years now, having been first introduced to them through the Old Age Playstationers gaming forum that I am a member of and currently an admin (we use them there for forum posts and I use RSS Bandit to collect these). Creating a course was also covered and then adding a link to a website. The schools I spoke to could all see the benefit of this – it provides pupils with a bunch of links to explore rather than just wandering off onto the Internet. Most of the links will open in a frame in Moodle, thus allowing pupils to easily return to the course the are on. One or two websites were problematic, such as those that open a new browser window with no address bar to copy the link from and one that had some frame-busting javascript. With a bit of fiddling we found the addresses and had these open in a new window from Moodle.

Many of the schools seem quite switched on with this. They don’t seem fazed by all of this, which is good. It means there can hopefully be more focus on the curriculum use of Moodle rather than the technical side of setting up a course.

The final session for these schools is in just under 3 weeks time where we will look at the activities that can be set up in Moodle.

Ian, Pat and I now need to look at the ongoing support for these schools and the ones that have already had this initial training. We will do this through after-school drop-in sessions (we need to co-ordinate our diaries and sort out some dates first) and by creating some demonstration videos using Adobe Captivate and Wink.

Assuming we’ve all got a job in a few months time after the School Improvement Service Review, we’ve got a busy time ahead of us for some time to come…

A sunny start to the final full day of the conference!

A History of the Future
The final keynote of the conference was from Ian Neild, BT.

Ian gave a very interesting and entertaining talk on how technology has changed life over the last century.

There is too much to note here on what he said – I’m hoping that his presentation will be made available

Amongst the many interesting slides I saw in the presentation, here are two pictures that stuck in my mind:

1. A Barbie USB drive – pull off head and plug into a computer.
   
2. A nano guitar – size of blood cell & with 6 “pluckable” strings!
   

OK, this isn’t really a good summary of the keynote. It was very entertaining though and just what was needed on a Thursday morning!

Using Moodle as a Core Component of a Local Authority Learning Platform
This themed session was from my colleague Ian Usher, E-Learning Co-ordinator, School Improvement Service, Buckinghamshire CC. Well, I had to go and support Ian, didn’t I?!!

Ian did spend a lot of time talking about Open Source Software and justifying why we use it (Moodle). Unfortunately this meant that only a short time was spent looking at what Buckinghamshire schools had done. Ian only had time to show some examples of uses of forums and we didn’t get a chance to see some of the Moodle courses that schools have made. This was a shame as some of this is good stuff.

It was interesting to see who turned up to watch this (approx 60 in all) including Robin Hall from Becta and someone from RM. It was also interesting to see members of the audience jump in to defend the use of forums by pupils when someone asked what value was added when pupils commented on another pupil’s musical composition and couldn’t they just type the word “sh*t” in there. The value in this case is two-fold. Firstly the pupil was sharing music that he had created at home – not in school – and through this he has been put onto the Able, Gifted & Talented register. Secondly all pupils had the opportunity to give feedback to this pupil if they wished, something that they would not all be able to do in school due to time constraints. Teachers can then help them develop their constructive criticism and evaluation of work from this.

Extending the Primary School through Learning Platforms
This themed session was from Miles Berry, Headmaster, Alton Convent Prep.

Miles is an advocate of open source software and the Moodle VLE.

Miles talked about the work he had done with Moodle at his previous school, St Ives. There was some good use of:

• forums to discuss homework and support each other.
• video capture of work going on at the Interactive Whiteboard to view from home and support homework.
• flash and java activities on the VLE.

The issue of work-life balance was raised by two attendees. This is a good question and needs careful consideration. Although some teacher input is required it doesn’t mean teachers have to work all the time. Leaving it to pupils to support each other and to intervene only when needed is much better, not just for the teacher but for pupils. This allows them to learn how to support and collaborate with each other, plus consolidates the learning for a pupil when explaining it to another pupil.

Miles had done a lot of data analysis to back up the work he had been doing. One example he showed was that using the VLE seemed to improve SATs scores by 2-3 % although this is not statistically significant.

Miles mentioned Elgg and the work he began on this. He said that this brought home-based learning back into the classroom through pupils’ use of the blogging facilities. Miles said that, in a sense it’s “a digital show and tell”.

An interesting and passionate presentation.

Online Social Networking and Teacher CPD
The themed session was from Mark Berthelemy, Learning Solutions Architect, Capita Learning and Development.

This was about Mark’s own CPD and how he uses Web 2.0 tools to enable it.Mark has a learning network – Ian Usher, Miles Berry, Stephen Downes etc – whose blogs, newsletters etc inform him about what he needs to know. Broadcasting your knowledge, thoughts and reflections extends your reach to inform others.

Blogdigger – gives you a personalised RSS feed on what others are blogging. Mark uses Google Reader to put together the RSS feeds he reads.

So should others in an organisation begin blogging to allow them to share their thoughts and experiences and learn from others? The answer is probably yes and there would no doubt be benefits. However there are also issues:

• Managing time so that blogging is just not another job to do.
• Some may not have sufficient ICT literacy to do this
• Some will not want to blog – especially those just ‘coasting’ in their jobs and only doing the minimum to get by and draw their paycheck.

All of Mark’s bookmarks from the presentation are on Diigo under the naace2007 tag.

Mark said that it would be great if the chief executive of a company, LA etc were to start blogging. That’d certainly be interesting to see in Buckinghamshire! Maybe we should get the County ICT Adviser and other ICT Consultants to join me in blogging first…!

A useful and thought provoking session.

The final afternoon
The presentational side of the Naace Conference 2007 drew to an end with two sessions.

The first of these sessions was Expert Panel: Meeting the Challenge. There were summaries of the three theme strands: Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, ICT CPD and Learning Platforms and Web 2.0 from various members from backgrounds including HMI, Ofsted, QCA, National Strategy and the Naace Executive. There followed an unexciting question and answer session.

The second session was Becta: Responding to the Challenge, chaired by Stephen Crowne, Chief Executive, Becta. Another enthralling question and answer session. Yawn.

Maybe this is why less than half the conference bothered to turn up?!

The Naace Conference 2007 ended with Closing Remarks from Terry Freedman, Chair of Naace Executive Committee.

Was the Naace Conference 2007 any good?
On the whole I would say it was. Yes, there were a few duff sessions and some of the organisation left something to be desired (for example, no coffee on the Wednesday morning). However, most of the sessions were interesting and thought provoking and I found it beneficial. Time now for me to reflect on the Learning Platforms and Web 2.0 stuff I’ve seen and think about how I can do my bit in Buckinghamshire to move this forward.