ICT in Education

If you’ve been reading this blog you will know about the School Improvement Service Review and the threat to advisers and consultants jobs in Buckinghamshire, including mine.

The new structure was announced at the end of April and was finally confirmed last week. I, along with the rest of the ICT Curriculum Support Team, are among the fortunate ones and still have jobs. In some ways it is a celebration, albeit a muted one as a few colleagues are losing their jobs. Exactly what is happening to them is unclear – there will be efforts to find alternative posts in Buckinghamshire but inevitably a few are likely to be made redundant. Some have already ‘jumped ship’ and taken jobs elsewhere, so it is possible that for those who remain there won’t be redundancy because of this.

Times may well be changing for the ICT Curriculum Support Team. We have Ian Usher joining us as part of this restructuring and we will soon be discussing the work we will be doing from next term. I think there’s going to be an even greater focus on VLE/ Moodle training and support as well as other new initiatives – videoconferencing and e-portfolios. We shall soon see…

This afternoon we had the second session of Moodle/VLE training for schools starting it this term. As usual it was led by Ian Usher and supported by Pat Trowbridge and me.

The session focused on getting some content onto their VLEs. Seven teachers from the three schools were shown various things including how to create a course, add text and pictures to sections and upload and link documents.

It really does make a difference the number of schools and teachers taking part. In previous terms we’ve had many more attending these sessions and there has been a buzz and interaction between them. There is not so much of this with only three schools, and this may also account (in part) for why most turned up without a definite idea about what they wanted to create a course on. In previous sessions teachers have come along to the same session with a range of ideas and some have sparked off what others are doing.

There’s one more session to go with this group, in the first week after half term. I’m already looking ahead to the autumn term and have more schools signed up to the training we’ll be holding then than we have now. We do have over 100 schools still to train though…

This morning I received an email from Cambridgeshire Software House – we have a Buckinghamshire school in the national final of the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion Challenge!!

Congratulations go to Elangeni School for being the first school in Buckinghamshire to achieve this. This is also the first year that they have taken part so they have done well to get through the Buckinghamshire knockout round and final, and now the national semi final. They will go on as one of the eleven primary schools to compete in the national final at the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon on 29th June.

Needless to say I will be there, along with Pat Trowbridge, to cheer them on!

The first of the summer term’s training sessions for the current group of schools starting out on the VLE journey took place this afternoon. It was a select group of 3 schools (6 teachers in total) so with Ian Usher, Pat Trowbridge and me all there it was a good ‘teacher:pupil’ ratio!

We didn’t cover as much today compared to the first session last term. This was down to late arrivals. We have clarified the start time for the next session though so hopefully we’ll catch up on the bits missed out today.

All of the schools are now running an updated version of Moodle (1.6.5+) to what was in place before Easter. We’ve not gone for the latest version (1.8+) or even it’s 1.7.x predecessor – it’s always best to hang fire and use what we know works and move to newer versions when they are established and bugs have been ironed out. Not only this, Moodle updates so often that it’d be too time consuming, costly and disruptive to keep upgrading to the latest version. We have added in some additional activity modules though – Book, Feedback, iPodcast, Project, Image Slideshow and Webquest. It’ll be interesting to see how schools take to these. I’ve also got to learn what they all are too (I didn’t know about these until they appeared in the upgrade)!

After the training session we had the first of our twilight workshop sessions. Four schools came to this (6 teachers in total) and it was a productive time, answering individual queries and sharing some with the whole group (e.g. how to clear out data from a course in preparation for next year). We were aware of some of the issues prior to the session as we have set up a forum on the BucksGfL website with a thread for each session where teachers can post these to. Not that we could check the forum for a chunk of the day though – Atomwide were upgrading the BucksGfL Moodle (which was still running on 1.5) as well as transferring it to another server. Fortunately Ian called them and they promptly ensured the move and upgrade was completed during the afternoon. We did get a couple of schools turn up that hadn’t posted though. This wasn’t really a problem but we need to encourage schools to post in the forum thread in the future in case we need to prepare anything prior to the sessions and also because we’ve said if there aren’t any posts the session won’t run. It’d be a shame for teachers to turn up and find we have gone!