BlogDale

This week I have been playing with my Wii. Following Johnny Chung Lee’s posts about his research into using Wiimotes and an IR pen to create an interactive whiteboard (for less than £50), and Doug Belshaw actually doing it, I’ve mashed up a complete solution that is cheap and convenient.

Interactive whiteboards are like marmite. People either love ‘em or hate ‘em. I know people who believe strongly that the IWB is an expensive luxury in a classroom and that the same learning gains can generally be met using just a projector; conversely I’ve spoken with teachers who believe strongly that the interactive aspect of the board is what makes it useful, and they now wouldn’t be without the IWB. Interestingly, these two poles of opinion were found to be split generally between phases, where primary teachers wouldn’t part with their boards but secondaries were indifferent to them. My own observation was that whereas a huge investment was made in putting IWBs in classrooms, less importance was placed on training teachers how to use them. And so they sat on the wall as an expensive ornament for months until somebody went on a course and found what “other people” were doing with them.

To me, the biggest impact of a school’s investment in IWBs lies not in the whizzy resources that they produce for their own particular brand of IWB with its proprietary software. The biggest impact is to get teachers to use ICT to prepare and deliver rich content that is pertinent and relevant to learning objectives, and the rest will follow. As suggested here, the initial use of an IWB is simply to use it as a data projector and not to exploit the features of the interactive board itself. Surely that represents a wasted investment? Couldn’t we have bought two projectors rather than a projector and board? Yes we could. We should. And now there’s a way to dispense with the expensive board altogether, or at least see if your teaching style needs the features that a board has to offer.

Here’s how I did it…

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In these days of flux it’s often unsettling to think that your VLE is at the mercy of somebody else further up the line. At my school we host our Moodle VLE independently with eCognition, a company that will exist for as long as I do because I set it up to make sure that there was reliability and continuity of VLE provision to schools. We (my school) don’t feel the uncertainty that other schools might be feeling at this time when we HAVE to have a VLE in place before Sept 2008, because ours is set up and flouorishing and in a stage where exponential growth of usage is about to take place next term.

So how to add stability and peace of mind to those teachers who have created course content on their chosen bespoke VLE and are facing the prospect of having to move it to another VLE? Personally I would hate tha; going through all my files and courses and converting them to another format.

Well, if I were starting now (and some are) I would be seriously considering creating learning objects NOT within the structure of my VLE but in SCORM-compliant format. (Yikes. Even the acronym SCORM still makes me come out in a sweat). Don’t worry aabout the technicalities any more. Packages like RELOAD and eXe will help create and compile your learning objects into coherent course structures, but there’s still a learning curve. A nice online SCORM creator that I just discovered is myUdutu that allows you to export the packages you build for free, so you can then put them into your own VLE.

Basically, your course content needs to be delivered in some sort of framework. You create pages that deliver it, and you can then test the learning that has gone on in various quiz-type ways. The content can be any number of digital formats including text, pictures, video, audio etc. You pull them together in ways that you want your learners to experience and you test their new knowledge along the way. Then you bundle it all up into a package. That’s how online learning works in its simplest form, (the package is a SCORM-compliant learning object. You didn’t need to know that bit).

And the beauty of SCORM is that it’s a standard (*cough* well, mostly). So anything that is created in SCORM compliant format will import nicely into any VLE that says it will support SCORM (Moodle does. So do many most others). So whatever VLE your department/school/district/consortium/LA/RBC dictates you should go with, your SCORM packages are transferable between different ones. So whatever VLE you choose (use Moodle, do yourself a favour and save yourself much heartache - SCORM is just a minor trick in Moodle’s bag - there are many more learning-rich tools to use) you can import your SCORM packages with peace of mind.

We’ve installed a helpdesk at school. Previously we didn’t need one, since the network was small enough (and used by so few people) that the faults could be reported directly to the technicians in the corridor and they’d have it fixed by lunchtime. But not any more…the network has grown and it has become increasingly difficult for the techs to take jobs on in this way, and to prioritise and track them adequately. And everybody wants a slice of the ICT action these days. IT’s getting busy.

The beauty of the helpdesk is that already, after only a couple of weeks, it has allowed technical support to relax and prioritise their work instead of firefighting. Jobs are getting done, everybody knows where they are and all systems are just tickety-boo.

The solution we’re using is OneOrZero, an Open Source solution. Nicely customisable, we’re still working on defining categories in different areas while we pilot the system. Things look good so far; getting things working properly is one of the first steps in embedding elearning. People need to feel supported and to know where to go for help.

The day was scorching hot and the rooms stifling, but the Music conference went down a storm. I did two sessions on the use of Audacity for podcasting, which I’ve blogged on the Shropshire HOS blog here, so ’nuff said. A number of people signed up for eThink blogs on the day, which is great - seeing the ways the use of this technology develops in schools is inspiring.

Worthy of comment is the Cool Timer which I used for the first time. It’s just an on-screen timer but projected up on the wall/screen/IWB it lets people know how long they have left for a task and adds to the mix in a lesson. It was great fun to change the alarm soundfiles around but the gentle harp one really didn’t hit the mark as an alarum. Mrs Brown uses it I hear, and I grinned as I thought of her getting pupils to choose their own soundfile for the alarm. I bet she does - just her style, getting the pupils to take a part in the running of the lesson.

I took these meagre notes during a session on coaching. The poor quality of my notes is in indirect proportion to the quality of the session; I gave up taking notes and began to listen and participate instead. But here’s what I wrote anyway.

A number of schools are developing coaching as a means of CPD as a whole school initiative. Coaching is well-received in schools as teachers are finding that they value the dialogue that is generated between them. Schools are setting aside timetabled sessions for developing coaching.

Advisers support the development of the coaching in the school and help to facilitate the coaching relationship. Teacher/Pupil coaching is showing remarkable results as pupils develop quite sophisticated understandings through dialogue.

People trained as coaches are often passionate about their development. Cynicism is often dissipated through coaching dialogue.