A couple of more mundane things. I must confess that the SIMS part of my job is the least exciting - but does have the potential to make a large, positive impact on teaching & learning.
I’ve put together a brief handout on using messaging within SIMS and we’ve activated the feature for a couple of curriculum groups, SEN teachers and senior staff. We’re going to throw it all in the air and see how people use it!
SIMS Messaging Training Guide
Also, we had some School SAFE training which was very well led and a good combination of legal and practical considerations. That got me thinking and doodling about how to improve communication within school over “near miss” incidents and behaviour information which does not lead to a detention. I also sketched out some ideas for imporving the staff area of our school website, particularly with a view to share professional development.
Finally, I made a little template ready for all the other little training guides I’m no doubt going to produce.
This little darling which you can buy for £15 has helped my students gain easier access to thousands of pounds worth of mobile, high resolution, imaging equipment.
Instead of:
- Fiddling with cables (cables which students never have with them, and are different for every make of equipment)
- Carefully lining up infra red ports on the few staff laptops which have them
- Popping out increasingly miniscule memory cards, finding the correct adapters and slotting them into card readers
- Sending pictures to my mobile phone and me then transferring them to my computer.
Students can now easily Bluetooth pictures from their phones to my laptop.
We’ve had open learning week at school, where year 9s enjoy a wide range of activities. However many digital cameras we make available (we had five for 30 students today) it never seems enough. So by installing a USB bletooth adapter (that’s what the thing above is) students were able to use their own cameras (on their mobile phones) to bluetooth pictures to the school network. This gave us access to thousands of pounds worth of equipment which the students carry around.
It worked and they loved it!
What had started as either a regular presentation or newspaper producing task turned into a mobile, citizen journalism task. Students relished the opportunity to be taught how to make more complete use of their phones.
Of course now I’m faced with more quesitons to consider and work to do:
- How should our policy on mobile phone usage reflect the potential for students to use them in learning experiences?
- Will the Bluetooth adapters work on student logins?
- Do staff know how to use he Bluetooth adapters already built into their laptops?
- Why does everyone laugh when I call it a Bluetooth dongle?
- How do we make sure that students fully realise the dangers, responsibilities and vulnerabilities of living in communities with such powerful, invasive, discrete, mobile technologies?
How come the smallest steps seem to raise so many more questions and opportunities!
As expected upgrading Moodle from version 1.6 to 1.8 was not entirely problem free!
A technical bit
Moodle has been slowing changing the character set of it’s database from Latin to UTF8. This has been happening in parts of versions 1.6 & 1.7, but not all parts of Moodle (especially not some third party modules) have been using it. As a result although the majority of the database was correctly encoded, not all of the tables were. Here is the solution (for any technically minded people who stumble upon this).
To convert many MySQL tables to UTF8 from a different encoding.
Dump the database (I used phpMyAdmin, and added a drop tables command) and download
Use iconv to convert the content of the tables to UTF8 (this is easy on *nix systems, for Windows you may want to use this online version of iconv)
Now for possibly the tricky part, the collation of each table needs to be set to UTF8. It is easy to set the collation for the entire database to UTF8, but you usually need to do this for each individual table, in my case 49 if them.
What I couldn’t find was the syntax to convert all tables in a MySQL database. I could have followed a sequence if umpteen clicks x 49, but more usefully I sed a find and replace command in a text editor to take a list of tables and apply the alter table charset command to each table through an SQL command. For example: ALTER TABLE `tablename` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
So what next?
Now we have a wonderfully improved VLE - how should we use it to:
- Support learning
- Equip staff
- Communicate better with parents
Any suggestions gratefully received either by Email or through the comments system on this page. One small thing I will do is ask people! So if you bump into my over the next couple of weeks don’t be surprised to be canvassed on your opinions!
Logo wonderfully simply created from the web 2.0 logo creator.
The story so far
I’ve had a quick look at the stats for the school websites we’ve used over the last year (when I’ve done precious little!). It is slightly complicated by the fact that some people visit different domains; www.gcus.net, learn.gcus.net or celebrate.gcus.net.
The average daily number of visitors to our school website is currently between 100 and 150 , depending on the month. Our usage in school is counted as one visitor. It may include some automated visits from Google and other search engines, but you can count on about 80 of those being “real people” accessing the site from outside of school.
Each visitor looks at an average of 10 pages before leaving. This means that the site has been relatively successful at maintaining people’s interest and providing them with useful information.
Our Moodle installation has:
- 1500 registered users (we have about 850 pupils and 60 staff, 600 users have logged in in the last 6 months)
- 275 courses (for example Maths has courses for each level of Key Stgae 3, each tier of GCSE and each unit of A Level)
- 4500 resources (each page, link, quiz, image and PDF is a resource)
- average of 150 log ins a day (more logins to our website than recorded visitors because the school Internet address is just registered as one visitor but a lot of students log in to the website from school)
- trained over 50 staff to add content
Above are some of the pics users chose to represent themselves on the website.
Next steps
- I’ll schedule a full backup of Moodle to run tonight.
- Over the next few days I will upgrade our installation from version 1.6 up to 1.8, the latest version. Expect a few things to break temporarily! But enjoy the new features, such as customisable profiles and improved roles allowing more control over who can see what, accessibility & usability improvements, Moodle networking to join multiple instalations together which may be useful for offering Moodle to our family of schools and improvements to quizzes, assignments and lessons.
- Possibly compile a brief survey for student, staff and parental users to better guage their usage, hopes and disasters of using Moodle.
- Discuss ways of using Moodle to better support teaching and learning, initially through discussions with a range of staff.
To find out more about Moodle visit www.moodle.org
Well, it seems as though I was appointed to be a something or other today, job title to be decided.
My first minor contribution is to celebrate our school’s open learning week (year 9 students choose from activities ranging from paintballing to boat building). I’ve dropped a brief note into each staff member’s pigeon hole inviting them to contribute, text, images, video, animations of the activities they are involved in. I will then work with some students to publish these and build discussions around the material.
Not very new media, but material con be contributed by email, mobile phone (SMS or MMS) or by copying into our school shared network area. On our next school trips hopefully we will have students live blogging - but give me a chance I’ve only been in the job 20 minutes (literally!)
