digital lifeboat

Good start to the week as had a meeting with the Head who has now instigated a regular briefing session with myself and my collegue. This will be very beneficial to all parties.

We talked over many of the current issues including the development of Moodle.  I was pleased that this is seen to be a high priority. The head was interested in reading my strategy document and will look at how we can include Moodle training into the programme for next year. I think it may not be in the all day format that would be ideal, but any time I can get will be of value in keeping up some momentum.

I think I will create an edited version of the strategy report for the SLT I can’t see them ploughing through 6,000 words.

Still chipping away refining the courses I am working on in Moodle,  and have had one of my trainees from last week into the office to do some work on a course idea they thought of during the training day.

I have been looking at examples of using Moodle in primary education and found some  schools who are really trailblazing in this field. I think we have much to learn from them, and am using these as examples for my next training session which will be with the primary department staff. This certainly encourages me along one train of thought re final year project in taking an overview of some good practice in other schools.

Managed again to write up another 1,800 words on the report so pretty much met my target for the two easter holiday weeks which was good. Spent ages on the referencing. I do find it tough especially as almost all the references are to web pages or electronic versions of reports available on line.

Maureen has been working on the group assignment and created a powerpoint of our content ideas. Worked a bit on this editing and made up a case study and quiz exercise to demonstrate SWOT and TOWS. This worked ok for a demo. Tricky getting the relative hyperlinks in though, powerpoint not having the ability to do this. I would like to re do the whole thing in Adobe Captivate 3 once we have sorted out and agreed final content to make the whole thing integrate better.

Putting my work plan into action this week managed to write up a little under 2,000 words on the strategy document, and have the skeleton plan in place.

Done some more prep for the Moodle training building up the course I am developing. Found a good video on teachers tv. I can see myself becoming a fan of this site. The resources are of very good quality and I have already bookmarked two or three for future reference.

I have downloaded one to use at the training session tomorrow. It is too big to upload to Moodle and I am not sure of the current status of teachers tv in our filter. I will be unblocking this if necessary so that I can put links directly into moodle.

http://www.teachers.tv/

I have been practicing using questionnaires in Moodle, and have set up two for use this week. Elements withing my Moodle training course now include, pp, video, quiz, wiki, discussion forum, questionnaire. Lots more things still to include and upload. Need to improve the layout and add some graphics next to make it less text heavy.

I am experimenting with the authoring software at school and hope to make something interactive for the group assessment presentation with this.

I found this today working on some materials for the next Moodle training day at school. This time I will have a group of 10 fairly young support staff. I wanted to introduce them to Moodle making particular emphasis on the range of tools available, and the potential for collaboration in the classroom.

 I thought I would survey them for their ICT skills and how they might be using web 2 tools socially, building a survey into Moodle as one of the activities for the day.

 Looking for a taxonomy of web 2 tools stumbled upon

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/

Andrew Churches from New Zealand ’s wiki left me breathless with the detail of his research. This is a huge resource for teachers of ICT.

 Superb work on mapping digital activities  to Blooms Taxonomy. 

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

Working on quite a complex time management system over the next six weeks or so. I will need to translate this into my MS project Gannt chart but here is the outline for reference.

 My plan is to capitalise on the staggared Easter holidays and leverage some advantage for myself in managing the workload. I did not plan this in advance and it is only in the last couple of weeks that I have realised that there is room to arrange some activities to take advantage of the college holidays.

 As of today at the end of week 5 ( and by design) I am completely up to date on weekly activity postings to Victory.

With the University on Easter holiday for two weeks before re commencing with week 6 activities, I have two whole weeks to devote to the report writing ( minus the Easter bank holiday weekend which I intend to award myself as a holiday) This gives me two full days writing time on the next two Wednesdays, plus evenings Monday to Thursday week one, Tuesday to Friday and the weekend of the second week.

By the time Uni starts again I should have made a good inroad into the final report structure and got some content in place. Then there are two ” normal” weeks with work and uni activities, followed by the school two week holiday period. At this point I will be going into work but workload will be lighter due to lack of students and staff!! Again this will leverage me some time as I will not need to stay over my hours.

Hopefully this will help me to get the strategy document and the group work done with less stress as the number of activities to balance will be less than normal.

Challenging assumptions about delivery channels

This is the sit up and grab you moment of the book – so far…

The physical or virtual presence of an instructor is one way of engaging learners hearts but by no means the only way. The delivery channel that has had the greatest  impact on how people think, feel, and act, that has had the power to change history is the humble book- the ultimate asynchronous distributed. self paced, self-directed learning channel. There is nothing face to face about the book- it does, however, engage the reader both mind to mind and heart to heart. Authors change attitudes and behaviours every day.

Morrison, D. (2003) E-Learning Strategies How to get implementation and delivery right first time. Wiley