digital lifeboat

 CompendiumLD maps of the second stage course design.

Time to update the blog on the progress of the school Moodle.

Recent developments have continued the stone gathering speed metaphor from the last update.

I have continued to gradually develop my “pet” test areas on Moodle, notably the Eco schools course. There is a lot of activity in this area in school and plenty to write about and update content little and often. This in turn has helped feed the ICT co-ordinators dogged campaign to make all the pupils log into Moodle each ICT lesson. One of the reasons for this is to help the children learn their username and passwords.

Needing a some regularly updating content for the pupils to check up on in these short activity sessions, the Eco schools course has been a useful target.

Moodle made the agenda of a recent management meeting and for the first time some targets were set for development. The results have shifted the school into the next gear. Yesterday the teaching staff were given the staff meeting time to go and work on their subject courses. This morning I arrived at school and by 10 am three different groups of staff had approached me for either refresher training or basic training in Moodle.

By lunchtime we had booked in two training sessions for admin staff and I had decided to go ahead with a germinating idea for a “Moodle club” for staff to drop into a weekly workshop.

After school I met with a small group from local schools working on our first collaborative project on the main LEA Moodle site.

In addition I am getting a steady trickle of parents applying for their moodle log ins. This in turn will mean that once the admin staff are trained and start to feed and update public facing courses further momentum will be generated.

The pace has definitely picked up and the significance of the management team setting an agenda cannot be underestimated. The workload connected with Moodle has shot up for me since Christmas, but I can also see that “ownership” of different areas is growing. 

I must make some backups of different areas at this point and compare them in say six or twelve months to see what stages we go through as the learning community grows and finds it’s feet.

Just wanting to capture a few notes on the twilight session by making some very generalised observations. I will be looking in detail at the avalanche of feedback over the next couple of weeks.

 I had two hours to introduce the course to the target group. Half worked in the ICT suite on computers the other half on laptops via a wireless connection in the room next door. We began the session with some introduction and explanation of the project for the benefit of new staff.

 The school has a 2Mb Internet connection.

Testing

I was not able to test with an inexperienced user before the training session. This would have highlighted some of the issues which arose on tne night. In effect the training session became a usability test by the target group. I now have data from a wide range of users in terms of ability, age and experience.

 Logistics

 The group of over 20 was too big to manage on the night working in two rooms, and I could not keep up with the number of issues that were going on simultaneously.

One new laptop was missing software needed for the activity. 

One person attended unexpectedly and did not have a log in.

 Bandwidth

It is not clear if the Moodle server is correctly setup for streaming video. Testing prior to the training night revealed widely varying download results. With multiple downloads on the night the alternative smaller flash movie was needed. More info needed to follow up further.

 Moodle

Found an unexpected (untested) aspect of the chat room that the participants were identified by initial not name, leading to confusion.

Course Content

I had way too much material for the 2 hour session and did not need any of the extension exercises I built in. I think there is scope for dividing the material up in to a beginners and advanced course.

 On the whole the group worked much more slowly than I had anticipated. Over familiarity with the content had led to an underestimate of the time needed to complete different topics. Failure to achieve the first assignment objective, was mainly due to lack of time.

The journaling reflective activity seems to have been useful.

There was positive feedback about the interactive tutorial which was a novel learning experience for the group. The group saw the benefit of active learning in that activity.

More basic instructions were required on navigation and orientation in the Moodle environment. (too much for the 2hr training but to be developed further for the course ongoing.)

 It is too soon to make any judgements about how the training went overall until the data is analysed. There is a wide mixture of experiences and feedback. There were bugs or technical hitches in almost every area of the course on the night and the materials were thoroughly tested, pretty much to destruction!

It was an exhausting experience, and not an easy one for the subjects, but I do belive that I can see ways to solve most if not all of the issues which arose. 

I think a number of principles were tested in the different activities in the course and many proved useful for further development. The discussion acitivy was the least sucessful on the night. There were too many unknowns for the participants to deal with for them to properly engage with the task I set, but hopefully an experience to build on in the future.

 More to follow… 

Week 4  was working on the research design. It’s been slow going and I felt bogged down and wanting to start work on the course building before I run out of time.

In the middle of all that took a few days “out” by way of a diversion to do a bit more family history research. Inspired by the 90th anniversary of the ending of WW1 and spent some late nights unravelling the amazing story of a Great- Great- Uncle who died at the Somme.

Anyway as sometime happens, when busy at work and study, a ”mental break”  renews one’s energy to get back to the task at hand.

So to week 5 and a bit of excitement the first tangiable object resulting from the project, the results of my training needs survey are in.

Here the beauty of using Moodle comes into its own. The survey was done on line and the built in reporting tool has already done all the analysis work for me and provides the results in graphical and numeric form.

Comparing this with the effort of the last piece of research I did on the pupils on paper I recall the hassle and inaccuracy, double checking, inputting all the data into excell and then figuring out the correct equations to get a meaningful result.

Granted it took me several hours to build the questionairre, but it was a fraction of the time I spent on other recent paper based surveys. The last time this survey was issued the results were looked at briefly but never analised at all statistically.

All I had to do this time was observe the number of participents entries rising until after a couple of e-mail reminders all but one of my study group complied. I deliberately did not look at the results until they were all in having learned from my previous research that the full picture often looks different from the interim result.

Here is an example showing the way the results are presented for a rating question.

I found that by scanning through the 16 questions I could quickly identify the gaps in knowledge, and those areas where a whole topic was not well understood. For a busy teacher with several hundred pupils this must be of great benefit.

By way of limbering up to the research methods course about to get underway here are my thoughts on my attempt to do some research on the pupil cohort at work.

This week I finally manged to publish the results from my survey of pupils from last term. I will write about how I did this research and what I learned in broad terms without publishing the statistical results here.

The purpose of the research was to discover how many of our pupils had access to a computer at home with broadband Internet access suitable for accessing work in the school VLE, Moodle. It seemed to my colleagues and I that we could not push forward the development of the VLE without having some indication of how many children could access it from outside school. Also we needed to be looking at how we might make provision for those children who might not have computers and Internet access. We are aware of the growing scale of gov initiatives to address the digital divide, however we expect a number of children to fall through this net even so.

A questionnaire was prepared on paper which was sent home with all the pupils. Responses were identifiable initially so that they could be checked off a register to see who had replied. We wanted to get statistics for the children by year group. The personal identifying information was then removed before someone else entered the data into a spreadsheet. I had to re check the data several times as some of the sample groups were very small errors in the input had a disproportionate effect on the results.

The initial round of questionnaires bought in a return of about 30%. I then sent out via e-mail and letter further copies to those who had not responded.  By the end of term we had had a response rate of 50%.

In general I think next time I will send the survey directly by post and e-mail to the parents. The survey itself was quite long and we attempted to get too much information. Next time I will have just three questions. Do you have a computer, do you have Internet access, is it broadband?

Maths and statistics not being my strong point I have a vague awareness that there may be statistical methods by which the data we have could be extrapolated to make predictions about the the 50% who did not respond. However in the absence of this knowledge the application of “common sense” to the figures had yielded some interim conclusions.

The results from the group who have responded show a disproportionately high percentage of broadband Internet access way above the national average, currently 57%

This lead me to conclude that those who did not respond largely represent the balance of those who do not have computers or internet access.

This means that overall across the school our pupil cohort have well under the national average of access to the Internet. This would be consistent with other measures of the student cohort.

It was interesting that as the returns came in I was initially impressed with the level of Internet access the pupils seemed to have, and was quite optimistic about our ability to close the gap on the digital divide. However it was only at the end of the process that the true picture emerged. It is clear that only the massive levels of investment proposed by central government will make an impact on this situation. For ourselves, once the impact of the £300,000,000 is assessed we will need to revisit this question again, a year on from the first survey.

Meanwhile we can use the data we have to work on plans for a range of after school activities for pupils and their parents.