Trial dissemination method

Please feel free to rate and comment on the video.

An introduction to Reflective Practice through Google

For anyone starting out, looking at Reflective Practice is a tricky topic to get your head around. Below is a video I made with Google Search Stories to illustrate my journey through:

This is a retrospective journey, mind. I by no way consider myself an expert on the subject of Reflective Practice, but my assignment on the subject is quite popular on YouTube 🙂

Development of a new skill within Moodle

How can I adapt and improve Moodle?

Previously, I had identified current strengths and weaknesses within Moodle. I will now look to develop a new skill to address a current weakness of the platform.

I had observed that the current system was being used to distribute materials and information effectively to students, but little was happening to gather these same things from the students themselves.

I am currently at the point in the academic year where coursework is being completed from both years 10 and 11. Based on experiences over the past two years, the biggest difficulty students have is ensuring that assessment criteria is met for their assignments, and therefore as a department, we developed paper checklists that students could use to tick off every objective as they completed it. The weakness with this system is that over the course of their assignments, checklists were lost entirely or became tatty in appearance and therefore difficult to read as tasks were added, removed and modified by hand.

As we now have a Moodle system in place, I will look at developing a method of checklists being completed on the Moodle platform.

Research in the official Moodle documentation did not reveal a simple way of achieving this with the standard feature-set of Moodle. I then did some broader research on the internet which lead me towards the official Moodle forums where I came across a thread where others were trying to achieve the same thing. At this stage I had gained knowledge of the extensive support network of other Moodle users from around the world. I then added to this forum post where I detailed my needs for the checklist. I was then quickly responded to by other members of the forum with suggestions that unfortunately did not quite meet my needs.

After a few hours, I then received a message from a forum member that suggested a Module for Moodle that would let me achieve my goal.

Planning and implementation

A Module is something that extends the functionality of Moodle beyond that of what it is capable of as standard. There are currently just over 600 modules for Moodle at the time of writing that extend it in a very many variety of ways. The module that I am planning to implement is simply called: ‘Checklist’

From the author’s description:

This is a Moodle plugin for Moodle 1.9 that allows a teacher to create a checklist for their students to work through. The teacher can monitor all the students’ progress, as they tick off each of the items in the list. Items can be indented and marked as optional. Students are presented with a simple chart showing how far they have progressed through the required/optional items and can add their own, private, items to the list.

From the description and screenshot of the Module this appears to fulfil my needs of a Checklist and add the functionality of the Teacher being to able monitor progress, a benefit that I had not previously considered.

The extra information provided by the author of the Module provided information on how to install the plugin into my Moodle platform. This was much simpler that I had anticipated with only three steps to the install:

Unzip the contents of file you downloaded to a temporary folder.

Upload the files to the your moodle server, placing them in the ‘moodle/mod/checklist’ folder.

Log in as administrator and click on ‘Notifications’ in the admin area to update the Moodle database, ready to use this plugin.

I performed the transfer of the Checklist files to Moodle with a free piece of Software called Cyberduck. A simple and effective FTP client I use to transfer files two and from my departments web server.

Once I had followed these steps, there was indeed a new item in my existing Moodle courses called ‘Checklist’.

Before I trialled it with students, I added a sample checklist module instance to a test course I created and created a test student account to see what the student would see and how the teacher can then control it. This proved that the module did provide the functionality I was looking for. I then added it to the coursework centric courses in Moodle and spent a starter of a lesson showing the students how to use it and ensured that I could see their progress once they had transferred their paper copies to the new system.

From this process of developing Moodle with Modules, I have learnt:

• There is a wide and supportive community of like-minded educators that have a wealth of experience with Moodle that will more than gladly lend a hand if you ask for it.
• There are many different features that can be added to Moodle through the use of Modules.
• The skill of developing Moodle with features not currently available with the addition and installation of Modules.

I feel this is a valuable skill that will be used again as I now can combine the knowledge of the various modules available with the ability of how to add them to sculpt and develop my Moodle install towards the needs of myself and my colleagues. It may also occur that there will be issues as I further develop the site, but now my knowledge of the support network provides an experience driven knowledge base for me to seek advice, assistance and recommendations.

How does it work in practice?

Since the Checklist Module has been in use with both years 10 and 11, there are a few features that I feel are missing. As this has been rolled out across two large year groups, the teachers panel gets very cluttered with all the information coming from different students. This makes it difficult for teachers to see a quick overview of how a particular class is doing.

When a checklist is viewed individually, you can see a progress bat at the top that shows the overall percentage of completion of the checklist.

I thought that it would be useful for a teacher to see this view for a class of students together. I made this suggestion to the developer of the Module to which he swiftly replied that he liked the idea and will be including it in future updates of the Module.

UPDATE: Since this post was written, the module has been updated to include the features I requested from the developer.

Replacing the existing files with the updated files of the module was all that was required to perform the update of the module. A reflection of this is that someone who runs a Moodle site must manually check periodically whether module updates are available and perform them manually. This is in contrast to other web based services such as WordPress, another technology in use on the lateforlunch.co.uk server. WordPress automatically updates itself and the installed modules plug-ins, something I feel would be a welcome addition to Moodle 2.0!

On the initial paper implementations of the checklists, the students were able to add notes to each item. This had the downside that this lead to the checklists becoming unreadable, but this was a feature that was missing entirely from the Checklist Module. This is easily fixed by allowing students to add their own individual items to the checklist. These are easily added, removed and modified leaving no mess as was occurring on the paper versions. Students can also tick these notes off as they achieve them.

So far, the use of the checklist module has not failed and myself and my colleagues continue to see a benefit of the technology and a positive impact on students ability to self manage their assignments.

What is a ‘learning organisation’?

So, this is a question I have been striving to answer for about a week now. Reading Trawling through many academic texts was just grinding my gears and was getting me nowhere. Speaking with Prof Stephen Heppell at BETT 2010, he told me that modern learners were using YouTube as their primary search engine. I took this advice today and started going through just a few of the top results for: learning organisations. This brought up this video that clarified many things for me. It is a primary source as it is uploaded by the author, so can it be referenced in academic texts? That is the real question.

Reflection in the workplace

Although not my brain child, my Academy is now rolling out a trial scheme with the view of creating reflective students. The whole idea comes from developing ‘parent tutor day’ which is where form tutors meet with individuals from the group accompanied by their parents to discuss a multitude of different things. This time around, instead of the tutors whaling on at the students about what they are good at, bad at and need to improve, students are taking the stage.

Students will present a reflective dialogue for around three minutes to their tutor and parents identifying key areas that they themselves have identified. This is developing several initiatives in the students:

• Development of reflective ability
• Presentation skills

Above is a sample of some of the things they are talking about in their dialogues, but there is a range. Some have done a SWOT analysis and others have gone with a more traditional exploration of themselves.

I can only hope that this idea is developed into an ongoing initiative as i think being a reflective learner is vital to progress. In education, students are pushed to the limit, rarley being offered structured time for personal constructive reflection, seeing what has been attained and what needs still to be done.

I hope to update soon with further developments.

Thats a wrap.

So, that’s it, nothing more to see here… for this year anyway. Its now Toby Adams, CertHE, but this is not tobyscerthe blog, so we have a way to go yet. So what has the first year been like? Interesting, that’s all I can say. I came to all this with severe apprehension of higher education, but I now know that all bachelors are NOT equal. There are the institutions that adopt change and innovation with open arms and exploit it for all its worth in a learning environment and there are those who would have you writing with quills if they could. I am fortunate enough to be associated with the first of the two.

I can see precisely how this course has helped me and expanded my horizons in only the first year and how it really can map to any job role.

Above is a graphic from wordle.net

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

The word cloud is created from this blog, the larger words appearing more often. A great tool for visual reflection and presentation.

My project over the summer is to develop my other blog over at http://techintnl.wordpress.com

I hope to get this to its own domain and all sorts, but I would like to see the readers, hits and comments before I commit. Please do have a look and read, why not leave a comment?

Millwood’s Visuals

In one of my LO’s, I shamelessly used Richard Millwoods graphic from his blog as an image for the title page as it was a great shot of an AI planning session and looked very pleasing to the eye (well mine anyway). This was a LO looking at Action Inquiry from a research perspective.

A latter LO is now the workplace application. I have since become fond of this image and had the brain child of transposing it into my work setting. Below is the result. Its a little more imitation than transposition, but it is in my workplace all the same. My colleagues thought it was my world domination plan and were reluctant to remove it before lessons began. A great way to start the day at 7:27 in the morning!!!

UAI LO3 Conclusions

Above is my conclusion of LO3 of UAI hopefully explaining:

• Genre selection
• Issues encountered
• Strengths / weakness’ identified

Made in iMovie 09 and my first real attempt of creating a ‘vid-cast’

Basic principals of my study

Here is a bit of an off-beat post to outline the components that I am so thankful for and could not imagine doing my studying / researching / learning without. First up its the underpinning element:

This is the framework on which I do 90% of my work (the other 10% is my learning journal which is a blue lined book, nothing special.) I have been involved in the IT industry for a while and without (hopefully) sounding like a bit of a bandwagon tag-along, Mac OS X has really facilitated the work I have produced so far with its simplistic file management, redundancy and time machine.

I suppose the enclosure for the previous (and all to follow) would be my fantastic laptop the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 15″ The best laptop I have ever had. It keeps on surprising me with most things, could not recommend a brand/model as much as this!

This little gem would have to be the secondary framework. Doing a research / distance learning degree would be rather difficult without web access and Firefox allows me to access all I need to on the web with the ability to support plugins such as Zotero.

The common room / lecture theatre / tutorial space and everything else, FirstClass is the University. It brings the Cohort together to engage in a communal learning environment and also allows students to connect with other cohorts, past and present.

Another Apple product now, still not a fan-boy, iWork 09. I have only been using it really in Semester 2, really to try it out. I have had all versions previous to 09 (through site license) but never really ran with it. 09 has really been a saviour for me, alleviating the need for buggy, slow, putrid Office:mac 2008 that I am only using for my reference page for each module as it has interoperability with Zotero, a feature iWork has yet to support.

Oh, now my favourite, Spotify is a service like iTunes that provides all music in its database (around 2-3 million) for free, streaming and instant. See my previous post to see the love!

I suppose this would be another component of the mix. Zotero is a FANTASTIC premise, but not fully developed in my opinion, head over to their website to read all about it and see how it can help you.

Oh come on, not everything is good with hiher education, this is how the descrepancies are dealt with!

What could you not do without???

Spotify my mind

Communal, free and revolutionary, Spotify sets out to change everything. Spotify will feel rather similar to anyone using iTunes but with one vital difference. Spotify connects to Spotify servers to stream over three million track from all major record labels for free. The only catch is that you never own the music, but that is also its key aspect to the £0 price tag. Spotify is also almost all server side, so how ever many computers you sign in on (can only be signed in on at one at a time) its always the same, Windows or Mac. Because of the de-centralisation of the whole thing, collaborative playlists are also possible, endless potential and fun. You will have to sign up to register and wait for an invite, but invites can also be given out by current members, I have a few remaining, so leave me a comment if your feeling lucky!

Community involvement at a new level

Now, if your also following the curricular of the BALTR course, you will know all about community participation in the aim of an output, but i have now come across something that brings this now to a new level.

What is being seen with the “YouTube Symphony Orchestra” is communal involvement on revolutionary global scale. Something that hasn’t been done before. I wont blab on, just look at the video, isn’t it fantastic? I might even rake out the violin again and see if i have still got it!

The level above

With most things, to grasp what you are trying to do, its good to look at the level above. I have come across a fantastic resource from an affiliated University of my Academy; The University of Greenwich. The pack pictured above contains three PhD thesis’ from the field of education. Its really interesting to read through these and then compare it to my work. It gives a great perspective on referencing (were talking about two per sentence) and statical analyses.

There is supposedly an open on-line respositary of these, if and when i find it, you will find the link here.

Plone

The fantastic FirstClass does a brilliant job of bringing students of the course together, but a big hands together for Plone, which i think brings everything together so nicley. Tomorrow is World Plone Day which is an event to celebrate the product, its uses and how it has impacted so many scenarios for the better. Take a look here to see what its all about.

A well earned break

The glory and satisfaction of a two week holiday is something that i have looked forward to for weeks and now its here! I have a whole 14 days where coursework deadlines, detentions, assemblies and form groups do not exist. A well earned break i think. I’m looking forward to these two weeks so that i can get around to doing some reading from my reading list. I have just finished reading “The Learning Revolution” and all i can say is that its a fantastic read, some great pointers in there that should spur on anyone to challenge the existing methodologies of education.

Hope to do some more blogging too over my break, as i can feel it becoming a bit addictive.