So what is it that puts Moodle to shame? Well, Moodle of course! The school had been stuck in the older Moodle 1.9 for years and Mary delivered training to the whole staff on the latest version of Moodle, demonstrating the cool new features the colleagues will enjoy. “I did point out to them that it still is Moodle, ” says Mary “and I think they knew that; they were just so overwhelmed by the ease of use that they didn’t consider the old and the new connected.”

Mary continues: “I actually went against my own advice today, because I started off by showing them all the cool drag and drop stuff, especially dragging in files. Whatever your feelings about Moodle being a file dump, this is a  great “hook” to pull them in with, and so next session when I go through some more interactive stuff that I feel is more valuable, they’ll be won over already.” In the short, 45 minute training, Mary focused on what she calls “quick fixes”, simple stuff easily done but with obvious results. Like searching for and embedding youtube videos and Flickr or Wikimedia images. “Youtube has only been allowd in the school since last September, ” says Mary, and it’s now recognised as a useful teaching tool which hasn’t been abused by students at all. So the ability quickly to find and add a youtube video was bound to be a winner.”

If you’d like Mary to introduce your staff to the very latest Moodle, get in touch with Paula via our contact page. And if you’re a Moodle admin, here are a few tips from Mary to make life easier;

1) Rename “server files” to something like “Files in other courses”. That’s what they are, and it will be better understood and less offputting than talking about the “server”.

2) Remove the requirement to add a description to files, pages and other resources. While being able to display this description on the course page is neat, many times teachers simply copy the text of the name and so it’s redundant  and a bit annoying to have to enter a description too

3)Show them the link at the bottom of the pages to “Moodle docs”. (This got gasps of approval amongst this afternoon’s teachers who hadn’t seen the latest documentation) And set it to open in a new window; many users find this reassuring

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I spent two intense days at BETT last week, investigating commercial VLEs. The reason?  Because Our Lady’s High School, in which the OurLearning Training Centre is based, is exploring alternative Moodle provision and to make 100% sure Moodle is the right choice (which I firmly believe it is!) I was tasked with researching what other VLEs have to offer. It was a fascinating insight: I learned what  the current trends are, what other VLEs do  better; what Moodle does better and how things are moving forward. Below are some of my findings. Bear in  mind that I was looking from the point of view of secondary education only, with the needs of High school teachers and students. I visited:

FROG

ItsLearning

Life(Uniservity)

MyLearning

Fronter

(A quick mention to IamLearning, which, although not a VLE, is a great game-based learning add on)

Each VLE had something cool I liked and something I felt was less effective than Moodle. For example, I thought Frog and MyLearning both had very cool, modern graphical interfaces that would immediately appeal to young students, but none of the VLEs came anywhere near the powerful assessment and reporting functionality of Moodle.  Maybe that’s because Moodle has a very high FE/HE uptake, whereas the products I explored were for schools; I don’t know. A few comments:

Drag and Drop is the Future!

The overriding method of editing a page was dragging and dropping blocks (or widgets as some call them) Think Mahara pages and you’ll be there.  The new version of Fronter even has drag and drop quiz questions (that reminded me a bit of Google forms) We need to get drag and drop into Moodle’s Myhome (My Moodle ) page and My profile page at the very least.

Personal spaces  and Social networking

While you can customise your profile (if allowed) in Moodle to a certain extent, you don’t have any more options. If  you want a Facebook like approach, again, you need to look to Mahara, where users can create their own pages, share with others at different levels. Most of the VLEs I looked at offered personal spaces  (sometimes called portfolios) as standard, suggesting they combine into one the “work” functionality of Moodle with the “social networking” aspect of Mahara. This is a big plus for students who then feel they have ownership over a particular area. Whenever I introduce pupils to Mahara, the first thing they want to do is change their profile picture and write on walls (another feature offered by some of the above products) and whenever I introduce them to Moodle they immediately go searching the Messages block for elder siblings or friends to message. If we are to teach them safe social networking, we need something in school that’s user friendly and inviting. Moodle was created before the advent of Facebook and although you can use it in a similar way, it involves workarounds. (You can make a comments block on your profile as a wall for instance.) There is a desire for a new Edmodo-like social course format (see here ) and hopefully work being done at the moment on course formats should make creating this sort of thing easier – but we aren’t there yet. The teenage targetted offspring of a Moodle-Mahara union would be unbeatable; it would take over the world!

It’s all pictures and no words!

I confess:  I am a words person! If I have the choice between clicking a text link or clicking on an icon, I will choose the text anytime. If i have to itemise stuff I will write a paragraph or a list instead of drawing  a pretty table. But increasingly the world is going GUI – and every single VLE I looked at had bigger, brighter buttons than Moodle. For teenagers used to bright and shiny, this no doubt makes a seamless transition from home to school. You want to add an image to your page? You find the image icon block and drag it in. No letters of the alphabet needed. (We’re back to Mahara  -style again) Moodle DOES have bigger and brighter icons in 2.4 and it’s great. But a lot of it is still text based. A colleague claims “Moodle’s meant for universities, not high schools and that’s why it doesn’t really look right for 11 year olds”. Does he have a point?

Customisability

Continuing from before: what Moodle does better, and because of its open source nature, is allowing you to customise your site’s appearance. You want a primary school look? Get a primary school theme! I asked each VLE provider how much a school could personalise their “landing page” and the answers were mainly – just school colours and logo.(Itslearning offered WP templates for the front page, however )This is doubtless due to the fact that the products are hosted remotely: ItsLearning in Oslo  for example, with each school  like a subdomain on a big server. With Moodle, a school can have anything from going it 100% alone or being totally managed – and all flavours of customisation in between. Moodle doesn’t have to look like Moodle, whereas I suspect Fronter (for example) will always look like Fronter.

Activities

File upload, folder display, forums… the occasional wiki and various types of Quiz (sometimes called test) were the norm for all. The ability to connect with Dropbox, Google docs and so on was promoted – something Moodle’s been doing for 3 years now. And SSO to other sites… well, Moodle does LTI.  A  couple of demonstrators bigged up the ability for non-technical teachers to embed youtube videos without any coding  – but I confess I think Moodle does that more simply than either. Mylearning (which probably came out top, if I have to declare a favourite) has some sort of copyright agreement whereby a teacher can find a youtube video and download it directly into their teaching space, thus overcoming any problems with youtube being blocked in school. That WAS cool.

As far as quizzes were concerned, there was nothing that came anywhere near the powerful functionality of Moodle’s quiz. But again, some might argue: do you need all that in high school VLE? Are all those question types, that Certainty based marking, those detailed reports  necessary when all you need to know is: did your pupil do the quiz; what did they get right and wrong? Not sure.  I suggested to my colleague you can just turn off the Moodle quiz functions you don’t need, but my colleague replied –why have them there in the first place?

Homework assignments

Moodle calls work students send to the teacher for marking “assignments.” Other VLEs have different names for them but I felt most did a reasonable job of offering both text based and file upload options.  Group assignments (now available in 2.4) seem to  be possible in a couple of them, albeit produced in a slightly different way, mirroring for instance a  Mahara  group page which is then submitted.  Once again I felt Moodle did so much MORE but once again my colleague wondered how much of the More you need for secondary schools. I’d have liked to have spent more time looking at  the gradebooks.  Fronter’s seemed to have loads of clicks to get anywhere, and while others were prettier than Moodle, I couldn’t get a real feel for a whole class as often the demo sites only had one student with one test assignment or quiz so you weren’t able to see examples after a whole term with lots of students and lots of assignments.

Mobile and tablet friendly

Everyone seems to have a mobile “app” these days, and all the companies I saw were confident their VLEs were compatible with all device types -or soon would be…. Frog and MyLearning boasted of their HTML5 prowess, Fronter said their product worked on everything except ipads (some java issue they promised would be sorted shortly) and Life(Uniservity) have got a mobile version in the pipeline. I was pleased to see Moodle partner Synergy Learning actually had Moodle Mobile in big print at the back of their stand – Moodle is well up in this area.

Online, offline

On a couple of occasions the demonstrator apologised for the wifi internet connection at BETT. No worries, but it reminded me that last year I did some Moodle demos with a Moodle site on my laptop locally and didn’t have to apologise once. Moodle has the edge in this respect because it’s possible to have it living on your school servers and then sent out into cyberpace out of hours so you get the best of both worlds. If you are tied to a VLE that resides in Berlin (for instance) you don’t get that benefit.

MIS Integration and Parental Access

This was available with them all – for some it was standard, part of the price, for others it was an extra. Either way, if you have SIMS (for instance) Jimmy’s classes will sweep beautifully into your VLE and your parents can see what Jimmy’s been up to . But hey, Moodle offers this too, as an extra. I know of at least three options (Schools ICT Z-Link, Overnetdata and Webanywhere) If you can’t afford it though you, do have a wide range of other authentication and enrolment options but getting Parents on and connected to their children is still a nightmare in a standard Moodle. (See this  bulk add parents plugin however, if you’re interested)

Price

Actually, not a lot in it. Of course if your network manager is tech savvy, she can set you up Moodle for free. But if you don’t want the hassle, then the prices I saw are comparable with those of commercial VLEs. It usually depends on your number of pupils (although Fronter required number of teachers too) Frog quoted £5K set up and £5K a year thereafter; MyLearning quoted £2.75 per pupil with a 50 % discount if you purchased 3 years. The others were somewhere in between. For Moodle it depended on if you wanted SIMS integration and /or Mahara, the level of support you required, and how many years you would sign up to, so it was hard to compare, although we are looking at a minimum £5K per year.

Others

I didn’t get a chance to go and checkout Google but I took a brochure relating to a primary school using Google Apps for Education. I can see how this can be a winner and substitute VLE for many schools. Likewise, the free Edmodo. It’s basic but combines resource sharing, assessment and social networking – not to mention parental access. I’ve had minimal experience  of it but pupils trialling it in our school have taken to it very positively. While I can see it being great for individual teachers, what I can’t picture so well is how it could work in a whole school, but maybe I should google that!

Support

I am totally biased here because nobody will ever convince me that the commercial support deals or community support forums (apparently Frog’s is quite good) will match Moodle’s offerings. You can of course pay for support for Moodle ( you can even pay me!) but if you can’t or won’t, then Moodle.org’s support forums are open 24 /7 and that’s where I am heading now…

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If you’d like Mary to visit you for consultation or training, get in touch with Paula at OurLearning here.

The colours replicate the school’s official year stripes  which the children wear on their uniform, and the use of group badges like this gave Mark the idea of creating other group avatars as  ”badges of honour”. “Those Year 10s who have been particularly helpful to the Year 7 pupils are put into the Pupil Mentor group and given a Star badge which displays on their postings, “ he said.

“This is a great motivator and it also means the younger pupils can easily identify older pupils who could support them. In fact, one Pupil Mentor has actually started a thread offering homework help to the  Year 7s!”

As part of their ICT coursework, Mark’s KS4 classes have to create tutorials to explain certain processes such as sending emails. The course serves a further purpose in that the KS4 pupils post their tutorials -which might take the form of screencasts for instance – as attachments in the forums and the Year 7 pupils are then tasked with giving them constructive feedback.

Such has been the success of this cross-year social forum that pupils have been posting regularly throughout the Christmas holidays – even while waiting for their turkey to be served up -check out the time on the following screenshot!

Juliet Park, Director of MFL and NVQ expert

Just before the Christmas break we thought we’d highlight another of our valued trainers here at OurLearning – @moodlefairy Mary Cooch. In our last post we told you how proud we were that Secondary Maths trainer Mary Tuson and Computing trainer  Alan O’Donohoe were both classed as “outstanding” by  a recent OFSTED inspection (report here) . For her part, Mary (who was only slightly disappointed not to have been observed during the inspection!!) delivered some VLE training specifically aimed at Modern Foreign Languages teaching last Wednesday.  The verdict was Fantastic- according to Juliet Park,  Director MFL at Yewlands school and regular speaker and trainer for regional and national events with organisations such as ALL, Network for Languages and the SSAT where she  worked as a Lead Practitioner for the last 4 years. Juliet is nationally renowned as an NVQ specialist, supporting  teachers and schools across the UK in the implementation of this successful alternative pathway and she astutely identified Moodle as  being a highly appropriate way to deliver not only NVQ courses but also her MFL lessons at school.  Listen to what she had to say about MFL, Moodle and Mary below, and if you’re a languages teacher looking to use Moodle in your school, download our “Allez-y with your VLE” brochure here.

In short, if you are looking for training on Mathematics or Computing from real teachers who have proven themselves as Outstanding, take a look at  what Alan O’Donohoe and Mary Tuson are offering in the New Year! And watch out for more Outstanding subject-specific training coming shortly!

When I was asked to go back to my roots and run some MFL courses, the first thing I thought of was: Moodle! Whenever I do VLE training, I always veer towards examples using Languages,so it just seemed right that we should offer a course focusing specifically on how MFL teachers and TAs can make the most of Moodle. Moodle has so many fantastic features that lend themselves beautifully to learning foreign languages, and I am looking forward to sharing these with other like-minded linguists.

So that’s how Allez-y with your VLE (course flyer here) was born.

Mary goes on. My second thought was : Games! Nobody except other languages teachers realise just how challenging a subject it it is to teach. Highly rewarding but very physically demanding. I used to play language games a lot with my KS3 and KS4 classes and when in 2005 I finally got a Smartboard, it opened up a whole new world of ICT based MFL games.

MFL Games for your IWB (flyer here) introduces teachers to free (yes, free!) games to motivate your classes and the learning won’t stop at the end of the day. Delegates will leave with a pack of games software and a log in to a Moodle site where they can  network, swap games and ask any questions for a full 12 months after the workshop.

All good things come in threes, and Mary’s third  event tackles listening and speaking skills by exploring different ways of using audio in the MFL classroom -and out of it! Pretty much every pupil now carries in their pocket the means to learn, practise and broadcast themselves anywhere and as teachers we need to harness that ability and direct it towards enhancing language skills. Not just pupils – if you fancy yourself as a podcasting linguist, download the Audio in MFL course flyer here and get in touch with us via our contact form. À bientôt - Bis Bald and Hasta Pronto!

Here’s a quick demo with screenshots. Click on the screenshots to see them full size and get a clearer view:

We’ve got a Staff dates Google calendar with a couple of events this week:

We grab its URL (ending in .ics) go to our Moodle calendar and click “Manage subscriptions” :

Now we add the details of this calendar. We’ve chosen a URL but you can also upload an .ics file. We can choose when it’s updated and the type of events:

So we now have a calendar subscription….

And when we go back to our Moodle calendar, there are those events from our Google Staff calendar! Really handy!

1. L’administrateur pourra ajouter un énoncé de remise
2. Il sera possible d’activer une date limite – et d’octroyer une prolongation
3. Les étudiants pourront remettre leur travail en groupe et recevoir une note collaborative
4. On aura la possibilité de faire l’évaluation à l’aveugle

Student submission statement (click to enlarge)

When a student clicks to upload or type in an assignment, they will see the message below and must tick to agree before they are able to send in their work. Handy!

What the student sees (click to enlarge)

If you’d like to find out more about this newest version of Moodle or would like customised VLE or e-Portfolio training with Mary Cooch, get in touch with Paula on our contact page.

If you’d like to learn more about Mahara, check out our E-Portfolio section from the links above.