Mark Granger :: Blog

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• Rigour or rigor mortis? Tanya's Gove challenge
  what Tanya Byron learned from talking to Michael Gove. It's kinda scary.

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• How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Fully-Automated Superphone


• Gmote > Android Remote


• Flash and physics

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• Spotinotes | A Spotify blog about the spoken word

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Running a host of VLEs is fun - sometimes. One of the most difficult things to do is ensure that things are centralised (to some degree) so that changes we implement at the centre happen with little or no fuss on the Moodles which are across the County. This creates a natural tension with schools who want to do their own thing within the framework in which we're all working.
The way a VLE looks is an example of this - Moodle comes with a standard set of themes which can be modified, but only to a limited extent. There's the fact that most people who are Moodle admins within the County never want to know what the letters 'FTP' or 'CSS' stand for - but there will always be some who do. Catering for everyone is difficult, and so this post describes what I've been doing over the summer to attempt to cater for the bulk of our schools...
We co-develop our Moodle service with the folk at Atomwide and the team in West Sussex - effectively this means that we have over 400 schools using Moodle and can share developments / ideas / problems and solutions together. Previously we had used (and I had blogged about) the Chameleon theme - an "editable in the browser" theme which, while working OK, put a lot of load on the servers due to the way it worked. Schools seemed to use it simply because, in its default incarnation, It Was Green, and no-one actually did much customisation with it. With the performance issues, it was decided to retire it.
Last year, during an upgrade for all of our schools, Mark from the West Sussex team shared a theme which had been developed by Dan Smith from St Paul's Catholic College in West Sussex. This was a theme which allowed a Moodle admin to upload a number of replacement images to an area within the Site Files section of the site to customise the theme, and also edit a CSS file in that area to update the sitewide styles.
Over the summer I've taken the theme and developed it a little. The previous theme would only take JPEG files, this one will now accept PNG, GIF or JPEG files and can display a mixture. The theme takes into account whether or not the slasharguments variable is switched on in your Moodle, which the previous one didn't. Moodle admins can also now upload a favicon.ico file into the appropriate folder within Site Files to replace the standard one, and the CSS file now has some (fairly) extensive documentation inside it. I've written a manual in PDF format and authored a range of instructional videos on how to customise it.
You can download the PDF of the manual here. I'm not currently sure if I'm going to open up the instructional videos to everyone, since they could significantly affect the performance of our Adobe Connect server, so I'll have a think about that. I might put them somewhere else, and will update this post to reflect that. Anyway... The videos are now detailed further down this post...

How to use the theme

You will need:

• FTP access (yes, I know this is an "easy to use" theme but it's not intended to be maintained via FTP, just initially uploaded that way) to place the theme in the standard Moodle themes folder;
• Moodle Administrator rights - to copy the editable themes folder into the Site Files area.

There are two elements:

1. A folder which needs to be copied (via FTP or some other method) into your themes folder in Moodle (next to the place where the standard theme lives). It's called Schools by default and should (bizarrely, due to the capital letter) appear first in the list of themes. Download it here. (.zip file containing a folder called Schools)
2. A folder which needs to be created in your Site Files area. The folder must be called theme. Download it here. (.zip file containing a folder called theme)

Once you've done both of these, the theme should appear in the standard Moodle theme selector. This has been tested with Moodle 1.8, I plan on testing it with our 1.9 development server as soon as is practicable, and possibly releasing any necessary update when we go live with our 1.9 build.

The theme is intended for someone in my situation (who is looking after a number of school Moodles and has schools who want to customise their own, but doesn't want to burden the schools with issues of FTP and similar complexities). If you are obsessed about micro-managing your Moodle theme then you are probably better off creating your own theme.

The important point with this theme is not the way it looks. It comes with a number of standard images, which you really shouldn't use. They are just there to illustrate the difference between PNG, GIF and JPEG files, which is also explained in the manual. The important thing is that once installed, it's easy to change, with no need to FTP. The alterations.css file in the Site Files area allows those who are comfortable with CSS, or even those who aren't, to go to town on the styling using Cascading Style Sheets.

If you're in a Buckinghamshire or West Sussex school and want to use it in your Moodle, this will shortly be available for you to use, so you don't need to download it.

The license

It's released under Creative Commons Noncommercial Share-Alike License. Basically, you can't sell it, but you can adapt it. If you do adapt it or pass it on, then the same license applies to that and all derivative works.

Support?

If you have any questions about its use, please post them as comments on this post, but please use your common sense and read the manual first! I'm not technical support for this, but it should work unless you break it!

Success?

If you use this and make a success of it, then please include a link as a comment so I can get an idea if it works.

Update - video tutorials

OK, I've published the video tutorials to support this in a publicly accessible place where I don't have to worry about the bandwidth! They were all done in Adobe Captivate and are hosted on the Adobe Connect server - hence you'll need Flash to view them, but you have that, don't you?

First of all, yet another link to the manual:

• Manual for the Schools Theme (PDF)

Then the videos:

• Selecting the Schools Theme
  once you've installed the theme, how to switch it on.
• Schools Theme - file locations
  where the files that a Moodle adminstrator can modify are located.
• Schools Theme - filetypes introduction
  the differences between .png, .gif and .jpg files, and why you might want to use each one.
• Schools Theme - Renaming files to change the order they display in
  how to cunningly rename the files so you can mix & match different filetypes in your theme.
• Schools Theme - editing fonts and colo(u)rs
  editing the alterations.css file to change the site's default font and tweak some colours.
• Schools Theme - sneaky editing using the User Themes setting
  a cunning way of working behind the scenes on your theme by enabling Moodle's User Themes setting.
• Schools Theme - making a favicon.ico file
  how to change the theme's favicon.ico file.

and finally a video for People Like Me - you're looking after more than a few Moodles for organisations (like, for example, a bunch of schools) and you want to know where the files go:

• Administering the Schools Theme
  how and where to upload the two .zip files.

I can't vouch that these tutorials will always be up to date - I maintain an identical set on our BucksGfL Connect server, and will always update those ones first, since That's What I'm Paid For. However, it's easy to publish the Captivate movies to many places, so I'll try and keep them in sync.

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According to a post on the PC Pro News pages 12 "open-source companies" (I think it's the software they support that's open source, rather than the companies themselves, but hey) have made the list for the Software for Educational Institutions Framework, which means that they can supply schools with Open Source software without the schools having to feel like they'd bought it from a bloke down the pub. Similar articles from the Inquirer and ComputerWorld seem to imply that it's actually 12 companies", one of which offers Open Source" - things will no doubt become clearer later on. Or maybe not.
In my mind Sirius Corporation sounds like it's a company run by a Mr Blofeld, possibly one that kidnaps submarines, or airships, or something, but it's actually a provider of Open Source solutions including (you saw this one coming, didn't you?) Moodle. It's not clear how this relates to the Becta Learning Platform Services Framework - Sirius aren't on there, so would their Moodle solution be approved under the SfEIF? Would anyone be bothered? What would be interesting would be if a company like Sirius or Novell (whose Open Source service has apparently also been approved) were to start to do Open Source integration with MIS tools, reporting systems, other things like that, to provide the "travel adapter" for schools who would want to plug in their newly-acquired OS infrastructure to their existing (legacy?) LA-supplied MIS system.
There's a bit of a generalisation by Sirius in the PC Pro article:

Moodle is already massively used in higher education, and loads of schools want to use it. But because no supplier was on the list, if a school wanted to use it there'd be quite a lot of pressure not to from local authorities. Hopefully that can change now.
Mark Taylor, president of the Sirius Corporation & Bond Villian

- of course at this point I'd be jumping up and down waving an orange flag yelling "Local Authority", but it's a not wholly inaccurate picture of where things are in some people's mindsets. I think the bigger reluctance to use Open Source Software (OSS) has been on the desktop where despite Becta's relationship with Microsoft fluctuating from bad, through worse, to approaching normal, there is still a reluctance to do anything that doesn't involve paying through the nose. This is often due to a perception that "buying from Microsoft gives you some sort of support" - but I've yet to see an implementation of a Windows network & MS Office applications in a school that does what's wanted.
I've been asked to take part in an advisory capacity in the Open Source Schools project, which is supported by Becta, to explore how the appropriate use of OSS can help with the delivery of the Harnessing Technology strategy, including personalised learning, parental engagement and home access, as well as curriculum-based materials. This is due to kick off within the next month or so, and I hope to post about it here. In the meantime, the list of companies for the Software for Educational Institutions Framework should be released later today, possibly by the Office of Government Commerce, so watch that (or this) space.

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Today I randomly received a phone call from someone who'd been recommended to speak to me about using a VLE Learning Platform (must get the terminology correct) to support homework. Well, it might not make you the most popular teacher, but if used well it can support colleagues and students with managing, tracking and even handing in homework. So, without much of a fanfare, and based purely on my thoughts after this morning here are Five Ways to use your VLE or Learning Platform to support homework:
They start from the simplest, and get more complex - actually that depends on your point of view - and I'm talking in Moodle terminology here, but if you're using a different tool then you'll be able to map this onto your system, won't you? Good!

1. Set up offline assignments to make a comprehensive homework diary
   The simplest form of Assignment in Moodle is the Offline Assignment - there is little or no interactivity in terms of handing in the work, but as a teacher you can use the Description field of the assignment to give useful links to start from, to embed videos to watch, or audio clips to listen to, and provide all of the guidance you'd normally give when handing out a paper-based piece of homework in the classroom. Importantly, set a due date so that the homework will appear in the course's Calendar and Upcoming Events - this way, a student (or their parents if your setup includes parental access) can see what's coming up over the next month / term / year (depending on how far you plan in advance). As the assignment behaves like a normal Moodle assignment, you'll be able to give marks and feedback, which can be stored in the gradebook so that students (and parents... etc) can see all of their feedback & marks in one place - plus as a teacher you get an overview of all homework in the Gradebook.
2. Set up a Quiz with opening & closing times as a homework
   When setting up a Quiz it's a trivial thing to to set opening and closing times - set these to Friday 5pm and Monday 8am and you've a piece of work which, by definition, has to be done over the weekend. You need to be sure that all of your class has internet access outside of school for this to be valid - if this isn't the case, make arrangements with a local library or explore how students could buddy up outside of school to deal with this. This requires more preparation (of the questions, for a start...) but has the advantage that it's marked automatically (if the question types suit automatic marking). Again, all of the marks end up in your Gradebook (but can be modified if you feel that some attempts merit this...).
3. Assess contributions to a Forum
   The same "access to online" proviso as #2 applies here, but setting up a forum as "homework" has a bit more bite if you mark responses using the Rating tools built-in (but rarely used) into the Forum module. Such Ratings are recorded in the Gradebook and by default only teachers can Rate/grade forum contributions. It's always a good idea to model appropriate and inappropriate responses first - so that you've got exemplar material to mark against. Ratings can be available as long as the forum's open, or restricted to a particular date range, this might be useful as you are likely to have to work with forums for a while before students get used to the idea that a meaningful response to another student's message is more than just "Yer Mum". It might be worth having a few practice forums so you can effectively manage students (and your) expectations before having an assessed exercise.
4. Build a glossary together as a class
   The Glossary activity is an under-used activity in Moodle and allows students to build a user-defined dictionary of... well, anything really. You could ask students to contribute to a collaborative glossary of biographical entries for a list of characters in a play, relevant information about places in a series of historical events, or anything really. The key with this sort of exercise is to establish at the start that simply copying material from Wikipedia or Encarta isn't the way to go - so try putting a spin on it by limiting it to a number of words (like Four Word Film Reviews, how about Thirty Word Biographies?). The power of the Glossary is that it can be used throughout your online course, so any time a term in the Glossary occurs - in a Forum post, say - then a link is made to that term's definition which everyone can read. Entries can be graded, so you can set contributing to a glossary as a piece of homework.
5. Hand in homework online
   This is the sort of activity which most people think of when they think of "Homework on a VLE" - setting an Assignment with a due date and instructions, pretty much as #1 above, then collecting the work on the VLE. In Moodle this is done via a simple Online Text assignment, an Upload a Single File assignment, or an Advanced Uploading of Files assignment. The details of these are best explored by reading the documentation pages, or simply by setting up an assignment of the kind you're interested in, but there are a number of creative practices which can be done with these tools. The Online Text assignment is fairly simple, but as it uses the HTML editor for students to enter their work in, there are lots of creative possibilities. If you're using Google Docs with your students, you could set an assignment (create a spreadsheet / presentation / etc.) as an online text Assignment and then students would respond with a link to their presentation and then a paragraph of explanatory text. You could set an audio homework by using something like GabCast - students simply link to the contribution that they made via their phone or (for the geeks among them) embed it in the HTML editor (if your Moodle site is set up to allow embedding to be done by students). There are as many ways to set up creative pieces of homework as there are creative tools on the web - however it's a good idea to settle on a few and stick to them, rather than aiming for something novel every week. That way students have more chance of focusing on what you want them to study, rather than the tool you want them to learn.

One really important part of any of these uses is setting grading scales consistently across you VLE. The best way to do this is to decide on a few "common" grading scales, then make sure your Moodle admin makes them available across the site. It's a good idea (in a secondary school) to agree a series of "applicable to everyone" scales, such as GCSE Grades, A-Level Grades, Levels and possibly ones like Effort & Attainment. These are then available to everyone on a consistent basis.
One word of advice would be - don't try everything at once. Think about what you would do with "normal" paper-based homework, work out which tool(s) would work and then have a go - starting simply and developing your use and you (and your students) learn how things work.
What other ways might you use a VLE for homework? Has anything worked better than you thought, while other things died a slow and painful death?

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Today I've been at my second face-to-face session with teachers from all over the County who make up the Teachers As Writers group (despite being started in November, this post wasn't finished until the end of the Autumn term). The TAW project is part-funded by NATE, the National Association for the Teaching of English and is being led by Simon Wrigley (our English Adviser and former Chair of NATE) and Jeni Smith from the University of East Anglia. Here's Simon's desciption of where the project had its genesis:

TAW was inspired by rage over the past 20 years of seeing the culture of English teachers denigrated, side-lined and eroded by centralised systems more concerned with control than learning. The National Association for the Teaching of English (a completely independent charity, funded entirely by subscriptions of those wanting a free voice in education) has argued for all that time (and indeed since its foundation in 1964) that teachers' culture was by no means all bad, that teachers knew things and, if trusted, could improve the lot of learners through their own agency. All this fell on the deaf ears of government- until about 2005 when it seemed that the powers that be were force to admit that without attending to the health of teachers' professional 'hinterland', further 'progress' was stalled. In fact, shortly before that the DCSF had been forced to concede that testing arrangements at KS1 were flawed, the importance of talk for learning had been underplayed, and there was a great deal more to education than that which could be easily be measured (eg ECM). And despite the enormously expensive apparatus of inspection and assessment, in the end, if a professional education service was to work well, you had to nurture and trust professionals rather than dictate to them or dismiss them. Indeed, had it not been for the professionals pointing out the short-comings of education policy, the policy would not have improved.
TAW was also inspired by the growing conviction that teachers who were succeeding with learners did so by their own energy, enthusiasm and reflection, by personal understanding of their pupils, and by trusting that film and literature had ways of talking directly to pupils which no amount of simplified method or scheme could do. What was needed was to gather teachers into self-help groups so that they had the space, time and respect to recharge their batteries, gather evidence and support each other. TAW's final impetus came from Jeni and I discussing writing groups which we had run with NATE over the past 17 years in Suffolk, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, London, Cambridge in the light of two government publications. That teachers of writing should write - and hence build healthier writing environments for pupils in classrooms - was endorsed and encouraged by Richard Andrews (Lecturer at the Institute of Education) in his 2008 DCSF report Getting Going, and by Phil Jarrett, (English HMI) in his 2009 Ofsted report, English at the Crossroads.

Bucks TAW is funded by Bucks County and DCSF Strategy money for the professional development of lead teachers, and for raising standards. It is endorsed by NATE and by UEA. Other TAW writing groups run by Jeni and by me will be contributing to the overall findings; these are funded by teachers themselves or their institutions. Jeni runs several other (mainly self-funded) writing groups, including a student writing group that must, therefore, be funded by UEA.

Bucks TAW's aims are:

1. to explore CPD which gives teachers independent professional confidence through having more agency in research, and gathering evidence of their own;
2. to improve the teaching of writing through more careful reflection on the processes of writing;
3. to develop a sustainable model of professional development in the LA;
4. to understand how on-line sharing may support the teaching and learning of writing in conjunction with paper and face-to-face methods.

The cohort of teachers was selected after submitting examples of their writing and have met a couple of times at the Teaching & Learning Centre in Aylesbury, as well as an inspirational day at the British Museum. My role has been to think creatively about the ways in which an online environment could support them - between the sessions the writers have little or no contact with one another - they are from primary and secondary schools across the county - and so a few months ago Simon approached me about the role an online Moodle-based environment could play. Prior to the project Simon was a self-confessed techno-agnostic - he could see the value of its use and was keen but (and I think he'd agree with this) often struggled with using it effectively in a way that wasn't frustrating. I've been longing to do this sort of thing - a medium term, involved, committed, blended approach to teachers working together - for ages, so I jumped at the chance. Here is a rough outline of the process:

• The first thing was to establish a Moodle course on our central BucksGfL Moodle (to which staff from all schools have access) and, importantly, establish a server redirect so we could give out a simple, easy to remember URL - www.bucksgfl.org.uk/taw rather than www.bucksgfl.org.uk/course/view.php?id=413.
• The next stage was to ensure that all participants had BucksGfL accounts. Due to the unified username system we use across the county, most did, but there were several people from schools who run their own username systems and won't play ball with other schools - these needed to be created as "one offs" along with a username for Jeni Smith. Simon & Jeni were given editors' rights over the course.
  
• The first exercise was to establish a simple forum (set up with the "Each user posts one discussion" setting) and encourage participants to introduce themselves, what they'd like to learn about their writing or themselves, one claim to fame they had, and what they could see from their window. This last one was shameless ripped from the NCSL's online facilitation courses, but it seems to work, and we're about sharing practice, right?
• Despite having never done any NCSL facilitator's training, Simon responded to all of the introductions (as did Jeni) prior to the initial project meeting at the Teaching & Learning C Centre in Aylesbury - an important part in encouraging further responses within the online space.
  
• At the first session, the group went through various writing exercises, were given (real!) notebooks to work with, and introduced to the elements of the Moodle course. These were:
• Various relevant documents from Ofsted, NATE, etc inserted as Resources in the course;
• A Creative Writing Journal which was implemented using the (vaguely redundant) Journal module;
• A series of open Forums to allow participants to share Examples of their own writing, Reflections on their own writing, Close (anonymised) observations of children writing and Reflections on classroom practice.

At the inception of the project we acknowledged that we didn't know how the use of the online tools to support the project might progress - we didn't really know how confident the participants were with using ICT and how comfortable they would be with sharing their writing and thoughts with their peers - we tried to structure it to have a private space (the Creative Writing Journal) and a public space (the forums). Right from the start we intended to start the project off and review and revise the use of the tools as it progressed. As expected, number of issues became apparent during the early use of the course.

• The pretty-much-obsolete Journal module didn't retain formatting when someone wrote a poem, or allow the creation of multiple pages, plus the commenting/grading system was unwieldy. At the start of the project I'd seriously considered setting up a Wiki (with its configuration to be No Groups / Student) so that one activity could effectively create 16 parallel Creative Writing Journals, though shied away from it as, without explanation, it can be a complex tool. However, the needs of the participants and the course meant that moving to a Wiki was the right thing to do. Using a wiki meant that Simon and Jeni could switch between the journals by using the menu at top right when viewing the wiki:
  
  This also gave participants who were bothered the ability to add a structure to their journal, by using the [square brackets] method of adding a page. This was a move away from the Journal activity, and simply required me to go through the Journal and copy the entries to the wiki, adding structure where it was obvious. I introduced this at the third session at the Teaching & Learning Centre and we spent ten minutes on it so that the participants could familiarise themselves with the new model. It works much better, and allows Simon or Jenny to add comments to any page simply by adding the text [Comment by Name] to the foot of the page and then adding their observations on the new page. The iterative, versioned nature of a Wiki activity also allows the course leaders to see how a piece of writing has developed.
• It became apparent that one or two participants were getting overrun with email notifications from forums they had subscribed to, possibly without realising what this would mean when other participants posted to that forum. Each email from a Moodle forum comes complete with a link to unsubscribe - however my experience with being a member of the Naacetalk list for years shows that even those who have an allegedly advisory role in ICT can struggle with simple instructions on how unsubscribe, so at the top of the course we placed a link to the list of all the forums on the Moodle course, with instructions to have a good look at the Yes and No buttons as an indication of how many forums the participant was subscribed to.
• Jeni had indicated that she wanted to share resources with ideas for writing with the group - a forum could have worked, but part of my approach was to broaden the range of tools we used, so I created a simple Database activity which allowed comments. Why do this? Well, we're working with a diverse group of teachers from an equally diverse range of schools and I wanted to give them examples of the different Moodle tools and how they might be used. After all, although TAW is explicity not a course, it does involve a cohort of 'learners' with nominal course leaders.
• We used the non-standard Questionnaire module to carry out a survey of participants' attitude to and experiences of writing to get some baseline data. I chose the Questionnaire module over the easier-to-use Feedback module due to the ease with with a grid of similar "Rate"-type questions can be created - the two questions in the following image would require at least 11 questions to be created in a similar Feedback activity:
  
• After filling in the questionnaire we asked the participants to reflect on their writing in an Online Text Assignment activity with a due date of the end of the (Calendar) year - as there's a need to move on through the process in the Spring Term.
• Creating a web page of links to (and thumbnails of) relevant texts available from Amazon and embedding significant extracts of relevant texts on Google Books.
  
• Simon has also been blogging about the project, a nice reflective process for the duration of the work and it's been encouraging and interesting to see how the fortunes of the project - and the participation levels have been interesting. Obviously they've peaked around the face-to-face sessions, but there's been an encouragingly consistent level. In this sort of project there's no guarantee of "success" through a ski slope of increased participation - but what's been encouraging is the level of engagement from the participants - e.g. the content of their contributions, not just the number of them:
  

Throughout the process I've been encouraged to see the reflections of those taking part and a number of requests to create something similar to the course which supports the TAW project on their VLEs - at primary, secondary and Sixth Form level. I'm really excited and encouraged by the project - it's an (at least) year-long endeavour and offers what would hopefully be a way of "developing a sustainable model of professional development in the LA" (to quote Simon's introduction above) and "to understand how on-line sharing may support the teaching and learning of writing in conjunction with paper and face-to-face methods". If we get a clear idea of both of these then, for me anyway, the project will have been a success. I'm not afraid of saying that we didn't get things right in the first iteration, but things are much more focused after the tweaks we made and will also hopefully improve throughout the rest of the year. Simon has reported that "TAW was well received by Phil Jarrett and others at the Ofsted conference on December 15th" which might be a sign that we're heading in the right direction. I may try and ask Simon to do a guest post on this blog about his experience on the project - and the more and more I reflect on the project, the more likely I am to submit a micropresentation on it for the forthcoming TeachMeet at BETT 2010. Watch this space. Or that one.

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During Wednesday this week it became apparent that things were not great with eTech - one of the (relatively) newer players in the UK Learning Platforms market, which provides its StudyWiz platform to about 13 Local Authorities (LAs) and other schools (29,000, according to its own site). An increasing number of tweets indicated that Becta were going to contact schools (and presumably, LAs) who had opted into StudyWiz as part of the Learning Platforms Framework (which itself has been the subject of much blogging here and elsewhere).

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• FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram