Setting Up A VLE

The VLE comes with software that is a bunch of VBA macros in Word that enables a template to set up a degree of engaging resources. It's called 'E-learning objects'. You can format a word document to have questions that give feedback, play videos and audio within the page. It's just another tool with various idiosyncracies that you need to get your head around. For teachers in secondary schools, getting their heads around stuff is not a selling point! Am trialling this with the PE faculty,a very enthusiastic guy called Chris who's already setup some top resources, I also showed this to one of the Physics teachers who was making good progress before I spilt fizzy water all over the laptop.

In other news, the Technology department are wanting to set up their own website. The VLE we've bought into has an upload limit of 50 megabytes - inidvidual resources, or 'learning chapters' that Tec have are way over this! We managed to get a bump to 100mb, but Tec are talking half a gig with some resources. Now, I know that there'll be nagging voices saying 'get them to optimise' but the simple fact is that this does not fit with the way teachers develop and prepare resources. In some cases, where a department already has resources that don't quite squeeze into the indiosyncratic routine of your VLE you're going to have to figure out how to do it. I'm for their own website developemnt in that as a faculty with good ICT capability, they'll probably enjoy the control and flexibility.

Fundamental question - is this just about chucking stuff online or engaging students? Aside from pointing kids at a particular website, how do you properly engage?

This blog will chart the development of setting up a Virtual Learning Environment for a secondary college in Bristol. I've just joined here after being a Head of ICT at another school.

Here's the juice, I'm on a 50% timetable - Y7 CCC and Y10/Y12 ICT. The rest is development time. We're using Serco Learning's Teknical Virtual Learning Campus. We have an RM CC3 network, wireless points around the site, and lots of PC's. Internet access is across the whole site and pretty quick.

There's an E-Learning Strategic Group consisting of about 20 members of staff who opted to be part of this group. Active participants numbers about 12 - I've added a few onto this figure as well - the members of staff that stop me in the corridor and say they want to be a part of the group. It's with this group that I'm focusing my energy on to develop this thing.

Term 2 - been here about 12 weeks in all and this is the progress to date on the VLE:

1)Trained myself to use it
2)Working through a training program of core skills with about 5-10 members of staff of various skill, enthusiasm and motivation.
3)Finally received the software (after 9 or 10 weeks of asking Teknical to sort it out) to link the VLE to our Data Managament System.
4)Set up a series of instructional videos using Camtasia each with it's own gnarly soundtrack featuring Only Living Witness (RIP), Earthtone 9 (RIP), Killswitch Engage, Seemless.
5)Have trialled most of the main features with a Year 12 group who have taken to it in their stride.

The plan:
Term 1 - Have the skills!
Term 2 - Pass on the skills and develop a series of 1/2+ lessons that could be delivered with the VLE for a number of departments
Term 3 - Test with Students and Evaluate
Term 4 - Pass on to the rest, revamped with Evaluation findings

Today fairly typical - had to cancel one meeting with a member of staff as he got taken for cover. Had another meeting, where a Physics teacher, Pat had created a website for his AS Level group - looked the business. Weird thing in our VLE - the index page of any resource must be called 'default.htm' - he called his home.htm. Renaming the index page would be a nightmare as all the hyperlinks would need to be edited - we got round it by creating a new default.htm page that simply used a javascript redirect command to immediately open home.htm. Pat was well happy with this and promised to go off, create another site and try to link that using the skills. I've pointed him in the direction of my Camtasia movies which are stored in our Staff Resources Shared Area.