Category Archives: moodle

VLE in schools

Northern Grid Conference 2012: I’m coming Home

  June 18, 2012 - 17:53 | ,
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I am delighted to have been invited to present at the Northern Grid Conference for Learning and Technology 2012 in Newcastle. Twitter feed for the conference is here. There will be lots of excellent teachers and educators presenting and sharing classroom practice. I will be talking about – and showing examples of – peer review. It is very important to help prepare young people for online life as well as offline. My focus is going to be on using peer review as a good starting point for replying to online posts – blogposts, tweets, facebook statuses, videos, animations – by encouraging pupils to be purposeful in their approach to their peers when reviewing their work. By using online tools to … Continue reading →

Going, Going, Gone: Google sells SketchUp

  April 28, 2012 - 16:55 | ,
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I’m a big fan and user of Google SketchUp 3D modelling software. You can build all sorts of things in SketchUp and then create an AVI movie and export it to showcase your work (image above shows this in action). It works very well in the classroom, engaging pupils beyond standard expectations, boys and girls alike – every year I introduce it to Y8 and am blown over by the amount of time the majority spend working on their creations. Also, we have started using it in GCSE Graphic Design course instead of ProDeskTop (blogpost about that here). But I’m not going to miss SketchUp because it is only changing ownership. See this official blogpost for more info. I’m mildly … Continue reading →

Nothing a kiss from a princess can’t fix

  June 15, 2011 - 20:27 | ,
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Frog calls it’s conference the ‘National Learning Platform Conference’. That is daft. There are many other learning platforms. Are there not rules against misrepresenting the facts in marketing material? If any Froggers are reading this, please do not despair at my critical tone. I am aiming to make Frog win at my school. To do this I will be it’s worst critic so I know where the pitfalls are. I’m not apologising. My tweets on the day were deliberately challenging Frog to show their teaching and learning credentials. I want to see the work; the value added to learning. I am not going to go through the sessions one-by-one. My incomplete notes are here (I used simplynote on my iPad … Continue reading →

Moodle training day: the feedback

  February 25, 2011 - 20:16 | ,
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Moodle INSET We organised an INSET morning for our VLE, Moodle. As with most schools, the VLE is slow to catch on. This is only the second training session in our third year. First time around I made the huge mistake of focussing on creating courses and uploading files. This was a bad idea because if the user doesn’t understand how Moodle works, they might create a course for every lesson etc. Yes, of course I explained it at the time, but similar to normal lessons the learners do not retain everything you say. Needless to say, this session was much, much better and staff were mainly very positive about their hands on training. See the way the INSET was … Continue reading →