Tag Archives: moodle

E-portfolios and tech angels

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Summer is in full swing – outside of Wellington.

After a very sunny day in Nelson which I spent giving two Mahara / MyPortfolio Taster Sessions for teachers of Nelson schools at Waimea College, I flew to Auckland for the Digital Technologies Symposium for secondary school teachers. I had another very sunny and very warm day. It also looks like it’s going to be really nice tomorrow.

Today I presented on the topic “E-portfolios: Just for students?” Approximately 30 teachers attended the session. Throughout the day I was then approached by teachers who had either been to the presentation or who had heard about Mahara / MyPortfolio before. It was good that I wore my Catalyst – Mahara – Moodle -  T-shirt thus being easily recognizable. ;-) They either wanted to know more about Mahara or had already thought about implementing it in their schools and wanted to know how to best go about it.

After tonight’s dinner at which Stuart Middleton from MIT (not the one in the USA, but the home-grown one from NZ) gave a great keynote that was filled with anecdotes from his childhood and a number of jokes (he also managed to bring in the engagement of Prince William to Catherine Middleton that had just been announced), I had a chat with Justin Scott from Otago Girls’ High School. They have already looked into Mahara and had run a trial as well. The girls liked the software because it was easy to handle (which is always nice to hear).

During our chat I learned how they support teachers and students in the adaption of technology. It is done through “Tech Angels”. These are girls who help teachers when they have a tech issue to solve. But they also help their peers. “Tech Angels” is a great metaphor for the work they do. The girls are very proud of their work, especially about the badge they get to put on their uniform. It is a great way for them to learn something new and help others understand it (learning by teaching). Teachers also realize that they do not necessarily know everything there is to know. This is a fundamental shift that is not always easy to cope with when teachers have always been the ones who were in control. Suddenly, they have to relinquish part of their power and have students help them.

A number of metaphors have been introduced to talk about the shifting role of a teacher. Ones that I encountered are for example “from sage on the stage to guide on the side”, curator, facilitator, gardener. Sui Fai John Mak put together a long list of roles that teachers can take. That also shown nicely how different these roles and their implied meaning can be. There is no “one size fits all”.

E-portfolios: Just for students?

Moodle and Mahara at ASHS

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Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal at Albany Senior High School (ASHS) spoke at Aotea College today about how his high school uses Moodle and Mahara. Albany Senior High (near Auckland) is New Zealand’s first open source school that promotes using open source software but also engages in open education beyond the software aspects.

Since my arrival in New Zealand two months ago, I have been hearing about Mark’s promotion of open source and reading posts by him, particularly on the MLE Reference Group, and finally had the pleasure to meet him and learn more about how his school uses the learning management system Moodle and the e-portfolio system Mahara.

ASHS tries to place as many software tools as possible online so that differing operating systems can still access them without problems and students can also work with their own laptops connecting online through Wifi.

It is up to the teachers to use Moodle with their classes or teach without it. Thus, the knowledge about Moodle can be situated on a continuum. Mahara, however, they have to use for their appraisal process. At ASHS professional development is called professional inquiry because it is an exploration and reflection. Thus, teachers get acquainted with it even if their students happen to not be using it yet.

From next year on, all student portfolios will be e-portfolios. Currently, they can have a paper-based portfolio alternatively.

Mark showed us some of his favorite modules in Moodle, informed us how he uses them in his classes, and how easy it is to set them up. He uses a number of Moodle activities to get feedback from his students on his teacher which he then can also use for his appraisal documentation. For example, students fill in questionnaires about his classes. He also looks at the statistics of activities, e.g. Hot Potatoes quizzes, to find out where students may need some more time because they did not answer certain questions correctly or it took them a very long time to get the answers right.

In just two hours he gave a small group of interested teachers from the Porirua region a good overview of what can be done in Moodle and how Mahara can be used as e-portfolio by both students and teachers and answered questions.

I am looking forward to his talk at KohaCon on October 26, 2010, when he will present on his school’s use of Koha, the open source integrated library system.

It’s the end of week 1 as I see it

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The first week of the MOOC CCK08 (these abbreviations are already ingrained in my brain) is almost over. I still have a lot of work to do, but have to interrupt it after this post to prepare some stuff for work. Unfortunately, I cannot devote my entire waking hours to the course which I think would be extremely helpful at times to really follow up on interesting discussions and trying to contribute to them instead of just opening them in my tabs in Firefox. I don’t feel comfortable to jump into a very theoretical discourse if I still need to straighten out the basics in my head. Hopefully with time it will get better, my inner optimist encourages me. Of course, I don’t and can’t follow all discussions, but at least the ones that I am interested in should be possible. :-)

The “Mookies” (Stephen Downes coined that name for people who participate in a MOOC) have been producing a lot of writing, video, concept maps and other visualizations in this past week. The visualizations certainly help me to get a better idea of the connections among us all and to sort out the many participants.

Tom Whyte and Trevor Meister try to come up with visual representations of our networks. Tom has started on the Twitter connections and Trevor put forward his ambitious and awesome ideas in his blog entry “Visual Network Interactions in CCK08“. As of now, Tom had already nine Twitter networks connected and there will hopefully be added many more. There are common connections already within these nine networks, and the network map starts to become complex. Pretty soon, we will need to invest in screens as big as walls and have them multi-touch enabled to navigate through this visualization. :-)

I order to see where I have been active and to reflect on my sparse activity during the week, I collected all Moodle and blog posts as well as tweets connected to the the course and put them in the infamous Wordle. Of course, I already knew where my emphasis was in the discussions, but maybe I had missed something which could have come up in the visualization.

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Common English words as well as numbers have been removed by the program which leaves the most often used words in the visualization. As you can see, “course”, “can” (isn’t that also a common English word?), “use”, and “moodle” dominate the word cloud. I never imagined being drawn into a discussion on Moodle as much as a I was, but that is what happened and where I posted mainly. In hindsight, this forum, albeit I am not an expert on Moodle and there are participants in the course who are much more familiar with the software, was a safe place for me because I knew the topic, had read about advantages and disadvantages of virtual learning environment, had tried a few myself, have worked with them for several years now and was confident that I could contribute something. Although it was a safe spot, that does not mean that it was not challenging, just not challenging in the same way as if I had tried to wrap my mind around a less familiar topic.

My resolution for the coming weeks is to spread out more thematically to the discussions closer to connectivism trying to geet a better understanding of the theory. I am not sure yet, if the coming epistomological week will actually be the perfect week to start with ;-) , but I will try my best and stick with the discussions even though I may be a more silent observer.

For this week’s Wordle, I have tried several versions as the words are redrawn every time you select a different font. Finally, I chose the one above as it gives me hope for my New Year’s course resolution. “Connections” sticks out a bit from the rest of the words and I take that as a sign for the next weeks: Look out for new connections and foster the ones that have started growing and that I want to keep. Connect week 1 with the coming ones.

The gathering of the data I used to feed to Wordle showed me that I will need a different strategy if I want to continue doing that for the next weeks. It’s been only one week and I had to remember where I had posted. It was rather easy for Moodle because you can access all forum posts of one person in the profile. However, for the blog entries it would have been more difficult had I posted more. In the first instance I even forgot Twitter. So I went back there, got my tweets out with Tweetake, the service Tom uses for his experiment, and fed it to Wordle as well. Next time, I guess, I should also include Facebook. The only thing I can think of right now is to paste anything immediately after posting into a document to keep track of. That’s the disadvantage of the distributed discussions, but I would not change that for the sake of ease to gather data. That would be like adapting your teaching to the technology that is available and being unhappy about it.

To end this post on an optimistic note, I am looking forward to the continued discussions, (visual) experiments, live online sessions (I hope I can make the Elluminate session on Wednesday) besides starting the new semester and everything that comes with that.