Tag Archive for ‘VLE’ at dougbelshaw.com

Tag Archive for 'VLE'

An invitation to a conversation…

Published

on 5 July 2008

Welcome! If you're new here, you may want to sign up for email updates or subscribe to the RSS feed for all my posts. Alternatively, browse or subscribe by category (look to your right). Thanks for visiting!

EdTechRoundup logo I’m delighted to be able to invite everyone in the edublogosphere to a special EdTechRoundup meeting this Sunday (6th July) at 8pm BST (your local time here). As usual we’ll be rounding up what we’ve found useful in the world of educational technology, but we also have a special guest!

Mike Jones, Divisional Director of Core Projects & Technologies (UK) Ltd. shall be joining us. If you remember, a couple of weeks ago there were some issues surrounding comments I made about their VLE product TALMOS. Mike shall be giving the other side of the story and helping us get at whether there is (or should be) a personal/professional divide.

Do join us if you can!

Censorship and the Personal/Professional divide

Published

Doug Belshaw

on 17 June 2008

in Education

In May 2008 I wrote a post entitled What is a VLE? In it, I discussed the ins and outs of various VLEs and linked it to an EdTechRoundup podcast in which I was a participant. I made a passing comment that compared one type of VLE to another. The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings.

The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school. I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that they’d almost forced me to remove any criticism (however slight) by referring to ‘legal proceedings’ in their communication with my school.

I’ve now added a disclaimer to my blog, saying that my opinions are not that of my employer (school or Local Authority). It does, however, bring up the issue of where the personal ends and the professional begins - and vice-versa…

Have you any experience of this? What was the outcome?

Help me write my job spec. for next year!

Published

Doug Belshaw

on 3 June 2008

in Education

. 21 Comments

(The response I hope not to get come September…)

I’ve mentioned this in passing in a couple of blog posts previous to this one: from next academic year I shall be E-Learning Tutor at my school. This new post (solicited by me, it has to be said) involves me spending 50% of my time (15 periods of 50 mins) per week teaching History and a bit of ICT. The other 50% will count towards the E-Learning Tutor role.

I’ve a meeting next week with my Head to flesh out my actual role. He mentioned today that I’ll have to do some “mundane” stuff, but that I will be free to push a few aspects of my choosing and accelerate perhaps one thing I’m really interested in. As you can imagine, with my Ed.D. thesis exploring the ‘Digital Literacy’, that’s the latter taken care of.

I’m expecting the mudane activities I shall have to undertake to be things like:

Interactive Whiteboard training (the really basic aspects)
How to use the new VLE (Virtual Learning Environment)
Using the internal Microsoft Outlook web-based email system
Ways to use Powerpoint and other presentation tools in the classroom
How to transfer digital video from digital cameras/camcorders to staff laptops

Whereas what I really want to be pushing are things such as:

Creating a blog to make resources available outside the classroom (I’ve already run a couple of staff workshops on this, with some success)
Basic podcasting and digital storytelling for non-written assessment, leading to e-portfolios for students.
Communicating with other educators worldwide (i.e. getting staff initiated in the edublogosphere - perhaps through the K12 Online Conference?)
Giving staff the confidence to take students into the ICT suites more often to use the Internet as a publishing tool.
Transferring schemes of work and programmes of study into an electronic format (perhaps in a wiki-like format using Google Sites within Google Apps Team Edition or the new VLE?)

Some context to help you understand where we’re at: my school has a plethora of RM One machines, Interactive Whiteboards in almost every classroom, and relatively unrestricted access (we can access Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Video, etc. but not YouTube, Facebook or games websites, for example). There’s a real mix of what I would call ‘digital literacy’ amongst staff. We range from those, like me, who use educational technology in some way in every lesson, to those who only use their laptop to help them write reports, and who certainly haven’t turned on their Interactive Whiteboard yet…

What else should I be looking to include in my responsibilities? How should my success and impact be measured, given that it’s a 1-year trial role? Suggestions in the comments section please!