Archive for the 'Cloud Computing' Category

MyColl (Our New Moodle Site) – 2 months in

Published on 12 April, 2010 in Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Google Docs and Moodle. 3 Comments Tags: Cool Tools, Google Apps, Google Docs, Hosting, LMS, Moodle, VLE.

Well our new Moodle Site (MyColl) has now been going just over 2 months. The idea to replace our school Microsoft File Sharepoint(less) site with Moodle grew last year as some staff started using a “Rebel” Moodle site that I provisioned. By early October I also had a handful of students requesting that we replace it. Two of the students helped me develop a site plan and they came up with the idea of naming it “MyColl” (as Wellington College students often refer to themselves as Coll Boys). I whipped up a Photoshop mock-up of what the site would look like. I was careful to include the integration of Google Apps Education Edition as an essential element. I presented the idea to the school’s Senior Management team Mid October. The idea was that the site would be the “hub” of online activity for the school on top of being a teaching & learning site.

By the end of October the site was hosted and themed for us by Totali. They also provided a tool called TSync which syncs password changes on the school’s Active Directory through to online services. We also made MyColl the browser home page on all computers, plus we enabled SSO (single-sign-on) so that students and staff were automatically signed into Google Apps when signed into Moodle.

Key Features of MyColl

Students Input and Ownership – they named it and also designed the logo (over 1/3 of the school voted online for the student finalists who submitted their Logo design online)
The MyTools dropdown provides access to all student Google Apps
We do not allow students to change photos (their school ID is uploaded for them), First or Last Name, and Email Addresses – this forces them to access school Gmail accounts. If they want to fool around then they use FaceBook.
A Gmail Block appears (once logged in) on the front page with unread mail headings displayed
We turned off Moodle Calendar completely – opting instead for the more generic Google Calendar (all departments are required to place assessment dates on the school assessment calendar embedded in the site. We also have our standard Public Calendar embedded and a Sports Calendar was also added.
School Events and information are updated regularly on the home page (though we are currently in the April School Holidays)
There are a range of public pages for parental and public access and information. A number of pages and most courses require logins.

The site is deemed to be “under construction” as a number of pages are still to be added over the next few months (we are aiming for one new page/course every week or two).

How successful has it been?

I am presenting the site to the New Zealand Moodle Moot (Conference) this week. My presentation is on the integration of Moodle and Google Apps with a discussion around Google Docs as a teaching & learning tool. As I was putting together the presentation I gathered some statistics on our MyColl site.

Key Statistics Are:

We are averaging 1200 “Unique” logins per week (out of a school of 1530 students and 120 staff) – From Moodle Stats
We are averaging about 1500 “Absolute Unique Visitors” Daily – Google Analytics (interpreted this means from a different browser/computer)
Interesting is that although there is a drop-off of “Absolute Unique Visitors” on Friday and Saturday, Sunday when school is closed sees us maintain the 1500 visitors.
In the last 15 DAYs of school (since we enabled Google Analytics) we have had 28,400 Visits, 8700 Absolute Unique Visitors with 116,840 Pageviews.

Considering we have been effectively going for only 9 school weeks this is very encouraging. Only about 25-30% of teachers are using it regularly with their students. As training is provided and courses are developed over coming months, we should see the usage really take off!

Why has it been successful?

I believe that the integration of Google Apps with the Moodle Site has been one of the keys. The site is steadily growing to become the communication hub of the school as well as an effective growing eLearning site.

Feel free to explore the site at http://mycoll.school.nz and ask any questions here.

Implementing Google Apps Education Edition – the experience so far

Published on 17 January, 2010 in Cloud Computing, Cool Tools, Google Apps and Google Docs. 9 Comments Tags: Google Apps, Google Docs, Moodle.

Well I am in the middle of my busiest time as a teacher and eLearning Director – believe it or not but I am supposed to be in the middle of the summer holidays. I haven’t posted since September last year with good reason. In Mid October 2009 our school made the decision to go ahead with my recommendation for a Google Apps Education Edition deployment. As you can see from previous posts a small number of staff used Google Docs effectively and were able to share those benefits with key decision-makers.

Preparations

With staff off on the 7 week summer holiday break around mid-December I felt the need to do the changeover before then so that they receive some training and use the Apps over the holidays. I set a target date of Monday 30th November with the migration of old email from Microsoft Exchange on the preceding weekend. Our IT Department did the initial set-up but we decided to contact a Google representative in New Zealand, Jan Zawadski of Cloudbreak, to assist with the migration to ensure its success. Although this was at a cost it was well worthwhile as we could use his experience from assisting business adoption of Enterprise Apps. It was also important that the change-over be relatively smooth for the 140 staff involved otherwise we could lose their goodwill.

Roll-out to Staff

First off an email was sent to staff 3 weeks ahead (9th November) informing them of the upcoming change and what it would mean. As you can see from the information sheet (Wellington College Gmail change) we introduced it as an EMAIL change as this is where staff would feel the most impact. Also, all teaching staff were told that they would be given the option of having Gmail running through Microsoft Outlook but not until mid February 2010 – it was important for them to try the Gmail interface fully before they opted back to what they were familiar with.

One of the recommendations from the our Google Rep was to set up a Google Help Site and to modify one of the templates available. As I had already used a Google Site with my rugby team I found this to be a relatively simple exercise - Wellington College Google Apps Support.

Gmail Training

With a successful migration over the weekend, I then ran several 45 minute Gmail training sessions throughout Monday 30th November and Tuesday 1st December for the staff. Here is what was covered [There is a Word Doc copy at bottom of page - feel free to download and modify the training session for yourself].

Feedback from the sessions was very positive with staff pleased with the extra functionality of Gmail. Some who already had personal Gmail accounts commented that they were not aware of all of the extras that they learnt about. One of the things that I promoted heavily was the ability for users to search for old emails using the power of Google search and the advanced search features – this was definitely a winner.

We had made the decision to allow all of the support staff (approximately 30) to run Gmail through the Microsoft Outlook interface. The biggest measure of success is that within 2 weeks all but one staff member (a power user of Outlook) had opted to stay with the Gmail web interface. Outstanding! Of course I was called on to help individuals one-on-one leading into Christmas. The biggest misunderstanding by staff about Gmail that I came across was the difference between folders and labels.

Calendar Training

A week later I followed up the Gmail training with Google Calendar Training. I had already discussed with school management the idea of separate Google Calendars for the school events. The first is for staff events which remains private, however it was decided to have 2 public calendars for school events:

Wellington College Public – is a calendar for parents, students, staff and the wider College community events
Wellington College Assessments – is a calendar which Heads of Departments agreed to put all internal and external assessment information for Senior classes. This means that parents and students can track when assessments are due and departments can see when there is a heavy workload on students.

Link to Calendar Training Session

Google Calendar was the tool that originally converted me to Google Applications back in August 2008. I can already see from staff reaction that Google Calendar is going to prove to be a powerful tool in the school.

14 Days until Student Roll-out

Well 1550 students return in 2 weeks time and will be pleasantly surprised to find that staff are confidently using Gmail and Google Calendar. They will also be given new network logins which will sync through to their new Gmail accounts. After some deliberation we decided to name student users in the format: “surname,first initial, first year,@ school domain” eg smithj07@wellington-college.school.nz – the purpose being that we can filter the students by year level or organise them by surname. One thing that we have discovered is that Google will need to improve the their Administration tools very soon to make it easier for administrators to run Apps institutions with a large number of users.

To encourage students and staff to use Google Docs I have been busy over the last few days creating a variety of useful templates. We will also be using Google Forms extensively throughout the school.

Finally, the College is launching a new Moodle Site concurrently with the Google Apps launch. I am also busy building and populating the site. This was another decision, made last October, to replace our old Microsoft SharePoint intranet (Now you can see why I haven’t posted for 4 months). The Moodle site is not ready yet but I will be writing a post about it in early February.

Well that’s all for now. I hope you get something out of this post.

Happy New Year
Mark

Google Docs for Collaboration (Part 4)

Published on 28 August, 2009 in Cloud Computing, Google Docs, History and Students. 0 Comments Tags: collaboration, Google Docs.

Well its been 6 weeks since my last posting. I have been incredibly busy but have continued to use Google Docs for Collaborative work with my students. Here is another way that I have used Google Docs in the last few weeks.

Year 9 (13-14 Year Old) Research and Presentation – Ancient Rome

I decided recently that I have had enough of doing all of the work in preparing and teaching for me a new topic. I decided to get the students to do a 8-12 minute presentation to the class on a topic within Ancient Rome. They were to work in groups of 2 or 3 (their choice).

Choosing Groups and Topics – Google Form
First I listed a range of topics for the students to choose from or they could suggest their own. I gave them a link to a Google Form where they could put in their preferences for group members and topic preferences (3). This made it easy for me to collate & appoint topics to each. Here is a link to the Google Form the students filled out.

Planning & Research – Google (Document and Spreadsheet)
The students then worked in groups on developing Three Focus Questions for their topic. This was done in Moodle Forums to allow students to feedback to other groups. They then worked collaboratively on a Google Research Document which would become their presentation notes. I did the activity myself on the topic “Hadrian’s Wall” as I wanted to model to the students what was required. As I write some of the students have already presented while others are yet to. I used a Google Spreadsheet (collaborated to all students) to allow the students to choose time-slots for their presentations. This was another time-saver and worked really well as students raced to choose the best times.

Presentations – Google Presentation
The students, having done most of their research and planning, were now at the stage to develop their presentation slides to support their presentation notes. This of course was done in Google Presentation. Again, I modeled this for the students (link here) as I wanted them to see that the slides were visual (with no or limited writing) and used to support what was being presented (voice). This simple presentation technique is still overlooked by many presenters. Presentations with a combination of both a voice script and reading off slides have long been proven to be the least effective.

So far two groups have presented and the standard has been reasonably good and will no doubt get better as students evaluate those that went before them. I have three more in about 30 minutes time so got to go.

I hope that this use of Google Docs for Collaboration has been of some use.

Google Docs for Collaboration (Part 2)

Published on 7 June, 2009 in Cloud Computing, Cool Tools and Google Docs. 2 Comments Tags: Cloud Computing, Google Docs.

This is the second in a sequence of posts outlining ways that I have used Google Docs with my classes.

Once my Year 11 History class had become very familiar with Docs I was able to give them a group presentation task. I mentioned in my previous post that I had split them into groups of three for collaborative note-building. Well these groups were named after the New Zealand Prime Ministers after World War II (1945-85). I thought it would be a good idea that each group introduced their Prime Minister to the rest of the class as a 5 minute presentation. Of course this was to be done chronologically as we moved through the course.

The groups were simply instructed to create and share a Google Presentation (PowerPoint) with each other and myself (for presentation purposes). It was to be a simple 4-5 slide presentation. They had not been given any advice in how to use the Google Docs tool as they were at a stage where they could work this out for themselves. There were to be 9 presentations in all.

As we progressed through the course and the presentations we were able to discuss “what makes a good presentation”. Some of the students really picked up on this and went for good visual slides complemented by some brief notes which they read as the slides showed.

I felt that this was a good use of the Google Docs tool as it was done collaboratively by the students and completely out of class and it also complemented what we were doing in class. The students took the task seriously and really came to the party. Note: There was NO ASSESSMENT involved in this at all.

I have published their presentations. Here are the links to give you an idea of what they produced:

Peter Fraser
Sidney Holland
Walter Nash
Keith Holyoake
Jack Marshall
Norman Kirk
Wallace Rowling
Rob Muldoon
David Lange

Plenty more to come on Google Docs for Collaboration…

Free online Image Editor – Pixlr

Published on 31 May, 2009 in Cloud Computing and Cool Tools. 3 Comments Tags: Cool Tools, image.

Recently I had a request from one of the school management team to show him how to resize (downsize) student photos to upload to our student management website. The photos that he had taken were far too large.

I decided that Photoshop would be too complicated to train him for such a simple task. I went to find Adobe Fireworks, a much simpler editor, on our school system and found that it had been removed in our last update.

I then dediced to search for a web based tool. It was then that I discovered a fantastic tool called Pixlr, an online image editor that is totally free and you don’t even have to create an account to use it.

Pixlr has an adobe photoshop/fireworks flash interface which allows you to either:

Upload an image from your computer
Upload an image directly from a website
Create a new image

It has a layers pallette, Navigator and History similar to photoshop.

The tools are simple to use and include select tools, a good range of filters and even a clone stamp.

This screenshot below gives an idea as to the familiar adobe tools and Pallette look.

Google Docs for Collaboration (Part 1)

Published on 26 April, 2009 in Cloud Computing, Cool Tools, Google Docs and History. 2 Comments Tags: blended learning, cool apps, Google Docs, History, learning.

This is the first of a sequence of posts that I am going to make about how I am using Google Docs with my classes. We often hear about how wonderful web-based tools are for collaboration and learning in theory, but not so often in practice.

I am fairly new to Google Apps having been convinced by other 2008 eLearning Fellows to give it a try. I just looked at my oldest document and Gmail and they date back to Beginning September 2008 so 8 months experience is what I am giving.

First, I must say that I have become a huge fan of Google Apps, and Google Docs in particular. Here are a few examples of their use with my Year 11 History class:

The students all have their own Google Accounts (our school has a planned shift to Education Edition in the future). With the students quite new to Docs I started them off with a simple task of notes building, to help them become familiar with the environment.

TASK ONE: As the students worked through their online course I provided them with a brief set of notes published online (yes you can publish a document as a web page) which they could copy and paste into their own set of notes. These publish notes were formatted with Headers 1 and 2 – this is important as the students could create an easy table of contents using this formatting.

The requirements that they were given were simple: Go online and find relevant images to embed into their notes. They were studying “The Origins of World War II” topic. With the collaboration facility in Docs I got the students to share their notes document to me as a collaborator. This meant that I could monitor their progress and give them assistance, if needed, and feedback.

One of the students has published his final product. Follow this link to view.

The next History topic (just started) has led to an increase in collaboration between students and the difficulty level of the task.

TASK TWO: Students have now been placed in groups of three (in my view this is an ideal number for online tasks such as this – they can be help more to account by others in the group for their contribution, or lack of). The students were tasked with writing a new set of notes on the new topic which is “New Zealand’s post WW2 Search for Security”. They are given suggested headings and a theme for them to write their content – example here. Students have only just started on this topic/task – it will be interesting to see how they progress.

I will post more on my experiences with Google Docs over the coming month. I can only recommend that you give it a go…..Good Luck!

Collaboration Webs and Mobile Tools (Part 2)

Published on 12 November, 2008 in Cloud Computing, Mobile Devices, blended learning and mLearning. 1 Comment Tags: blended learning, laptop classes, mobile learning.

This is a follow-up to my previous post a month ago on Collaboration Webs and Mobile Tools. What has brought it about is the November issue of Interface magazine article titled “Would you look good with a mini?” (well worth a read). The article discusses the emerging trend of Mini Laptops and how they have become more appealing with the particular attractions being size and price.

It is hard to believe that only 13 months (October 16, 2007) ago the very first viable mini, the Asus Eee PC, entered the market. Interface now mentions 6 standard models in addition to the recently released Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (image shown) which I purchased recently. I first started looking at the minis about 4 months ago as an option but was reluctant to touch them because of the key board size and screen size – but I changed my mind once the keyboards came in at 90% standard and the screen could handle 1024px width (600px height) to prevent the nightmare of side-scrolling. Another feature I like is that it runs on Windows XP which, love it or hate it, is the standard for most schools including mine.

This is a truly fast evolving resource and I predict that Mini Laptops will become the standard wireless access tool for students NZ High Schools within 2-3 years.

PS. I am not an apologist for Dell but I do love my Inspiron Mini 9…

Collaboration Webs and Mobile Tools

Published on 15 October, 2008 in Cloud Computing, Cool Tools, Laptop Classrooms, blended learning and ePortfolios. 0 Comments Tags: blended learning, laptop classes, professional development, Training, Ulearn.

Classmate PC

Well I have just about recovered from the U-Learn 08 Conference held in Christchurch last week. It is the largest eLearning conference for teachers in the country. The conference more than anything confirmed my belief that we are headed rapidly towards a combination of Collaboration Webs and Mobile tools which will take over our teaching. This year’s Horizon Report confirms that these will be adopted within 1-3 years.

For this reason I will be helping to implement a project at my school to facilitate a shift to the use of Mobile Tools and Connected Learning in the classroom. Currently teachers need to jostle over the limited computer room resources, similar to most schools as we know. We will be dedicating one classroom of laptops to allow 5-6 teachers from a range of subjects and Year levels to have online access on demand. The teachers will become a collaborative team with ongoing professional development in the use of online tools to implement student centred learning. The focus of this project is on developing the staff so that they can become team leaders the following year when we purchase a number of sets of cheap mini laptops such as the Classmate PC (as shown above).

Already there is strong interest in participation in the project. I see it as just one project among many where rapid growth can occur by exploring and modelling what is possible.

Clearly the expectation is that Mobile Phones will become the web tool of choice for most teenagers and possibly adults too. However, until the more web-capable iPhone & T-Mobile become more affordable then we see the use of the mini PC as an affordable choice to help prepare our staff and students for what lies ahead.

Here is a link to my presentation to Department Heads which was use to promote discussion of our “Collaboration Webs Project”: