Tag Archive for 'Cool Tools'

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: , , , , , , .

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

  1. 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)
  2. The MyTools dropdown provides access to all student Google Apps
  3. 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.
  4. A Gmail Block appears (once logged in) on the front page with unread mail headings displayed
  5. 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.
  6. School Events and information are updated regularly on the home page (though we are currently in the April School Holidays)
  7. 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.

Fantastic Forms

Published on 15 September, 2009 in Cool Tools and Google Docs. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

I have been meaning to write this post for some time now so here it is.

At the start of this school year (February for those in the Northern Hemisphere) I started introducing Google Forms (surveys) with my own classes and also to other teachers. For those not aware, Google Forms are a function of Google Docs. They are very simple to create – simplicity of use being one of Google’s principles. Information from submitted forms feeds into a Google Spreadsheet and results can also be viewed in a nice graphical summary view.

Here is a list of some of the ways that I have used Forms with my classes and activity groups:

  • Group Preferences – My History class were placed in groups for one of the topics. They gave me confidential feedback as to who in the class they felt most comfortable working with.
  • Intro to the Course Questionnaire – used to gather student knowledge at the beginning of a course
  • Word Association tasks – used to gather a range of words students associate with a topic – This example is from my Year 9 History class for words associated with “Ancient Rome”. The words were then pasted into Wordle.net to make a word cloud.
  • End of Topic Surveys – Great for gathering information on what type of activities the students thought were the most useful or enjoyable and of course etc.
  • Gathering Contact List Details – I used this to create contact lists for parents of my care group (Form Class), for the Rugby Team that I coached and of course emailing lists for my classes
  • Online Application Forms – The Tech Crew students who I help organise applied for membership via a Google Form
  • Class Vote – My Web Design class voted anonymously for the best website produced as part of an assignment [I won't give the link to this one as my students names are listed]
  • Team Vote – My Rugby Team voted anonymously for end of season prizes for Most Valuable Player, Most Consistent Player etc. [Again my players names are listed so I won't link for privacy reasons]
  • Group Member and Topic Preferences – My Year 9 History Class informed me of who they were working with in their groups and their preferred topics for research projects.

Here are some of the ways that Forms have been used school wide:

  • Professional Development Feedback – I have run a range of Teacher Professional Development workshops on Moodle and Google Docs.
  • School Survey – Members of our school community (students, teachers, parents) were invited to complete a survey on the qualities that they thought were important in a Wellington College (our school) learner.
  • Teacher Workshop Choices – on our last Professional Development day Teachers completed an emailed form to choose between a range of workshops
  • Scholarship Practice Examination Slots – Our Deputy Principal gathered choices of slots for optional practice exams (to be held this week and next). Some of the subjects were held at the same time whereas others were the students choices when to sit. All of this information was gathered and collated from well over 100 students. The Deputy Principal said that it saved him at least 10 hours of collation and chasing up students.
  • Sports Day Entries – Our Head of Sports just today asked me to design a form for approximately 500 students to choose events to compete in along with their DOB, Age Groups etc for next February’s Sports Day
I have created Links to some of the forms above to give you an idea of how I have designed them. Please do NOT complete or any of them submit. It is worth noting that you can turn the forms on and off depending on whether you wish to accept responses or not.

Other features are:

  • A choice of themes to make the forms more visually attractive
  • The forms can be emailed as a link or added to web pages by embedding or linking
  • One great feature is that you can add additional information into new columns in the spreadsheet without affecting later entries into the form
  • All entries are time/date-stamped so that you know when the information was submitted
  • Already mentioned are the great summary tools which automatically create useful graphs for quick analysis
If you have not used Google Forms then do give them a go. They are VERY SIMPLE. Just create a Google Account if you haven’t already and start using them….You won’t look back. They have saved many hours of time for myself and a growing number of our Teaching, Administration and Management staff.

Free online Image Editor – Pixlr

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

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:

  1. Upload an image from your computer
  2. Upload an image directly from a website
  3. 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.