Good VLE Lesson Page Design

[mark_macinnes]

Now that the year 11s, 12s and 13s have departed, I have some time to invest in our department area of the school VLE. I have a rough idea of the content that I want to display to each year group, and have some long-term plans for how it will develop. That bit is all fine. I am now on the stage of planning the design of the department area. The most challenging part is the design of a unit or lesson. I have seen many VLEs where all that happens is that resources are uploaded for each lesson (or, worse, each unit) and then just displayed in a list. This doesn't add any value to learning at all. I am looking to creating a design for a lesson where there is some added value.

 

What I am looking for are any examples that achieve this, so does anybody have a good example of a lesson page in a VLE that features design that adds to learning? To be clear, I am focusing on the layout and design of the page.

[secretlife]

What sort of VLE is it? I'd imagine that would have a bearing on what you can and can't add to its design and layout. Do you mean elements on the page -colour/images etc or do you actually mean the pedagogy of it, in which case I suppose it does matter which VLE it is.

[mark_macinnes]

We are using OpenHive (skin on top of Sharepoint). However, I don't want to place constraints on planning the design (so layout/colour/imagery/etc) of the learning resources so, for the time being, I am going to ignore that I am using OpenHive. (I will overcome the problem of implementing it later on.)

 

I am confident when it comes to content. I have spoken to both staff and pupils, I have researched the sort of features that can aid learning and I have tried out a few things over this year.

 

What I talking about now is the layout of the pages. Everything I have seen so far is simply lists of resources along with some text. This detracts greatly from the potential learning that can take place. Some learning may be enabled, but poor design will limit this. I want to include good design so that the learning is not limited. I would like to see some examples that show a well designed (layout mainly, but also other design aspects such as colour, imagery, etc) page or set of pages for a unit or a lesson.

 

To be clear, I am not talking about just making everything pretty and exciting for the kids.

Edited May 30, 2012 by mark_macinnes

[Linfit]

Does your school insist on a standardised format for lesson plans and lessons ?

 

Here teaching staff have a fairly standard lesson format on their paper based lesson plans giving objectives, content, plenary, extension materials etc.

They are very big on signposting learning here and making it clear to pupils what the purpose and objective of what they are doing is.

Of course, your MMV, but if there is such a thing at your school, staff would probably appreciate a consistency of approach.

That was certinaly the case here - we use Frog, and somewhat adapted the basic template to fit in with our standard approach.

[mark_macinnes]

My school has no standardised format for lesson plans. It is largely down to each individual department or teacher. At the moment, I will be creating this for my department (ICT) area, not across the whole school (yet). Having said this, I will certainly be looking for it to apply to other departments. However, I am not at that stage yet. I am at the stage where seeing good examples of this being achieved would help. My intention is not do a copy-paste job, but it would really help to see how others have approached it to inform my thinking.

 

I know it is quite vague and I do apologise for this.

[philwaud]

We use Moodle, Ive knocked up a course which has eight lessons (topics), each one is populated with several labels to delineate the sections of the lesson. I use a CSS trick to display a tabbed menu (its on the Moodle web site) that runs across the top.

The sections are:

Objectives and outcomes

Starter

Main activity

Plenary

Homework

 

All I do when a teacher wants a new course is copy restore this course into their subject. You have to edit the tabbed menu and close it without making changes so that Moodle updates the links but thats it.

 

Fairly standard, just saves some work and gives less confident teachers a framework to work with.

[mark_macinnes]

We use Moodle, Ive knocked up a course which has eight lessons (topics), each one is populated with several labels to delineate the sections of the lesson. I use a CSS trick to display a tabbed menu (its on the Moodle web site) that runs across the top.

The sections are:

Objectives and outcomes

Starter

Main activity

Plenary

Homework

 

All I do when a teacher wants a new course is copy restore this course into their subject. You have to edit the tabbed menu and close it without making changes so that Moodle updates the links but thats it.

 

I like the idea of using a tabbed menu to display objectives, starter, main activity, etc for each lesson. That would certainly be good for smaller screens as well (such as tablets).