mark_macinnes

I have used Moodle and OpenHive (Sharepoint). Personally, I wouldn't say Edmodo is a VLE. Or at least, it isn't a whole school VLE. I use Edmodo as a classroom teacher and I think it is fantastic for that. It is easy to set, receive and mark homework and then to give feedback. It is easy to send and receive private messages to kids. It is quite good for class discussions however the facebook-like wall does limit this as things very easily get lost as they move too far down the page. In terms of whole school, Edmodo just doesn't fit the bill. A whole school VLE needs some sort of centralised information area. This doesn't exist in Edmodo. You could implement it, I reckon, but it would be difficult, require a lot of organisation and I imagine would easily be forgotten about. I use Edmodo to do the learning stuff along side our VLE. We have OpenHive which has no real functionality for learning (i.e. set work, receive work, mark work, give feedback, gradebooks, view progress) unless you use the Learning part of it which is silverlight based and is not well designed. Edmodo does the learning stuff really well, I think.

I am the main school administrator for Edmodo. As the admin, you can view everything that anybody (teacher or pupil) has posted publicly. You can also view what has been posted to a group. You can delete posts as well. You cannot (at least I cannot see how) manage a group. So you cannot activate/deactivate group, change messaging settings, add/delete members. This is still down to the group leader (most likely the teacher). You can view all teachers, admins and students. You can change passwords and remove accounts. The admin functionality isn't wonderful. I get the impression they created enough functionality for the minimum features to be done. I would like them to improve the admin area, but it does what you need pretty much. By the way, we have setup our school subdomain with Edmodo. That is how we got the extra management functionality. Without having a subdomain, you cannot do any of this. Getting a subdomain was free and a painless process. It is essential if more than one class in a school intends to use 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).

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.

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.

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.