At 3:35 pm -0500 3/3/02, Stuart Meldrum wrote:

>Ref: http://duncan.smeed.org/2351
>
>Here's a few of my thoughta about whar Mr L said:
>"As promised here is a brief report of our very productive meeting."
>
>"We brainstormed a number of ideas relating to the use of ICT to
>support teaching and learning. Here they are in no particlular order."
>
>"Our school website www.dunbar.org.uk/dgs is already having a very
>significant impact upon the the school and yet we all recognise
>there is still a great deal of work to do."
>
>I've been working on the dgs website for a few months now after 
>coming in knowing absolutely nothing about how any of it is done, 
>I've got the hang of maintaining it now and am about to start trying 
>to take it to the next level (probably with a lot of help from 
>Grahame Smith from the traders association) but what I really need 
>to do is make sure everything I have picked up is passed on to 
>younger pupils so that the site doesn't start to die every new year. 
>One way to do this could be to set up pages for each year group that 
>are looked after by people in that year, I wouldn't mind helping out 
>at some sort of club on a Friday afternoon for this. It would also 
>help to make the site more relevant to younger members of the school.

What are the difficulties in the hand over? What did you need to do, in general terms, to come up to speed? What software do you use to maintain the site? Is this the same as the previous 'management' used? What would you do to make the hand over easier. Etc. A club/community approach to knowledge transfer would be an excellent idea to bring younger members up to speed. I can't promise to be available to help out 'in person' but could do my bit 'virtually' ;-)

>
>"We are exploring the idea of having a web-based personal learning
>plan for every student, which would allow students to develop a
>secure web-based folder in which they could keep information about
>their learning preferences, learning strategies, personal targets,
>interests, schools reports (which could be uploaded by the school) -
>perhaps with read access for parents.
>This took us onto the idea of a virtual schoolbag in which students
>could keep all their school work from throughout their school
>careers.  This would be particularly helpful for those students who
>have a tendency to lose information or to be disorganised.  It would
>also reinforce the notion of education being a progression and
>students could actually see the extent of theirlearning as the years
>go by."
>
>Every pupil already has on online folder on schoolmaster which they 
>can login to from our home page. It has e-mail and an online folder 
>with private and public sections. However it isn't an easy system to 
>use and it isn't very reliable. I would prefer to have all of these 
>things on our own site but wouldn't know where to begin. I've been 
>playing about with some free cgi scripts I found for password 
>protecting pages but I don't really understand them and so haven't 
>had much success. I thought that maybe if I worked out how to do 
>this I might then be able to move on to something more useful. Any 
>ideas?

I am sure that there will be 'commercial' offerings like Schoolmaster but the fact that these are (still) awkward and unreliable despite - presumably - a substantial development effort by full-time web developers, should be evidence enough that this is a difficult area and it's unlikely, IMHO, that a fully home-grown solution is viable or, indeed, desirable.

There are some short(er)-term goals that may help to move in that direction though. My meeting with Mr Ledingham concentrated mainly on these...

>
>"We were most excited by the idea of students having their own web
>pages.  Duncan intoduced me to the idea of wblogging and I was
>immediately attracted by its apparent simplicity and potential."
>
>I hadn't heard of weblogging until Mr L mentioned it on Friday and 
>when I saw this I realised it's pretty similar to the forum that we 
>are going to be adding to the school site next Friday (fingers 
>crossed!) The one we're going to use is the same as the forum on the 
>Dunbar site, where you can set up as many administrators as you like 
>who can delete entries (and edit them i think)as well as being able 
>to ban entries from certain ip addresses, it also has a swear 
>filter. If we eventually have a page for every student then there 
>would need to be this many controls because you know what some of 
>them are like.

Weblogging is not that related to forums. To a great extent they are complementary. At the moment we are participating in a forum-like thread and weblogs+forums are a good way to share knowledge. But in my experience, forums on their own soon degenerate into 'flamefests' - which is why it's necessary to have all those 'banning/editing/censoring' controls. I'm not saying that weblogs per se overcome all the the negative aspects of free-for-all forums but evidence suggest that they are less likely to induce 'flammability'.

I would agree that administrators need features that allow for banning/editing/censoring but would hope that the necessity to deploy them would be reduced by weblogs. Having sensible acceptable use policies help to eliminate these problems before they occur.

>
>[I know, I deleted a huge chunk of what he said here, but I don't 
>really have anything interesting to say about it!]
>
>"We would like to establish a pilot project for volunteeer groups of
>students to undertake a weblogging initiative.  The conversant
>software seems to have real potential for schools.  My only concern
>is the security angle for young people and we would probably need to
>have some means of ensuring only those individuals who have password
>clearance can read the web logs."
>
>Yeah, I agree, there needs to be lots of controls on what is said 
>because it really doesn't look good when you get the usual neds 
>contributing their thoughts. (ha! as if they have thoughts!)

I try not to be too judgmental and see merit in encouraging a wide variety of topics in weblogging. Of course there needs to be bounds of decency, etc., put in place and a certain degree of trust is required.

I know there are people that consider the Internet to be an inappropriate resource for school education and look for every opportunity to 'put it down' and/or highlight some of the negative aspects and cite these to reinforce their prejudices. I don't agree with them and am convinced that this technology is a positive force for good. Yes, controls/guidelines need to be established for students and there will be times when trust is violated but, hopefully, note to the extent that the majority is penalised due to the actions of a small minority.

>
>"Finally, we agreed that the two key criteria must be that the system
>does not place any burden upon teachers and the system is VERY user
>friendly for students."
>
>Yeah, I agree again, teachers have enough to do (except Mr L who 
>just seems to wander aroung the school saying 'hi' to everybody)

>"I would welcome the thoughts of current undergraduates and school students. "
>
>Well here you are - my thoughts for what they are worth, (probably 
>not much I know, but at least I try)

Cheers,

Duncan