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The world of Biometrics in Schools gets larger and more complex by the year!  I was particularly looking for Biometric Registration systems and saw a few options…  Not had a chance to look at them in great detail yet but these are the ones that caught my eye whilst walking round BETT.

LiveRegister:
Live Register is small robust box that has a fingerprint scanner used for AM/PM registration.  A student simply places their finger on the scanner and a second or so later they are marked as present with this data being passed on to SIMS.  New this year the system also allows ‘Signing in/out’ so that 6th Formers and Boarders could use the system to indicate they are going off-site or returning.  The boxes are about £550 each plus software licence – I reckon an average sized school could install this for about £15K.  They were also demoing a version that included a 7″ display screen which looked like it might have some potential!

DRS:
DRS have been in the registration game for a long time being the main supplier of OMR forms used in many schools.  They also offer a e-registration system which looks quite capable and again feeds into SIMS.  Their system for signing in/out requires a separate scanner to be setup for this purpose  which would work really well if most people leave via reception etc – but wouldn’t work as well on our wide site…  Their boxes were about £850 each (which included one main terminal and 2 subsidiary scanners)

Aurora:
Aurora are very much the wildcard entry into the world of school based Biometrics as rather than the traditional finger-print approach taken by others this uses ‘facial recognition’.  The student walks up to the box, enters a 4-digit pin then the internal camera checks the person matches the pin and registers then (again passing data to SIMS).  This is technologically an interesting solution, but with the added element of the need for a pin and the fact that the boxes are around £3,500 this is not a cheap or simple solution – however definitely one to keep an eye on!

The strange but appealing product that also caught my eye whilst wondering round wasn’t related to registration but would be great addition to any school already using biometric registration.  It is called “Password Manager” and was made by BioStore.  Whenever a student forgets their password they simply go up to the machine place their fingerprint on the pad and it creates a temporary password for the (valid for 30mins) so they can login and reset it without having to bother the ICT techs…  All this happens in about 7 seconds – Would be great for the start of terms!!

There are lots of good online Word Processors out there but at the end of the day they tend to all just offer a subset of the features of a locally installed Word Processor.  So imagine my surprise to find such a fully featured system independent web-based Word Processor which offered something new! (loosely web-based – it is Java based and looks like it uses Web-Start technology)…

What WriteOnline does that makes it really special is it offers graduated support for those who find writing difficult.  For example it supports writers by reading-aloud individual words or sentences.  It offers a clever prediction engine that attempts to predict what you are trying to type (including phonetic spelling – i.e. type in ‘fiz’ and it will offer words like ‘physical’ etc.)

In addition to this it supports multiple word-banks depending on the task at hand and writing-frames (i.e. sentence starters).  One particularly clever feature was the ability to create Mind-maps and then use the completed mind-map to create a word-bank which can be used to write the essay.

All in this looks like an excellent tool to scaffold learners who find writing difficult (for whatever reason – young students, SEN, EFL etc).  The tool can be accessed from any computer and also includes a version that can be installed locally (where internet connection might be an issue such as a laptop).

A nice feature is the Moodle integration which allows you to create an activity which specific wordbanks etc within moodle.  Students then complete the writing in WriteOnline (which can be saved as a draft to Moodle) and then submit it for marking.

All in this definitely looks like a tool worth some consideration!

To get a better idea of what WriteOnline offers I thoroughly recommend having a look at their Video Demos

Some of you will remember that last year I spent a lot of time investigating VLE options for my school before finally deciding on using Moodle as temporary measure as we couldn’t find anything that did exactly what we were after.  For those who haven’t read my original post on my personal opinion of the various VLE offerings that I wrote last year you can find it here

So this year at BETT I wasn’t really looking for anything that might fall into the VLE category (although I did have my eye out for things that could integrate into moodle!) so I was very surprised to be so completely amazed by a new product to the market (launched on the first morning of BETT) called OPENHIVE.

Much like Frog, OPENHIVE isn’t selling itself as a VLE but rather as a Learning Platform – and in both cases this is a much better description as what they aim to achieve is much more holistic platform within which most of the school’s ICT sits.  Both aim to offer tools for various areas of school life – portals, email, parental engagement, etc…

There are however a few key differences:

OPENHIVE is a modular system where you can pick and choose parts of the product without adopting everything, where as Frog is pretty much an all or nothing product (with the exception of Secure Gateway & Parental Engagement bits which I believe are chargeable extras).

The second major difference is that OPENHIVE is cloud based (meaning all the data is hosted remotely) whereas Frog is a physical box within your school.  This has ups and downs in both directions. Cloud based means remote management and service agreements for up time etc, but also means that it is difficult to fix problem yourself as you don’t have full access to the server…  Also there are the concerns about hosting all this data on someone else’s server (especially data about students – i.e. parental engagement)

There has been a lot of talk recently about the traditional VLE being dead and that people should be looking to form their own Learning Platforms by using a combination of Web 2.0 in conjunction.  What commercial Platform al ‘Learning’ products aim to achieve is a level of integration between tools which is difficult if not impossible to achieve using a collection of disparate tools.

OPENHIVE is built on top of Microsoft SharePoint, a very powerful but complicated environment.  What OPENHIVE have achieved that (in my opinion) no one else has managed to, is to build a tool for use in schools which is simple and visually appealing but retains the power of the SharePoint environment.  This has been done by using Silverlight (broadly Microsoft’s equivalent to Flash) as a front end for much of the UI.

For me the really appealing things about OPENHIVE was the integration of MIS data throughout the system.  Timetables in Outlook, links to Groups, clear data for Parents, with the addition of Instant Messaging, Shared Whiteboarding etc.  Plus all the native stuff that you get from SharePoint all in one coherent package.

The personal appeal of OPENHIVE is that it offers the very real potential to integrate the diverse range of tools that we use in school (Citrix, ClickView, Office 2007, Outlook, SIMS, etc) into a complete coherent system which is accessible from anywhere (and anything!).  This could really change the way in which our students work online and have a profound effect on their experience of school.

Also from a business perspective, the fact that they have recently been purchased by Capita gives confidence that they are not going anywhere soon.  Coupled with the fact they have built it all on open standards to BECTA’s regs give a lot of confidence.

I’m really excited to see where this goes as it has the potential to really change the way in which the online part of a school and its associated data work…

The one thing that worries me is the cost – I have heard some VERY large numbers floating about for cost per head which could easily price it outside of the reach of the majority of schools…  I’m hoping that they find a sensible price range which enables schools to get on board with this potentially school changing technology!

Take a look at their website for a few more details: OPENHIVE or follow them on Twitter @openhive_net

Hopefully in due course OPENHIVE will add some screencasts to better show off their Platform, but for now the intrepid @daibarnes managed to record some video of the platform whilst at BETT which gives a useful overview of the product.

Having been a long time TabletPC user I have always been a bit sceptical about the benefits of IWBs relative to their high costs, but this last year I have had access to a SMART board in my classroom which I have found really enjoyable. I am still mostly a TabletPC user and still do most of my A-level/IB teaching sitting at my desk, however with lower school classes the IWB can be really useful – but it is still very expensive for what I use it for…

The problem with IWB boards for many schools is that most teachers use them as glorified projection screens and rarely if ever use the ‘interactive’ element making the costs unjustified! So when I saw the interactive DLP projector on the TI stand at BETT I was blown away. Rather than attempting to explain how it works I suggest you watch this:

Basically it enables you to use the ‘pen/wand’ both directly on the board or at a distance.  The accuracy is pixel perfect (and there is no calibration ever!) and it works on any surface with no other hardware!?!  All in these are likely to retail for around £1,000 which is MUCH less than a projector and IWB!

For those needing a mobile IWB this is the perfect solution as the projector also included DisplayLink technology (which is what I use in my Toshiba DynaDock) which means you only need to plug in a single USB cable and you get Video/Audio(via projector) and IWB elements instantly (again with no calibration!)

Also they offer a wireless connection over UWB where you plug in two USB wireless dongles and you get all of the above only wireless which would be fantastic with my tablet PC!!

This technology is likely to appear in a number of projectors from different manufacturers over the coming months but the one on display at the stand was the:

InFocus IN3902/3904

Keep an eye on this technology I think in a few years you will see this in lots of classrooms as old projectors need to be replaced (particularly in the Independent Sector where IWB are still not widespread) with the current type of IWBs being reserved for users who specifically need ‘touch’…  Time for the IWB market to do some innovating!!

Strange experience this week seeing myself in the Guardian.  I was asked to do a quick telephone back in November interview as part of an article about the launch of the new TI-Npsire Activities Website called NspiringLearning.  Then a few weeks later they sent a photographer down who spent 20mins with one my classes taking pictures.  The journalist wasn’t sure exactly when it was due to be published but thought sometime in January…

I had meant to keep my eye out for it, but the first I knew about it was when a friend emailed me in the afternoon to say he had seen my picture in the paper!?!  Anyway all in it was a fun experience!

If you want to read the article you can find it below:
Professional development: how can we cope with a fast-changing ICT schoolscape?

Apparently the supplement it was published in was also handed out in all the BETT bags on Friday!?!

UPDATE: See update at the bottom

As MP4 seems to have become the default movie format in the last few years it has become more frustrating that moodle doesn’t natively support MP4′s!

The multimedia filter in moodle uses JW Viewer as the player for flv’s but the most recent version of this player now supports playing MP4′s!  So I figured I would have a go at updating the filter to support MP4′s (and M4V’s) using the latest version of JW Viewer

Well it turned out to not be that complicated…  I haven’t done a complete tidy up, but it seems to work as you would expect and means that students don’t need to have Quicktime installed on the client machine to play back MP4′s

To install this (very BETA) version of the plugin, simply download the attached file, unzip and upload the folder to replace the /filter/mediaplugin folder.  Then click on the “notifications” link to udate the settings…

The just upload the mp4/m4v file to your moodle install and put a link to it (as normal) and it should get replaced with the JW viewer…

Note: If you are using this for comercial purposes then you need to purchase a license from Longtail Video

Please let me know if it works for you!

DOWNLOAD REMOVED

UPDATE: It occoured to me that rather than hacking the core multimedia fiter it might work better if I just wrote a new filter just to deal with MP4/M4V files so that this would continue to work through upgrades etc…  So attached below is the all new (beta!) MP4 Filter

Download the MP4/M4V Filter

Download the original Mutimedia Filter <- May be useful if you downloaded my original attempt!

To install just download and extract the mp4filter folder and copy it to the filter folder, then make sure you remember to activate the filter!!

After a discussion on twitter this afternoon with @daibarnes and @moodlefairy  abut how to best maintain enrolments in moodle – See ETRU Point 6 http://edtechroundup.wikispaces.com/07.06.09 for the original question…

Anyway this led me to thinking about the various options on how we could use groups to separate users within a single course.  But as moodle currently has no option for sitewide groups (on the roadmap for 2.0) so groups must be manually created for each course which is a significant amount of work!!  There are some options to create an populate a course for each class within your MIS, or hacks like the CLEO SIMS hack which enables you to use SIMS groups.

However outside of these there seemed to be no obvious solution.  Then I rememebered that the bulk upload user system can be used to enrol students in groups and wondered if it could also be used to populate the grouping of students and it turns out you can!

If you create a csv file in the following format:

username, course1, group1, course2, group2, etc
user1, TestCourse, GroupA, AnotherCourse, GroupB
user2, TestCourse, GroupA, AnotherCourse, GroupC
user3, TestCourse, GroupB, AnotherCourse, GroupA

etc...

Where user1 is the students username, TestCourse is the shortname for the course and groupA is whatever you want to call the course.

Then when you go to the bulk upload user tool, change the setting to ‘update user’ rather than ‘create new user’ and away you go!

You can use this method to either create new users and enrol, enrol users in a course and group, create a new groups and add new users, or just add already enrolled users in a pre-existing group.  If a student is already in the group then it will just leave them there…

Note:  This will not remove any enrolments or groups students are already in (even if they are already in a group on that course) so you may end up with students in multiple groups.  As a result I would probably suggest you use this to do your initial enrolments at the start of the year, but then manually adjust during the year…

Anyone know a better way?

A few weeks ago following a conversation between myself and @warwickrobotics about who runs the VLE in different schools, and the concept of a director of e-learning I decided to put together a google form to explore this question…

I am very grateful to the 48 people who took the time to respond and I hope the information that I gathered is useful to other people as well.  All responses were anonymous…  Part way into the survey it became obvious that it would have been useful to know a little more demographic information (independent, state, secondary, primary etc) so this question was added in but sadly wasn’t included for all responses.  So what did we find out?

Read the rest of this entry →

This post has been a long time coming and is a summary of the thoughts I have had about the relative merits of two way of organising a VLE.   In these days of Web2.0 tools and OSS which are increasingly freely available on the market it is important to question why schools pay large amounts of money often £5-10K a year on buying in a comercial VLE.  Are there appropriate reasons to choose a comercial product over an OSS product and if so why?

Before progressing too far I should give a little background.  I am Maths & ICT teacher (currently Head of Maths and not teaching any ICT) who has used a few different VLE solutions in different schools (WebCT, Uniservity, Moodle – although some of these quite a few years ago!), and I am curently exploring the VLE options for my current school.  There are plenty of options on the market but I don’t intend to discuss those here – See Comparison of VLE Solutions for more info on this…

What I want to look at today is what are the key areas that make up a VLE, discuss some of the OSS/Web2.0 & comercial solutions to these areas and talk about integration between these – the idea being to explore the potential for building a complete VLE out of a collection of distributed systems some local others web-based.  I then want to think about what the benefits and pitfalls of this approach might be…

For me the key elements of a VLE are:

• Communication Tools – Notices, Forums, Chat, etc.
• Submission and Marking of Assignments
• Some form of quiz system
• Ability to store files for students to download
• E-portfolios
• Integration with Email/Calendar tools
• Ability to play multimedia resources
• Ability to display SCORM resources

There are plenty of excellent tools available which provide some of these tools – Edmodo is an excellent communication tool (similar look/feel to facebook) with the addition of some basic calendaring tools and the ability to set/submit assignments.  Mahara is a very good e-portfolio product.  Moodle is the defacto OSS VLE which has lots of useful features.  Google Apps for Education provides excellent email/calendar suite with online word/excel/powerpoint equivalents…

Each of these tools provide very significant tools in many cases more powerful tools than are available in most comercial products.  So surely the best solution is to use a combination of these (or similar) products to build a VLE using the best possible tools…  But sadly things are not quite this simple…

In the scenario above we have at least 4 different products, on top of that if we are wanting to offer parental reporting from our MIS we would need another product…

So what is the problem with multiple product solutions?  Well potentially we now have 5+ usernames and passwords to remember (as well as having to actually login multiple times to the various tools)…

There are options which might help mitigate this problem – using AD to authenticate products with local Windows Usernames etc, but this will only work for locally hosted products… Another option is to try to use OpenID but this is not widely supported and would still require a different username/password to the one used to logon to the machine…  So at present there is no perfect single username/password option.

This isn’t insurmountable but is worth being aware of…

What other problems might we encounter in a distributed VLE?  Well let’s suppose a student has completed an assignment and produced an excellent piece of work that they want to include in their e-portfolio, at present there is no nice way of getting the file into the e-portfolio, short of seperatley uploading the file.  Integration of this sort is coming along (supposed to be in Moodle 2.0) but is not available at present, similarly if they had done the assignment in edmodo then they would have issues…

This point however raises a much bigger issue for me which is that in a distributed VLE you often end up with multiple products which repeat features…  This naturally could lead to confusion, when you set students some homework in the ‘VLE’ do they check for it in Edmodo or do they check in Moodle?  Similar problems exist for all the tools which are repeated…  Inreased integration enables us to see more of these tools in the same location but doesn’t change the fact that you can end up with multiple forums, multiple places to set assignments, multiple means of communication etc…  This leads to confusion for both staff and students.

This confusion all points towards another problem…  Multiple systems means training staff/students in multple systems.  If you have a very tech savy staff this may not be a problem but in most schools this is not currently the case, and the thought of having to train staff on how to use (and move between) 4-5 systems fills me with dread!

It may be possible to mitigate some of these problems by using some form of front-end portal – maybe Drupal/Plone for OSS or SharePoint for commercial.  This may help a little with pulling some of the data together into a more coherent environment (and may assist with single-sign on)…  But you have to take into account this this is adding yet another product to the mix!

These problems should not exclude this is a solution, there are still plenty of reasons to consider this kind of mixture (not least of all that many of the products are free).  However achieving a good level of integration will require a lot of work (much of which is likely to need adapting as each of the parts update).  This means you will need good technical support, and raises the concern over what happens when that significant ‘technical support’ or lead teacher moves on…  Could someone else coming in continue to efectively manage such a distributed system?

Given these concerns I think there is still a place for considering fully integrated products.  At present there aren’t many of these on the market that really offer the full range of resources one might want in a VLE all in a single box.  A single prouct (particularly a managed one) has several advantages.  Less training as everything is in one product, there will be less time needing to be spent on reteaching navigation etc…

A single product also means less concerns over upgrades, and integration issues.  Also with a single product you don’t suffer from the repeated ways of doing the same thing…

So is a single all in one product the best solution?  Well sadly all is not perfect in this scenario either.  Even the best of the comercial VLE products cannot even begin to live up to the quality shown in a specialist product (OSS or comercial) which is trying to do just one thing.  A stand-alone Wiki product or Forum product is bound to offer more than the one that forms part of any VLE…

For me the debate continues, and at the heart of this debate is the balance between:

Ease of Use vs Quality and Range of Functions

What do other people think?

I would also recommend having a listen to @mweller’s podcast on VLE vs PLE fight club