A “one-stop-shop” for staff and parents at Green Oasis School

Introduction

Green Oasis School was founded in 2001 in Shenzhen, China and began following the National Curriculum for England in 2008. The school is made up of a range of nationalities, with the majority being Chinese nationals. The school’s vision is to ‘Educate, Nurture and Inspire Excellence’.

Titus Learning first met with the school’s Head of Secondary at the annual SEASIMS conference, who expressed an interest in the integration we had developed between Moodle and SIMS.

 

 

Problem

At the time Green Oasis had a basic Moodle in place, however they had reached a stage where they were keen to add integration with SIMS – the school’s management information software.

“Staff and students were already using a version of Moodle at the school, but it did not have the ability to synchronise with SIMS so would not be suitable for the needs of the school moving forward.

From the initial Skype conferences it was clear that Titus Learning were offering a professional product with a stylish, customised and user friendly interface.”

– Swati Joshi, Head of Computing/Moodle, Green Oasis School

Action

A detailed consultation followed to establish the key requirements for implementing a learning management system at the school, which included:

  • The ability to host the new LMS on site, both to improve performance and comply with Chinese restrictions on global Internet access.
  • Support and training for key staff members on using the platform to support teaching and learning, as well as the basic administration of the LMS.
  • Integration between the school’s SIMS software and the new LMS

Titus Learning proposed a managed Moodle, including a responsive custom theme designed to display across  range of devices and provide a simple, easy-to-navigate interface for inexperienced users. The platform would be hosted at the school, but managed remotely by the Titus team, removing the burden of applying security patches, updates or bug fixes from the busy administration staff in school.

This set up would also allow Titus Learning to monitor usage of the new Moodle and proactively advise the Green Oasis team on how the platform could be improved or utilised in new ways to ensure engagement with staff and students alike.

Once the platform was ready for launch, a senior member of the Titus Learning team travelled to Shenzen to provide detailed on-site training for all staff and administrators involved in the usage and upkeep of the new platform.

Results

The redesigned theme proved popular with users from the launch, with positive feedback on its clear layout, signposting of key features and ease of use.

“Titus Learning has provided an extremely good experience so far in terms of sorting issues within school and communicating with members from Titus. Titus Learning documents have helped the teachers understand Moodle better.

The customized look with tiles and custom colour theme is an asset to our Vision Mission statement. Working on mark sheets has been the best experience so far in terms of its availability online.”

– Swati Joshi, Head of Computing/Moodle, Green Oasis School

In addition, integration between the new Moodle and the school’s SIMS software has allowed the school to save time on routine administration such as updating user groups, share selected assessment, behavioral and registration data with students and parents and improve home-school communication.

Looking to the future

Post launch, Titus Learning and Green Oasis have maintained a close working relationship as the school develop their e-learning provision.

“In the future we are looking at developing our Staff Zone and Parent Zone so it becomes a “one-stop-shop” for what staff and parents need to check, and longer term the vision would be to look at going completely paperless in terms of our communication with parents.”

– Swati Joshi, Head of Computing/Moodle, Green Oasis School

To learn more about the work we’ve done with Moodle, or to find out how we could help your school or organisation improve engagement, communication and learning outcomes, book a short online demo with one of our team.

[button link=”https://www.tituslearning.com/book-a-demo/”]Click to book your 15 minute demo now >>[/button]

Guest Post: Puppets On A Digital String?

This week we’re pleased to once again feature a guest post by John Mikton, who blogs at Beyond Digital. With 22 years’ experience working in Education Technology and 12 years as a Senior Leadership Team member in International Schools, John is perfectly placed to comment on all things EdTech. John is currently the Director of eLearning at the Inter Community School Zurich and was previously the Director of ICT at the International School of Prague. John is an Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Education Trainer, Common Sense Digital Citizenship: Certified Educator and trainer at the Principal Training Center and AppsEvents.

This post is inspired by an L2talk I gave at the Learning2 Europe conference in Warsaw.

“…every storyteller has a bias – and so does every platform…”-  Andrew Postman  “My Dad Predicted Trump in 1985 – It’s Not Orwell, He Warned, It’s Brave New World.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 02 Feb. 2017

Credit: Jim McDougall, Glasgow, Scotland
Credit: Jim McDougall, Glasgow, Scotland

I am an addict. Are you too? Don’t you hate it when you can’t find your phone, and a friend has to call it?  Maybe the first thing you did this morning was check your phone and the last thing you did today was check your phone.  Think about it: we walk and text, and even drive and text. Have you had this happen – you are in a social situation and you go the bathroom to check an update? You are standing on a street corner and suddenly realize you are on your phone swiping at it, unconsciously. Then there is the feeling you get when you post a picture on a social media feed. The “likes” start coming in. It feels good, really good, and then you check back and back. You post an update and there no “likes”. You start wondering to yourself, “What is going on?”

I am sure you’ve heard about B.J Skinner’s rat experiment. The first rat had a lever in its cage, and every time it hit the lever food would come out. The second rat in the same set-up, hit the lever and nothing came out, no food. The third rat, same set-up, when it hit the lever a little food came out, then nothing, and then a lot, and then nothing again. The third rat developed an addiction. It quickly realized as long as it hit the lever it had a chance of getting some food.  This is called the principal of variable rewards. That feel-good feeling: the dopamine rush. Behavior design, as explained in this article (Scientist who make our apps addictive by Ian Leslie 1843 Economist October.November 2016), is a critical part of every app development. Tech companies employ behavioral economists, psychologists, and psychiatrists in the creation, design and curation of our app ecosystems to ensure we keep coming back for more.

So many of our interactions with devices are subconscious. In Eric Pickersgill’s thought provoking photos series “Removed” (do spend some time on the link!) he highlights the idea of being “alone together” as Sherry Turkle so aptly describes in her book Alone Together. We are often physically together with another person in a space, sometimes even intimately, but our mind is burrowed in a phone.

As adults, we are quick to point the finger at kids for not being able to manage their screen-time. Think of this, the first time an infant will interact with a digital device is watching a parent using one. What does it feel like for a child in a pram looking up at their parent to only see a blank expression immersed in their smartphone? The dinner table conversation interrupted by parents checking work emails? Mary Aiken in her book “ The Cyber Effect” states we are asking the wrong question. Mary writes “We should not be asking at what age is it appropriate to give a digital device to an infant, but be asking the question when is it appropriate for an adult to interact with a digital device in front of an infant.”

A good example of behavior design is Snapchat and the new feature “streaks“. The idea of streaks if you have a dialogue with a friend over 24 hours and you continue this over days, a flame emoji shows up. In tandem a number counting your interactions keeps tally. Should one of you stop posting, an hour glass shows up giving you a heads up that the streak will disappear if you do not stay on. For adolescents social media relationships can be a gauge of their social capital. Streaks add a layer of complexity to the interactions.

I am not against digital devices. I have been working in Education Technology as a coach, coordinator, IT Director and Director of eLearning for over 20 years. I love the seamless and frictionless experience of our digital environments.

It is a fact that our online data (health apps, social media, travel, online games, GPS, shopping, search etc…) is collected, analyzed, and then sold to third parties, or curated to give us a personalized online experiences with the clear goal of manipulating our behaviors. We as educators have an ethical responsibility to be skeptical of behavior design’s narrative. Let us challenge our learning communities to question the complexity and consequences of behavior design in our lives. Stuffing a digital citizenship lesson for 15 minutes during a Friday morning advisory is not enough. We need to make this narrative an integral part of the living curriculum.

Do we want to end up being puppets pulled by the strings of choreographed digital ecosystems which we do not control?

I think it is important to understand schools are most likely the last place where children interact with digital devices with balance and pedagogic purpose. We cannot take this for granted.
If we ignore behavior design we will lose something. Free will. Surely neither you or I want to lose this?

Titus Learning at the 2017 Moodle Moot

Titus Learning co-founder and director Seb Francis attended the Moodle Moot UK and Ireland 2017 on the 10 – 12 April at the Park Plaza Riverbank London. Here, he shares some of his thoughts on the event. 

Last week I attended the Moodle Moot in London alongside hundreds of other Moodle users, providers, and the HQ team themselves. The Moots initially started out as a community driven event to share ideas, development projects and an opportunity for improving your knowledge of all things Moodle. Since the early days of the Moots being purely community led, the HQ team have joined forces to bring an extra dimension to the event, leading a number of sessions themselves, and showcasing some of the work coming directly from HQ.

This year’s Moodle Moot was opened with a great keynote from Gavin Henrick, with news of what’s been released in the past year, what we can expect in Moodle 3.3, and asking the delegates directly how they’d like to see Moodle progress and develop. We had a drop in from the big man himself, Martin Dougiamas, via Skype, who was also around to chat virtually with the delegates over the few days of the conference.

I managed to attend back to back sessions (even with a slightly sore head on the Wed!) from a range of presenters, and picked up some great ideas of how the different institutions are using and customising Moodle. From the HQ team themselves there is obviously a huge push to improve the usability and general UI/UX of Moodle. This is apparent with the release of the Boost theme based on Bootstrap 4, and focusing on ease of use, as opposed to new features, for 3.4 coming later in the year. The sessions on the Moodle mobile app, and global search led by Juan Leyva and Dan Poltawyski respectively, were very well attended (I had to sit on the floor!), and are proof of how keen people are to utilise Moodle in more places, whilst saving time.

Becky Barrington from Cornwall College did a great session on improving the usage and adoption of Moodle among staff. In her own words, when speaking with staff about Moodle the response was much more ‘Uuuhh’ than ‘Oooh’ (even if I can’t go as high pitched as Becky did!) and that was something she was determined to change. She started by understanding more about individual departments, and matching certain Moodle features to their requirements, rather than trying to blanket the same approach over all tutors.

This led to great early results but she knew she needed to scale it across more staff. When they introduced a new Student Information System (SIS), she worked with the Management Team to push training for this via Moodle. This immediately showed staff what was possible with Moodle and she soon got the question she wanted: “can we do that in Moodle for our own students?”. Finally, she looked at which other plugins and systems could be used alongside Moodle to make the tutor’s lives easier, and the students more engaged with the content.

Introducing systems like H5P (which we’re a huge fan of – check our post here) got tutors creating quick, easy and fun content which seamlessly integrates with Moodle. The work Becky did at Cornwall College should certainly be used as a model for other institutions looking to improve their Moodle usage.

The Chair of the Moodle Users Association (MUA), and the eLearning Lead at ISS Lancaster University, Steven Powell, gave us a ‘year in review’ of the MUA and the great work they’ve already done. Only a year since its creation, we are soon to see the ‘My Course Overview’, and have some other great ideas in the pipeline. What’s more impressive is how they’ve proved the concept of having a community led platform to suggest, vote, and develop new technologies, and it’s very promising for the future of Moodle. If you’re not yet a member of the MUA, or a little unsure of how it works, I’d definitely recommend checking out the website.

I had the pleasure of meeting Justin Hunt, who is the wonderfully talented developer of the suite of PoodLL plugins (I told him to look out for the chap with an afro and a Titus t-shirt… I think it took him a whole 37 seconds to find me!). I’ve been aware and played with the PoodLL plugins for a number of years, and it was great to meet the guy behind it. If you’re looking for a way to enhance the type of submissions you can receive from students (audio clips and recordings), or a way to jazz up your Moodle course (with the button creator), then the PoodLL plugins are perfect. We’re going to be doing more work with Justin so if you want to find out more just give us a shout.

The Moot was also a great opportunity to showcase some of the work we’ve been doing for our very own clients, and get feedback from the biggest and best in the Moodle community. We’re super proud of the development work we’ve done, whether that be our custom Titus theme, the plugins we’ve created for event management, CRMs or even payment gateways, plus more. Hearing those in the know say positive things about what we’re doing was really encouraging encouraging and makes it all even more worthwhile.

Last but not least, I came away from the Moodle Moot having met a whole bunch of great people, who I hope to keep in touch with both at and outside of the annual pilgrimage to the Moot!

So I’ll wrap it up there (and apologies to those I met and have not mentioned), but whether you attended or not, it’d be great to hear anything you have to add to what I’ve written. The Moodle Moot is certainly on the agenda for future years and I’m already looking forward to 2018!

– Seb

EduLink One reviewed on the Assessment Manager blog

We were pleased to be featured last week on David Pott’s Assessment Manager blog, with a review of EduLink One and how it integrates with the SIMS ecosystem.

You can read the full review at David’s blog here: https://davidpott.com/2017/04/05/edulink-one-titus-learning/

EduLink One gives teachers, students and parents a single interface to share reports, documents and information on a range of devices, allowing you to:

  • Engage students with an easy to use interface giving quick access to timetables, homework assignments, resources and exam calendars
  • Involve parents by giving access their child’s grades, attendance and behavioural data, as well as instant messaging to keep them up to date with the latest news.
  • Empower teachers to work flexibly, enabling on-the-go access to real time MIS data and allowing marking, assessment and registration to be completed from a mobile device.
  • Support administrators with instant messages delivered directly to the user’s smartphone, and integration with cashless payment systems.

If you’re interested in joining our free trial of EduLink One, please fill out our enquiry form here.