Updating soon

We have been slacking on updating the Not A VLE project mostly because we have been busy speaking with teachers, pupils and parents. We are having great success with building online relationships and have got to a point where the blog is operating as required.

We hope to post several blog updates in the next few weeks. Please bare with us!

Gathering feedback and information

Getting responses from parents & teachers over the internet is proving too be tough. I'm not surprised.. Our pitch was 1/2 hearted.. I'm weighing up the option of going down to the school at 3:30 on some days to meet the parents and talk face to face to really find out what issues surrounding ICT they feel passionate about.

Facebook privacy and user issues!

I had a few chats with some of the staff members at Wilsden today about privacy and data protection. Basically they are scared that if they add wilsden primary as a friend then parents will be able to message them or get in touch.

This may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing, it's not for me to judge but the simple fact is that the facebook account is one of many methods we can use to aggregate data and has proved to be initially successful.

We currently have our facebook page open to the world to see but it appears that anyone can see who are friends(parents) are, this is a problem and is being addressed.

No doubt in my mind that as long as we aggregate data from the blog to facebook using the notes/rss feed then facebook has been a positive attribute at engaging parents.

Another decisions that has been made is that only friends who are actual parents will be accepted as friends, I personally disagree with this however this is required due to privacy/security reasons and will be policed internally by a staff member on a weekly basis.

One of the parents has offered to spend some time training this staff member.

A big problem we are facing is that of explaining to staff members that by putting something onto say, the blog, will make it's way onto facebook and that they don't need to double post or even to do anything on facebook other than to accept people to see what has been posted..

Facebook user update

Tuesday - We are now up to 36 friends on facebook :) That's still less than 10% of the parents though so please spread the message. I will ask for the school to send out another notice about the facebook page on Friday to see if we can get some more followers.

Facebook user update

Now up to 11 followers (Sunday AM)

Didn't expect any pupils to be following the school but it appears 1 of 11 is a pupil!

Newsletter response

Up to 8 parents on facebook so far! Paper newsletter went out yesterday (Friday).. Will update here on Monday

Our facebook test

During the last 2 parents evening I went to I asked 90 parents to add the school as a friend on facebook.

I made one mistake and said to search for wilsden primary school, infact they needed to search for wilsden primary..

Anyway, 3 parents found us so that's 1 in 30.

On Friday a newsletter is going out with the direct address http://facebook.com/wilsdenprimary for parents to add the school a friend.

It will also be interesting to see if any teachers add the school as a friend.

It will be especially interesting to see which I get a overall higher % of, parents or teachers..

Year 3 and 6 open day

I just finished an open day. The children in year 3 were given their toshiba laptops. Wilsden has an ownership model and most of the questions I was asked were quite sensible.

I asked parents of year 3 and 6 to search for Wilsden Primary School on facebook and to add us as a friend so I will await to see the results of that. My estimate is that 5 or so parents will, my logic is that if I can get enough parents on then I can get a network of parents together to provide quality feedback.

Here are some of the questions that were asked today:

• Can a parent send email to child's email address?
• Can parents send emails to teachers?
• Can your child keep the laptop when they leave year 6?
• Will we have more idea of what children are covering in lessons on say a weekly basis on each subject?
• Is non school software allowed on the netbooks?
• How will back ups work? What if the device is lost?

For the record, I took pictures of these questions on my HTC hero but the focus is so bad I can't even read them.

Next stop is answering these questions on the school blog which is available at http://wilsden.primaryblogger.co.uk

One thing I did find interesting is that parents put their mobile # and name on the post stick note for everyone to see, I guess they expect that the school would call them and answer their query instead of publicly answering it. Maybe they got asked to and I was day dreaming!

£20 million on newsletter paper?

I have just begun doing my review of the processes used by the schools to conclude if there actually is a problem.

At Wilsden Primary School I found the following:

• Each year there are 11 annual trips each needing 60 consent letters. 660 sheets of A4 paper.
• Every 1/2 term a consent form is sent to every pupils guardian(singular). 2508 sheets of A4 paper.
• 40 Permission slips are sent out on average each year to 60 pupils guardians. 2400 sheets of A4 paper.
• Each week a newsletter is sent out to each pupil for the attention of a guardian. 16720 sheets of A4 paper.
• Twice a year a 3 page report to each pupil for the attention of the guardian. 2508 sheets of A4 paper.

Let's assume 200 sheets of A4 costs the school £10

The total amount of paper used communicating between parents and a school is 24796.

124 packs of 200 sheets of A4 will be required.

Total cost of paper - £1240

This is per school, this report is specifically focused on this school however there are 16,000 primary schools in England with this level of cost burden. Between those schools a staggering £19,840,000 (£20 million).

Yet another VLE conundrum - Sites for parents

@simfin asked on twitter today - does anyone have a list of useful links/resources for y1 parents I can pass on to a teacher populating her new VLE? TY

One of the things I simply don't know is what do year 1 parents need to know? Surely the teacher can only truly know what is useful for her environment and her parents? I know sites like http://myschoolclosures.com are relevant to the entire school so I would recommend that but I'm stuck to think of other sites to recommend that I can guarantee will be relevant..

Any feedback on this or recommended sites would be great! Cheers

UPDATE:

Simfin summarized what he wanted as: "things you need to know to help your child succeed in y1."

So the conundrum is What do the parents want to know to help them succeed? Will parents give assisted learning if they have access to the curriculum? Is it a good thing if parents do and some parents don't? Is the teacher putting links online just to tick a box and has the teacher informed the parents about the links?

One thing I must remember while working through this project is that a VLE is like a free market. Choice is key and everything has a traded value, the problem is that with 5 or 6 key parties involved, making a deal that suits all could be complex but like any good deal, everyone should feel better off.

Trying to tick boxes is not what I am trying to accomplish by this project..

One last thing whilst I'm on a rant.. One of the ultimate goals is a paperless school, "Not a VLE" is part of this project but the implementation of Web2+ tech will be predominant throughout.

ICT inside and out

One of the things I have been pondering today is user account names..

Schools are coming around to the idea of having user account names that are longer than previously experienced.

When you login to local resources you can have a user account like john.smith because it is unlikely that inside your organization you will have someone with the same name.

With the Not a VLE project I want to start going down the road of a globally structured naming schema, eh? you may be thinking.. This is important because one of the main things I want to use is everything.

I don't want to be restricted and I don't want users to have multiple accounts or need to remember usernames. There are many reasons for this but the most important is simplicity and natural progression.

So you may be used to:

john.smith

Get ready to get used to:

dem.john.smith

dem here is identifying the school/organization. In this case it's Demo Primary School.

Is this scalable for schools?

By my maths there can be 17576 schools in this case. In the UK there are that many schools.. But what if we want to use global services? Shibboleth will handle this in some cases and in the future this should be more frequent...

To summarize on Scalability, the answer is in debate. Also is it a good identifying the organization of a pupil in a username from a child protection/data protection/copyright point of view..

If my brain worked today I think I could propose a solution for this problem...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Wilsden Primary School have won awards for their excellence in delivering ICT using different technology however we haven't really ever properly focused on involvement outside of the school gates.

My goal is to try to provide Wilsden with a web presence that will fulfill the requirements of everyone who has contact with the school.

I haven't yet defined my target audience, that is job #1.

I'm not getting paid to do this work so donations and/or sponsorship in the form of beer/curry for free consulation is available.

I don't have a name for this site yet. I don't know processes I will go through. All that I do know is that nearly all schools who have had a VLE have not had a good experience. This is not entirely a technical problem, in most it is a fundamental problem with the naming of a VLE. Let's break that down..

Virtual = Very 1990's - no one cares for virtual any more.

Learning = Dictates the site is a place for learning, not true in most cases although Learning may be the outcome.

Environment = Why? Why?!

From the above I can summarize that whoever invented a VLE decided that the learners focus was purely off-site learning IE. learning from home and having very little teacher interaction. In Primary Schools this is not the case.

Information on what parents, teachers, pupils and other people who have relationships with the schools want available online is still unknown.

To conclude: I have been given an okay to re-invent the way the school use the internet in general to function. Not a VLE