Moodle Moot Edinburgh 2014

One of the key reasons educators and corporations choose Moodle is the strength of the Moodle Community. This year’s Moodle Moot was held in Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange again demonstrating the power of the community where 350 people from across the globe descended on to the Scottish capital.

Martin Dougiamas’ key note was slightly different this year. Martin had flown his children over from Australia to join in with the festivities. Each time a version of Moodle is release traditionally his kids have taken a photo symbolising which version number we are on. The next version of Moodle is 2.7 and will be supported for the next 5 years. Moodle users are recommended to upgrade their installs to this latest version which includes amongst other great features security patches. It was nice to see his kids take a photo with the audience in preparation for the new release in the coming months.

Martin in his key note demonstrated some exciting plans around user notifications and how in particular Moodle can talk to Apple and Google to enable SMART phone notifications. Furthermore, a brand new text editor has been coded from scratch to replace TinyMCE and allows Moodle developers to display only the text editing icons they need enhancing the user experience.

On the Moodle Theme agenda boot strap themes are to be used as standard and the ‘More’ theme was demonstrated showing how teachers can customise their own themes quickly on the fly. Other impressive developments I witnesses included a sophisticated social media and notices module developed by Glasgow College which greatly enhances the student experience online. And finally, I was interested to learn more about conditional learning pathways and how depending on the grades of your students various notifications and additional resources can be unlocked. This enables a personalisation of learning whereby students who are struggling are given extra support materials and tutors are notified to intervene. Gifted and talented learners with higher grades can be challenged with more stretching resources individualising the experience.

Of course it’s not all about the technology it’s the people that make Moodle Moots special. Over lunch I spoke to people from the USA, Poland, Lebanon and Australia – well yes that was Martin Dougiamas the Moodle founder from Perth!

Bradford School of Management International Students

Sean at Bradford School of Management

Every year for several years I have worked with Shahid Rasul and Christos Kalantaridis lecturers at Bradford School of Management challenging students to come up with ideas to problems faced by Webanywhere. Not only does this strengthen our ties with Bradford University and help their mission to ‘Make Knowledge Work‘ but there are real business benefits to working with Webanywhere outsiders.

It is true that executives and managers in businesses can suffer from not seeing the wood for the trees and young dynamic students with fresh thinking can challenge some of your original thinking.

Our work with Christos is particularly interesting as we developed an online Ideas Market which now spans six international Universities two of which are in the Ukraine. Clearly, our online learning solution is much needed given the difficulties posed in the Ukraine and the disagreements between Russia and the West. Indeed, Christos is meant to be visiting another University in the Crimea but given the difficult situation this will no doubt have to be cancelled. The online Ideas Market place will continue to allow collaboration between University research groups irrespective of the political unrest and diplomatic strains.

My work with Shahid’s students has been equally enlightening. Two groups of students have been helping us with the challenge of global expansion. One group focused on our go to market strategy in the USA and another group focussed on issues around the business cultures between our three global offices in Poland, the USA and the UK. It was thoroughly enjoyable watching the students present back their findings at the School of Management.

Hopefully in a few years to come we can re-connect with the international students and who knows perhaps they will run Webanywhere in China!

Webanywhere and Whitehill Community Multi-Academy Trust

Whitehill Trust Board Meeting

I have been active over a number of years with the Whitehill Trust Executive Board. The Learning Trust includes Webanywhere and other organisations such as the University of Huddersfield, Denford, Carnegie Learning Leaders, Yorkshire County Cricket and Barnardos. This has been a great forum for like minded organisations who work with schools to collaborate for the greater good.

The Whitehill Trust is a great example of how business and other organisations can engage with the local community to improve learning outcomes and add real value. Whitehill partner organisations are now allowing Whitehill to offer school to school support to other schools in Calderdale and beyond. For example, the University of Huddersfield’s Jayne Price helps Whitehill with their Schools Direct placement of teachers whilst Carnegie Learning Leaders help develop the middle leadership within schools.

Webanywhere are currently investigating how learning management systems can be used to develop continuous professional development and talent management across the Trust. We have worked previously with other teaching schools and universities, to provide online learning portals for teachers. Whitehill are interested in how senior management will be able to track this learning and assess the quality of teaching whilst providing ongoing support. Having a number of schools in a dispersed geography means a blended learning approach to teacher training and talent management has many advantages both for the learners and the leadership.

Our New School Jotter with Education Apps is launched

Over the last year we have spent many hours of development and testing creating a new version of our market leading product School Jotter. School Jotter has a significant customer base in the UK used by thousands of schools. Countless schools on a daily basis rely on School Jotter to edit their school website but the latest version of School Jotter takes teaching and learning online to a new level.

New School Jotter with Education Apps

The old version of School Jotter has been successful in schools with bursars and head teachers logging on to update their website with the latest newsletters, holiday dates and more. So what has changed?

In our new version of School Jotter all stakeholders in school and outside of school are given logins to the system. This include parents, teachers, student and governors. Furthermore, School Jotter is turning from being a website content management system into an education app store.

Webanywhere has developed our own education apps and new apps such as School Merits and Jotter Learn can be used to extend teaching online. School Merits is an online reward system whilst Jotter Learn allows teachers to create compelling learning sites for setting homework or to drive classroom activity as part of a blended learning approach. School Jotter is now fully compatible with tablets and mobile devices and supports mobile learning.

We will continue to develop further education apps for School Jotter whilst incorporating third party education apps such as eBooks and other useful resources. We’d appreciate your feedback on our software. We want to co-create our software with you our customers, so please do let us know if you have ideas for other apps you’d like to see.

I remember my old paper based school jotter at school in the 1990s, how times have changed. Our new version of School Jotter takes teaching and learning online and into the 21st century! We hope this will engage students and improve learning outcomes. Out with the old and in with the new.

Webanywhere at Learning Technologies

IMG_20140129_110006 We are now onto the second day of the Learning Technologies Exhibition in London, and so far the show has been a real success for Webanywhere.

It began yesterday, with a seminar by our very own Kristine Clough. Kristine presented ‘Successful Onboarding With e-Learning’ – a study into how Webanywhere’s Totara solution met the needs of University College London Hospitals (UCLH). The fact that UCLH’s Rob Beer agreed to co-present the seminar with Kristine was a fantastic bonus, and resulted in standing room only at Theatre 6!

If you’re visiting the Learning Technologies Exhibition today, there’s the chance to win an iPad with Webanywhere and another of our prestigious clients, the British Safety Council. All visitors need to do is visit our stand (158), and then visit British Safety Council’s stand (100), and they’ll be entered into the draw!

Our Workplace Learning team have also put together a guide to Learning Tech – it’s called 7 Things To Look Out For At Learning Technologies 2014 and can be downloaded here.

Webanywhere at BETT 2014

Sean Gilligan at BETT 2014

Michael Gove’s speech started the BETT Show 2014 at Excel in East London. BETT in it’s 30th year was busy not just with UK schools but many international delegations. The Education Minister mentioned three key words in his speech which give resonance to what we do at Webanywhere. Michael Gove in his speech mentioned open source software and flexible technology that stretches learning outcomes.

Our commitment to the world’s number one open source learning platform is most certainly a positive with the Cabinet Office and Francis Maude recognising the need for free open source software to reduce government spending on IT.

Webanywhere’s core business value is to be flexible so again the need for flexible IT is in parallel with many of our software product roadmaps. Our tag line is stretch beyond and stretching learning outcomes is one way in which we judge whether our software deployments are a success.

I was very proud to launch the latest version of our market leading software School Jotter at BETT. Two additional apps have been launched within the platform including School Merits and Jotter Learn. School Merits is an online reward system and is particularly useful in evidencing how schools utilise their pupil premium budgets. The Jotter Learn application allows teachers to create compelling learning sites within School Jotter. Learning sites can be edited and created in a similar way to your school website but with a different set of widgets designed specifically for digital online learning.

In some ways I don’t like the great expense and cost to both schools and business of the BETT Show. On the other hand it’s great for team building and a celebration of UK innovation in education with a worldwide audience. BETT 2014 was an open source, flexible and a stretching experience and long may it continue. See you at BETT next year.

No pain no gain