Hi everyone,
as Educo has grown over the last few months we (Trevor, Darren) decided that it would be a wise move to bring the management and development of educo more out in to the open. We'd like to see this forum develop in to a place where we decide how Educo is developed and managed for the benefit of our learners. It's worth explaining a little about the funding and the role of the MOE in Educo. The MOE as part of its commitment to the VLN is fully funding moodle/mahara for VLN clusters of schools for 2010/2011. The intention is to build a business case around providing these services to schools as part of a future NEN.
I'd also like to explain a little about the philosophy around why we developed Educo and what it means to be a member of the Educo community. We are deliberately trying to break down the virtual walls that teachers and schools create in online learning. The reason for this is that we believe that teachers teach better (and therefore learners have better opportunities for quality learning) if teachers collaborate together. It's important to distinguish between sharing and collaborating - In my opinion, sharing is good but collaborating is better. In Educo this translates to the site being a place where teachers should be able to see what others are doing and feel free to suggest working together to produce quality courses. We've organised the site by curriculum areas as outlined in the New Curriculum rather than by school to aid this. So to be a member of the Educo community means, for me that you and your school support the vision of teacher and learner collaboration.
What should this forum/group do?
Firstly, this group is for people who are interested in contributing to the development of Educo. Membership of the group is entirely voluntary - please feel free to introduce others to this group - anyone can join (or leave!).
Educo is still young, but growing. As more schools and users come on board we will face challenges. This forum is an open place where we can collectively decide how we respond to these challenges - please use it to:
*Make suggestions on how to improve Educo (answers appreciated!)
*Share things that are working well or not working well
I'd like to introduce Glen Davies at Core Education who takes care of the server-side jobs such as maintenance and upgrades. Glen works with the ePrincipals - requests for work etc to be done on educo will only be actioned when requested by Darren, Vicki Smith/Pete Graham, or I.
That's enough for now. I've set the subscription to this forum to be -just initially- you can change these settings in the course if you wish.
BTW -the course/ forum can be found under home -> administration and is called Educo User Group and Management Forum.
How democratic!
one thing that needs sorting is the admin level on Mahara. Teachers need to be able to log in as students, but not be able to log in as other teachers. This needs to be a different role for teachers.
themes.... where are thet stolen from?? how hard would it be to get a tghs one?
I read about a plug in that if you open a doc in educo and save it again it will save in educo rather than having to upload again. Can we have that?
cheers
I take your point about the Admin level on Mahara. There's two lines of thought: the first concerns the policy that schools have in place around using the eportfolio. If the policy establishes co-ownership then students as part of terms of using mahara need to enable access to teachers to all of their portfolio. The other way of course, would be to have 'group admins' - put your learners in a group and assign an admin - the admin would have the ability to login as a member of the group. We could request this on the Mahara development forums. I suspect the best option maybe a combination of the 2. I'd be interested in seeing how this develops and can see the need for tools that support co-ownership. So we need to define exactly what we want to put forward to the Mahara developers. Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?
Themes. You could make your own theme - there's plenty of online documentation. Google moodle themes and find the moodle theme forum. Ours is adapted from a Newbury College theme. I'm not sure if the Moodle 1.9 series themes will work well with Moodle 2.0 which is released later this year and I expect we will be putting in place for 2011. It's probably worth waiting a little to see if this is the case. Darren or I can upload themes once you have made and tested them on a local installation of moodle (ie on your laptop) I use virtualbox for this sort of stuff.
The microsoft office - moodle plugin is available from
http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/officeaddinformoodle/Pages/default.aspx and it's installed on the client laptop. I'd be interested to hear your experiences with it. The problem that I see though is that using, for example, word documents on Moodle assumes that learners can read word documents at home. I prefer either HTML or pdf's. Likewise slideshare.net is better than *.ppt's and also uses less bandwidth.
TS
Themes. You could make your own theme - there's plenty of online documentation. Google moodle themes and find the moodle theme forum. Ours is adapted from a Newbury College theme. I'm not sure if the Moodle 1.9 series themes will work well with Moodle 2.0 which is released later this year and I expect we will be putting in place for 2011. It's probably worth waiting a little to see if this is the case. Darren or I can upload themes once you have made and tested them on a local installation of moodle (ie on your laptop) I use virtualbox for this sort of stuff.
The microsoft office - moodle plugin is available from
http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/officeaddinformoodle/Pages/default.aspx and it's installed on the client laptop. I'd be interested to hear your experiences with it. The problem that I see though is that using, for example, word documents on Moodle assumes that learners can read word documents at home. I prefer either HTML or pdf's. Likewise slideshare.net is better than *.ppt's and also uses less bandwidth.
TS