Xelium would like to wish all our clients and readers a Happy Christmas and a Wonderful New Year.

We look forward to working closely with you in 2012.

Twitter, much like Facebook, has the ability to set most people on opposite, potentially warring paths – you either absolutely LOVE IT, or absolutely HATE IT. To top it all, with the great debate surrounding the use of social media in schools, it must seem callous of me to recommend that schools start Tweeting and yet, here I am, to tell you that Every School should have a Twitter account and here are 5 reasons why.

1. Communication, Communication, Communication

We all know that schools need to communicate with Parents, newsletters, notes, countless way in which information and knowledge needs to be shared and transferred.

What has also been quite clear is that, while schools need to disseminate information, they don’t necessarily require constant feedback, and because it is often helpful to send out announcements and last minute reminders (especially to forgetful parents like me!) what better way to do it than via Twitter.

Remember when the snow forced school closures, if you were a Head teacher, wouldn’t you have loved to be able to Tweet at 5 am in the morning, possibly from the comfort of your bed to the school website to inform all Parents that school was closed for the day?

More amazingly, the power of Twitter on school trips is amazing, the interest that lies in the constant, (OK, perhaps every few hours is more accurate), updates that teachers or other responsible adults could send out, help parents to feel connected when their precious little Johnny is off on his very first school trip. Better still, if the bus is late, making its way back to school, an update via Twitter immediately makes that announcement.

To ensure that the communication remains a one-to-many, the school Twitter account could have followers, without actually following anybody. This ensures that all the tweets posted by the school, feed directly and is not lost in background chatter.

Now the point to make here is that, your audience need NOT necessarily sign up to Twitter but

2. Hey…Everybody’s on there already! If not…

It’s fairly straightforward to embed a Twitter feed in to a web page, ideally on the School Home page, to allow non-Twitterers (is there such a word?) to keep up to date outside of the ‘Twitter’ing crowd, simply by visiting the school website.

Seriously though, with 175 million registered users (Ref. MSNBC Technolog) and more users signing up every day, chances are there will be at least one member of the Parent community already on there, if not more.

What’s more the advent of smart phones brings us straight to our next point.

3. Accessibility

You don’t even need a computer to tweet, really. It can be done from any phone, smart or otherwise. One mobile phone (regardless of whether it’s a funky new smart phone or not) can be set up to tweet simply by sending a text message.

Some of our amazing clients have already put this to good use. The example I mentioned earlier, of the School Trip tweeting, was actually done via a standard school mobile phone, by a teacher who was just fascinated with the idea. And what an amazing response! We didn’t quite get to ‘trending’ level, but parents were encouraging and responsive and judging from their hashtags (#), very excited.

Now accessibility works both ways, not only is it actually pretty straightforward for the school to update their Twitter account, either conventionally on a computer or by a mobile phone, or several smart phones with Twitter apps.

Equally, parents aka followers could read these updates on a computer, either the school website (if Twitter was embedded) or on their Twitter profiles or other third party twitter software.

This pretty high level of independent users makes Tweeting…

4. Easy to manage

From a school admin point of view, the use of Twitter is actually really easy to manage. That is, there are no user groups to manage. I suppose to be more accurate, there need not be user groups to manage (user groups can be created if required), but the average ‘large school’ enrolment would probably have at most 1-2 K parents, and that is fairly easy to handle without the use of groups.

The tweets work as a ‘free for all’ PA system, sharing short bursts of information (in the 140 character limit) and if the information does not pertain to a certain group of users, it is easy enough to be ignored.

A bit different from email announcements, Twitter announcements work more on an opt-in basis. In essence, the interested Parent can choose when or how often they would like to access this information.

I think the most important point to make here of course is that, it is entirely up to the school completely, how often they wish to update their twitter accounts, and with the use of free third party software it is even possible to advance-schedule tweets so that the responsible party does not have to sit at the computer all day updating tweets (as you may well do!).

Oh and …did you know, if your school uses Google Calendars as an Administrative tool, you can actually get the Google Calendar tweeting too! (Learn how in my next post)

However, most important of all is that Twitter is

5. FREE

In this day and age of budget cuts and belt tightening, it’s a great bonus to find a service that is cheap, yet here it is, Twitter is completely free.

And while its functions perhaps do not quite match the capabilities of e-mail deliveries, say, via ParentMail. There are definitely ways to almost come close. The ability to link photos (instagrams) or shortened links to webpages (bit.ly or equivalents), mean that related information such as complete newsletters or digital photo albums can be shared in much the same way as email is able to.

So there you are, if you’re using Twitter in your school, fantastic! Leave us a link in the comments and we’ll visit. If not, what are you waiting for?

St Stephen’s CoE Primary, Bath makes great use of Twitter, check out this Outstanding School here.

For more great tips and ideas follow @Xelium on Twitter and if you’re on Facebook, come and say Hi!

Author: Li-ling Ooi, also tweets as @DrOoi

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

Looking for Video Resources and Digital TV Channels for Education, check out our list below, serving up high quality videos and relevant content for teaching and learning; for ideas, inspiration, blended learning or simply to Embed into your VLE as learning resource.

The list of free online resources and videos for teaching and learning below is updated regularly so do check back or sign up to receive updates from us at the bottom of the page.

ONLINE DIGITAL RESOURCES AND DIGITAL TV CHANNELS FOR EDUCATION

• Khan Academy: Maths, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Finance, History and More
• BBC Learning Zone Broadband: Arts and Design, Citizenship, Design & Technology, Languages, Geography, Maths, PE, RE, Science
• O2 Learn: A library of revision lessons covered a wide range of subjects uploaded by teachers in the UK
• Mr Reddy: Web Resources for Maths Teachers for KS3, GCSE and A Levels
• TES Connect Teaching Resources: Over 65000 free teaching resources
• Schools World TV: Starting with 3500 videos from the now defunct Teacher’s TV website and more
• Teachers Media: Free education video resources for professional development incl. Teacher’s TV archive
• TES Connect with Teacher’s TV: the Teacher’s TV archive section
• TeachFind: Teachers resources with archives from TeachersTV, Becta, QCDA and National Curriculum
• Open Learn: Free Learning Resources from the Open University

… more links to be available soon.

Author: Samuel J. Tan

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used  in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

A Quick 5 Steps Guide on Embedding a Video into Moodle

While there numerous of video resources for teaching and learning on the Internet, finding the absolutely best one for your lesson can sometimes be be tricky BUT once you have found it, it is useful to have this in your lesson plan in relation to the topic you are covering. So, what better place to do this than embedded it straight into your VLE.  The following steps show you How to Embed a Video into Moodle.

You may be aware of certain websites and digital TV channels that cater mainly to Education. These websites are a wonderful resource with rich media content to aid teaching and learning in classrooms. Our previous articles, Watching Videos for Homework, Flipping the Classroom and Teachers TV Resurrected in More Ways Than One included some links to these websites. You can find these together with some of our other favourite websites listed at the bottom of this article.

So how do you get them on your VLE. The easiest and quickest way is to embed the link from the source website onto a webpage on your VLE. To do this, simply use the published video link from the site or embed script, copy and paste this onto your web page and Viola! video-on-demand on your VLE.

User Level: Basic to Intermediate

Step by Step Guide: Embedding a Video into Moodle

1. For Start: Log on to Moodle, go to your course and click ‘Turn Editing On’.
2. Create a WebPage: Use the Add Resource drop down link, create a HTML page (Add a web page).
3. Browse for your video: In a separate browser window, find the video you would like to use, then copy the embed script. For this example we will use https://www.o2learn.co.uk/o2_video.php?vid=1139 (see screenshot) by copying the embed script at the bottom of the page.
4. Paste and Save: Back to your Moodle window, in the full text field, click the <> button to change to HTML editing mode and paste the embed script into there, complete the relevant fields and options then save your page.
5. Test and Tweak: open your newly created webpage to check if the video is embedded properly. You can go back to Edit Resource mode to change the size of the video frame to suit.

The same embed script can be used on any HTML page. Using the same embed script from the link above, we have included the video on this very post, see below.

Online Video Resources and Digital TV Channels for Education

Khan Academy: Maths, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Finance, History and More [click here]

BBC Learning Zone Broadband: Arts and Design, Citizenship, Design and Technology, Languages, Geography, Maths, PE, RE, Science [click here]

O2 Learn: A library of revision lessons covered a wide range of subjects uploaded by teachers in the UK [click here]

Mr Reddy: Web Resources for Maths Teachers for KS3, GCSE and A Levels [click here]

TES Connect Teaching Resources: Over 65000 free teaching resources [click here]

… for more online video resources, see our post Video Resources for Teaching and Learning.

Author: Samuel J. Tan

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used  in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

Teachers TV was finally put to rest at the end of April 2011 (see here). The coalition government had announced its decision to shut down the website way back in October 2010 but, thankfully, all is not lost. The collection of around 4000 videos and materials have now been rescued by teachers and is now available online (read about the teachers work here). This together with appointed ‘agents’ by the government, through so called non-exclusive distribution agreements means that around 3500 of those 15 minutes long video clips will continue to be available online for free on different websites.

So where we find them now…

For those who have not heard of Teachers TV, the Department of Education (in Skills) in the UK under the previous government had been funding an online training website for British school teachers for over 7 years. The website grew over the years with an increasing number of training videos and materials all aim at helping teachers in the classroom.

The new coalition government, however, pulled the plug on the project to save money. Thankfully, the content from the digital TV channel had been saved and in essence had just moved to new homes.

These new homes are to be found linked from the Department of Education website. However, only one site is ready with the content.

A quick look at the status of the websites in the middle of May showed the following status

Teach Pro Limited – www.schoolsworld.tv – coming soon

Phoenix TTV Limited – www.teachersmedia.co.uk – coming soon

TSL Education Limited – www.tes.co.uk/video – content ready

Even though not all these ‘official’ websites are ready, through the power of social networking and amazing ingenuinity of a group of teachers, the majority, if not all of these videos have successfully been ‘saved’ before TeachersTV went offline. You can follow their wonderful work here on Learn4Life.

So, breathe a sigh of relief!

Do check back for updates on the status of these websites and more.

UPDATE: Thanks to our reader, who made us aware of the existence of other similar websites, led us to TeachFind. A quick test drive on on TeachFind (see link below) shows that through clever search indexing and web caching technology, you can use the website to search and recall actual cached pages from the original teachers.tv website. A perfect snapshot in time. Not only is TeachFind a new home for Teacher’s TV, the website also included cached copies of the now defunct BECTA, QCDA and National Curriculum websites on its list with more sites to be available soon.

TeachFind – www.teachfind.com - content ready

The National Archives UK - www.nationalarchives.gov.uk – content ready

Author: Samuel J. Tan

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used  in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to embed PDF document onto your Moodle Course Area and make this available in a viewer frame, all achieved in 5 simple steps. Embedding a Portable Document Format (PDF) file onto Moodle is very similar to adding an iframe on a webpage, although the codes to achieve this look slightly different.

We start this exercise by first uploading a PDF document to your course area. Then the link of the file is copied and used on the HTML code below when creating a Web Page resource. We also take a look at the different parameters that adds functionality to the PDF viewer frame within the browser.

Typically, one would just upload and link the PDF document which then appear as links on the course area. Clicking on this link simply opens the PDF document. However, to make this look sleeker, you can embed the PDF document onto the course area, keeping the top banner, menu and overall look and feel of your course area. This also allows for additional information to be added to the page such as instructions to read certain sections or complete certain exercises.

User Level: Basic to Intermediate

Step by Step Guide: 5 Steps to Embed a PDF into Moodle as a Resource

1. For Start: Log on to Moodle, go to your course and click ‘Turn Editing On’

2. Upload your PDF: Under the Administration block, click on “Files” link then “Upload a file” button. Click on “Choose file” button then browse to and click on the PDF you wish to upload, and finally to upload this, click on “Upload this file” button.

3. Link to your PDF: Once your file is uploaded successfully, it will be listed in the Files folder. Right click on the PDF and copy the URL link. Depending on your browser, this can be “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy link address”

4. Create a Web Page Resource: Go back to your course by clicking on the course short name on the breadcrumb. Now still in Editing mode, click on “Add a resource…” drop down menu in your desired section and choose “Compose a web page”. Add the Name and Summary for this Resource. In the Full Text field, click on <> button to flip over to HTML editor mode. Paste your URL link here, then on the next line copy and paste the following line to the Compose a web page, Full Text field after the URL.

<embed width=”900″ height=”600″ src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/file.php/1/Replace-With-Your-Link.pdf#TOOLBAR=1&NAVPANES=0&SCROLLBAR=0″ type=”application/pdf” />

Now cut and paste the URL link overwriting the link in red above.

5. The End Bit: Click the Save and Display button. You can also add additional text or instruction to the same page, simple Toggle HTML Source by clicking on <> button to go back to WYSIWYG editor. You can then add your content that way.

There is More…

User Level: Intermediate

Step by Step Guide: Embed a PDF into Moodle as a Resource – Viewer Controls (Intermediate)

Now that you have completed the 5 steps above for embedding PDF document onto Moodle, try the following variables to enhance your viewer frame on the browser.

Parameters of which values you can change from “0″ to “1″ to turn them ON.

1. toolbar
2. navpane
3. scrollbar

For example, changing “toolbar=0″ to “toolbar=1″ turns ON the PDF viewer tool bar on the top of the frame.

Changing the “navpane=0″ to “navpane=1″ turns ON additional controls on the left side of the frame.

And finally, changing “scrollbar=0″ to “scrollbar=1″ turns ON the scroll bar on the right side of the frame.

You can also change the width and height of the window by changing the values measured in pixels, from 900 and 600 respectively to something bigger or smaller.

For this and many more useful tips and tutorials to make the most of your VLE, check back soon.

NOTE: This guide is written for Moodle version 1.9

Author: Samuel J. Tan

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used  in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

At the recent Moodle Moot UK (2011) I was really fortunate to be part of the #awesomegroup during the Knowledge Cafe, simply by virture of my first name starting with L! Many thanks to @LaurenShinfield who volunteered to chair our amazing session, I definitely learnt so so much.

It was also humbling to hear the experiences and expertise of @moodlefairy herself (Mary Cooch), during this Knowledge Cafe session, and also during her break-out session which I found very interesting, but more on that later.

@LaurenShinfield has shared the notes she very kindly and efficiently compiled during our session, and I am merely reorganising the information here. The complete list can be found here.

Although these pointers were a result of enhancing Moodle use, it can almost certainly be applied to any other VLE.

1. Acknowledge the limits.

Much as we would like VLEs to be all-singing, all dancing services, that would be able to spew out information, assessments, and all manner of teaching and teacher-enhancing activities, it is tremendously important to acknowledge the limits of a VLE.

While a VLE can be used to enhance and greatly encourage teaching and learning it really needs to be seen and used as a complement to the learning process. Much as it would be wonderful (or not) it simply can not replace face-to-face interaction.

2. Make a visual impact

People are generally more encouraged to use something that is visually appealing and colourful. If a VLE is made to look pretty, and navigation into and around the VLE is structured and logical, users and more likely to keep coming back.

If skinning a VLE or creating further graphical detail is not something you are able to do, it is advisable to set aside a budget for this to get it done.

3. User Buy-in – Involve your users

Niche

Users, both teachers and students, need to be able to see and to know what they can use a VLE for. A vested interest or a niche needs to be identified in order to encourage VLE use. Find out what users want to use a VLE for, show them what can be done on the VLE (NOT how to do it) if they are interested in what can be done, they will find out how to do it or come and ask you.

Roles

A very important often overlooked aspect of VLE use, is simply that not every user sees the same thing. For example, students see a different view from teachers. It is often useful for different user sets to be able to experiment and experience different roles. This can be achieved by assigning teachers as students in some courses and perhaps students could be given editing rights (teacher roles) in other courses.

4. Make Personalised Training Available

From the outset, offer personalised targeted training, whether individual or group based. This will create a starting point for users who feel overwhelmed. To support and enhance this starting point, make ‘how to’ resources available and include personalised videos based on your institution’s VLE.

5. Creative Uses for the VLE

Extending the use of the VLE beyond the conventional teaching and learning spaces allow and encourage greater opportunity for interaction. Some creative uses extend beyond learning, some examples include Support and Guidance areas, Student Unions, Students Space (showcase of student work).

6. When all else fails…Chocolates

Bribery and corruption not-with-standing, offering chocolate in return for enhanced VLE use has apparently worked!

Have you any secret weapons in the arsenal of encouraging VLE use? Do share your thoughts and experiences.

Author: Li-ling Ooi

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used  in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to embed an E-book into Moodle. When planning and creating resources on the VLE for the topic and subject you wish to cover, www.scribd.com is a good place to start apart from wikipedia.com, encarta.msn.org, bartleby.com, merriamwebster.com and britannica.com.

We used the following scribd.com document to build this tutorial.

Resource Referenced: http://www.scribd.com/doc/52586960/Royal-Weddings-Through-Time

User Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Step by Step Guide: 8 Steps to Embed an E-book into Moodle as a Resource

Embedding e-book into Moodle Web Page

We hope you enjoy this quick tutorial. Do check back for more useful hints and tips as well as quick tutorials to make the most of your VLE.

Author: Samuel J. Tan

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used  in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

Here are 5 tips to get the most of your VLE (for users of all levels):

1. Try adding the different ‘Resources’ and ‘Activities’ in your course area. You may create a test course (if you have the correct access level) or request for a ‘sandbox’ course area from your administrator to try out the diferent features on your VLE.
2. Do not be daunted by the OPTIONS. Often you find for any ‘Resources’ or ‘Activities’ you create there are many different options. Go through these options and understand as much as you can but don’t worry if you can not understand some of these. Simply accept the default values and come back to it later.
3. Hands-on learning. Creating the different ‘Resources’ and ‘Activities’ allows you to relate to how the e-learning environment can complement or replace some of the classroom teaching and learning processes. Having the hands-on experience and coming to realisation how these can improve your way of teaching is the best way to learn.
4. Start creating your courses. Now that you have tried the different features and options and understand how to use VLE better, start building the resources and activities you would use for your class. Plan how each chapter or topic can be covered through applying the different features. Map out your objectives and targets. Create an overall framework for the course, keep populating and improving the course area lesson by lesson allowing you to break down the course creation into manageable chunks.
5. Reach out to others. Don’t be afraid to ask and seek out different opinions on how others maximise the benefits of the system. These can be thought peers such as your colleagues, online forums, system administrators and sometimes even from the some of the students,

Lastly, remember to share your ways of working and improvements that you found on using the learning environement with others.

Related News & Links:

• Read the Moodle News article on “A Good Looking Moodle and 5 Basic Steps“.
• To follow the Tweets, Retweets and Mentions, click here.
• To find out more about Moodler.ME click here.

Author: Samuel J. Tan

Copyright © Xelium Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This article cannot be used in part or whole without expressed permission or license from Xelium Ltd. The author of this work and Xelium Ltd reserves all rights to the content of this website as the original creator and owner.

Yesterday’s Pre-Moot UK 2011 (18th April 2011) meet brought together Moodle Developers from around UK as well as all over the world. The Pre-Moot meet was held at the Senate House Library, University of London based on an Unconference format. For those not familiar with the term, here is a quick Wikipedia page for it ‘Unconference Definition by Wikipedia‘. The Pre-Moot Unconference had a slow start but picked up steam no sooner than the next tea break.The Unconference started with participants putting up topics and issues they would like to share and discuss  on cards and sticking these on ‘The Grid’. The Grid is a board with a collection of themes, so naturally, the cards would go under the relevant theme.

The participants were then split into Interest Groups (based on the Themes) with each holding two 30 minutes slots in the morning and another two in the afternoon. During each session, participants share and discuss any issues or topics listed on those cards. Participants who have taken the extra step of preparing for the Unconference used the session to present their work but usually the session is led by the developers themselves, throwing around ideas and sharing their experiences.

Indirectly, the Unconference created a Support Group or a sort of AA group for Moodle Developers or shall I say ‘Moodleholics’. It allowed those who worked in their own organisation to come out of their own zone and join like minded people, to connect, share and socialise. The important thing is it created a sense of camaraderie among its participants.

by Samuel J. Tan