Planning / WBLE

Struggling along – 3 days to go…

Well its starting to come together, but now finding it difficult to intertwine all the different threads of the design process together and also whether to not hint at some level of apathy for certain parts of that process. I have been teaching or been taught various design processes throughout my career whether it be an architectural process for a house design or a design and technology process for a furniture project design and still come to the conclusion that sometimes things are generally a lot more fluid and personal that any rigid process can describe.

However I am quite proud of my design spiral diagram which I think sums up what has roughly happened while I was producing and developing my WBLE. Click on the thumbnail here to have a look. Funny but I  have only just realised that WordPress had this thumbnail built in function that makes life so much easier! Typical but at least I have found it now!Spiral Big

Not much else to report, I have too many different styles of usability reports and seemingly I will be told off for numbers of screenshots within my assignment. But I find it very difficult to write about visual issues without a screenshot right next to it, so for anyone including Karon reading the assignment I would think this would be of great importance. Maybe my writing is not descriptive enough. Who knows?

End of a long night……..

..well also managed to:-

*Sort out the grading system – Note it has actually amazed me how comprehensive the grading system is.

*Sorted out a workshop module where students are not only marked by a tutor, but also through self-assessment and pier assessment…that will definitely be interesting to see how it works out.

*Added Masters students as Users..just need to join them to a course

*Emailed all GCSE users that course is ready – the quickmail addon is absolutely fabulous I can tell you.

So only need to do a few things including a little introduction animation, and then testing really begins and it will be time to actually start writing the assignment, or at least getting the outline together.

At least I am in site of the first hurdle.

Nice to be chatting again..

Well it was nice to get back to FirstClass and chatting. Interesting to see other Masters participants sites including Will’s and Dan’s , both of which are looking very good probably a little more professional than mine but maybe that is due to the type of user I am designing for and obviously the type of WIBBLY / course based constructivist that I am aiming for. Did find that the more I am designing my WIBBLY and playing with new Web 2.0 tools the more frustrating it is becoming using FirstClass though. Where is the shared-bookmark feed, clips from web-pages and blog-aggregator within FirstClass to maybe make the collaborative experience more genuine? Answers on a postcard please?
Will’s ‘favicon’ inspired me to sort out that wee thing, to brighten up the browser search bar. Something I had never down before. Favicon

Still putting off the screencasting, although came across a really fun one which made me think about how smooth and professional do I want it to be, when this one both amused me and got the message across. Check it out at Alex Barnett’s Blog . He introduces you to a new tool called immedi.at which links Instant Messaging to RSS feeds. Its fab and would link into my ideas for the Moodle of a connectivist nature and interlinking of the sending of chunks of information. BUT it does work, but shall we say is a little temperamental…so whether I include it as a tool to use in the AS Applied ICT Intro course I don’t know. Could be fun to include that as one person adds a bookmark to the group del.icio.us account that it then sends a message to anyone who is online that this has been published!!!

My other stumbling block is the use of content and whether I can embed or add some .pdf documents or not. Some from ‘Educause’ that I want to use as reading seem to suggest that I can use the documents for educational purposes as long as it is explicit where the documents came from. So I’ll go for it, but there seem many pitfalls to online copyright.

Have also taken the criticism of some early visitors to my Moodle site, that it is made for high resolution large monitors. By decreasing mainly the size of the opening page graphic…..lets see if it helps, I need to find a low resolution monitor somewhere?

Okay see if this gets sent to my IM account……fingers crossed…

UPDATE – It works….just click on the ‘Monitor This’ – e.g the ROBOT image button and have a go yourself….

Feedburner and more….

Well the cleaner scuppered any chances of screencasting today..so spent my time adding widgets, counters and the like to the website.

Feedburner has been of great help to manage feeds from my del.icio.us account and blogs, and enables you to produce and paste code to show little widgets of the latest feeds to those accounts e.g.
Your ALASdivide Delicious Tags

This is for the feed that all students will collaboratively tag any websites that they think are useful for their ‘Digital Divide’ research.

Tomorrow I promise myself screencasting.

Just added a little choon to hum that has been getting me through all this work.

CSS styles again…

Well spent most of the day finally theming my Moodle, adding logos etc etc. For some reason I picked my Granny’s favourite colour ‘green’ as the main theme of the site – which I am not sure if it works but to tell you the truth I have learnt a great deal from continually messing around with the style sheets in Moodle which will enable me to be able to change things easier and quicker next time. That is the wonderful thing I can do that without effecting any of the content anytime and any place. Obviously in the long term students and teachers can also alter the theming and stylesheets maybe from a small range to feel ownership of their learning and teaching experience.

Typically it seems one part of the style sheet does not work in Internet Explorer but does in Firefox – arrgghhhh! Will try to figure that out tomorrow if I can. Have added loads of get Firefox signs to main page, but also know at my school, all computers only have Firefox enabled so most of the GCSE and AS students that will be using this course are used to the ‘better’ browser.

logoscreenshot2.jpg

screenshotlatesthomepage2.jpg
Obviously check the website to see the graphics in situ I could keep messing for another month, but its time to move on and begin to finalise the rest of the main parts of the course.

A little worrying that I can only see Will’s progress via his blog, must say am a little dissapointed at the lack of a ‘community of practice’ that has seemingly not evolved with this unit. Is this due to its practicality? OR due to the fact that alot of the students are based in Leeds for this unit and so see each other face-to-face???

Anyways, will be back to screencasting tommorrow, and hope to finish my two main screencasts by the night – on del.icio.us and bloglines. Must then add the lessons and assignments………hmmmm…have just checked my Gant chart and can safely say I am behind. Evaluation, I am hoping there will be some willing students who are not too involved in their GCSE revision to help me along.

Mindmap of content and pedagogy….

Well been working hard on this, my content mindmap. Click on the link to have a look at it on a webpage, beware its very large. It still is a work in progress but I probably need to start preparing the graphics and logos to alter the themes for Moodle very soon, and then start manipulating and producing the basic course outline. Still have not decided if I need a link webpage /resource to enter into the main Moodle site. I am including my blog as part of the WBLE as it is something I already use with students and should form part of an overall set of Learning Environments. Checked the discussions of the other group from Tuesdays group chats and was interested to hear what kept a student or user at your site. I think more than anything it depends on your user group and what the function of the environment is. For example if it is for casual visitors that then may mearn at your site, this would be very different from a site developed specifically for a group of students from a school to be part of a blended learning system? Liked Dan’s site though and for those struggling with the idea of coding their own site, it shows how good these website generators are!

SBD’s go go go…..

Well here is the first draft of my scenarios, I decided to choose real students that might participate in the course and have written it as much as possible from my knowledge of how they learn within the subject of ICT. I have chosen to write four different scenarios to try and see from four different students perspectives. I would eventually have to look at writing from other stakeholders perspectives aswell. The scenarios took on an almost exagerated caricature type quality, which I found hard to stop. I have also found it very difficult to write the scenarios without being biased by what software / tools that I think I might be going to use. And this is why these are definitely a first draft look at the problem…..especially as it has made me search for more tools that might be of better use to my clients /students.

I have attached the scenarios as .pdf so feel free to download and have a look.

Planning the GANT Chart and thoughts…

Well finally my GANT chart is complete, and it has helped with some of the development of my ideas but above all to make sure I realise I only have six weeks to go. Already with the planning it is difficult to link the pedagogy with the practical outcome. Often the practicality of playing with the environment of Moodle that I have chosen or just simply the skills I possess within Dreamweaver are stopping me short of the outcomes I hope I can produce. Hopefully as I am drawing up my scenarios I can begin to clarify a little more what I will need to work on.

Click here for my Gant Chart