If you thought scroll of death was bad...

... try this on for size!

How many file systems do you see?
4?
Actually there are really only three but it makes your head hurt a bit doesn't it.
What you are looking at is the file system on computer drive, the file system in Blackboard Learn and the front end navigation system that the students use.

So what you say. Its just some files in some folders... mmmmm, that is what I thought. Files that need to be constantly upgraded in both places! I inherited a system where the shiny student interface was always up-to-date and the computer drive was always up-to-date but the in between was the stuff that horror films are made of.

I should also add that these systems are accessible by multiple people and as you can imagine have the potential to get horribly messy unless some kind of system is put in place.
I am hoping that we now have a system. I am also hoping it will work. Only time will tell.

My system is thus. Working back from the student interface, all folders have the same name as do all the files inside them. So a person in the computer system would look in the same place for a document that the student would. Hence if you need to overwrite something you always no where to look. Furthermore if one person updates the file on one system... they must update it on the other!
That way everyone knows where they are.
Fortunately I have an awesome admin team who appreciates the art of good filing.


In the future wouldn't it be nice to have one system that is all joined together... what's that you say?? Equella?
Watch this space

real time... moodle on the wall

How to use a teachers page on moodle in a real time classroom... quick and dirty.
How to add a bit of techno-snap to a lesson in 15 minutes.

Imagine I am teaching from Straight Forward Advanced – Chapter 5

I need some supplementary material and I know I have a room with a projector (maybe even an IWB)

What do I do?

Step 1 - Create a warmer.

• The teachers book suggests writing 4 names on the boar... YAWN!
• I copy and paste 4 pictures into a moodle page an Bob's your uncle... you have 4 pictures on the wall of you classroom!
  
  
  
  
  

Step 2  - The next activity in the book is a snarly reading activity with some fairly tricky words in it, even for me, so I can create a glossary in Moodle which can have many functions.

1. Acts as a vocabulary box but without the need for cutting up little pieces of paper. Teachers after all should not be allowed to use scissors unsupervised.
2. Students can be involved in making the definitions – they learn while making life much easier for you. 
3. Words can be added to throughout the week so by your review session on Friday you have an awesome bank of words and you can....
4. ...create a hangman game with. Then sit back and watch your students play happily while you take a na... mark their home work. 
5. You can also share the glossaries with your colleagues (making you very popular) so you get the benefit of several classes worth of extra vocab feeding into one dynamic beast. Multiply this by every chapter of every course book and Moodle glossaries may take over the world. Use with caution.
   
   
   

Step 3 is the grammar... no one likes it but there it is!

1. Instead of copying 12 pages from murphy – come on everyone does it – you can add a link to a page from the British Council. Stick it on the wall, explain it, write over it and then do the nice little exercise at the end.
2. It is embedded in Moodle so even the British council site is all nice and branded – suits you sir!
3. You could also find some more links to on-line activities which students can do on the board or you can write your own worksheet to hand out and then put it on Moodle for next time.

Because yes there will always be a next time!

Save the environment... start e-learning

I recently went on course for hockey coaching which turned the tables on me a little. I went from being learning provider to learner and I have to admit I didn't like it all that much. They say doctors make terrible patients and I imagine the same goes for teachers being hypercritical of other training providers. Well that is my excuse and I am sticking to it!

Both trainers were obviously very good hockey coaches but evidently disliked being in a classroom, as of course did the 30 odd hockey players sitting in front of them with a folder full of paper. A combination of a bunch of sports people sitting in a room and a load of unnecessary paper got me thinking. Why do we persist in forcing trainees to fill in lots of boxes on a bit of paper while half-heartedly discussing it in groups. I will confess at this point, I hate group work and always have but as a teacher I also see that there is limited point in giving people a question, asking them to discuss it and then showing the answers. 80% of the time there is nothing to be gained from the discussion which inevitably leaves the 20% that would be great to talk about with limited time. Equally giving people a stack of info and some papers seems a little bit like a test, not to mention a total waste of classroom time. Time which you could use to practice coaching techniques, discuss the rules or, just putting it out there... playing hockey!

So what is the answer?
Clearly everyone has access to a computer with the internet because one of the course pre-requisites was an on-line safeguarding course so why not give attendees and information handbook in .pdf (so if people want the paper copy they can) and a nice little on-line quiz which they can do in their own time before the course thus freeing up a nice amount of time to focus on things which are actually better when done in a group!

My control has lost focus

I have spent quite a lot of time recently trying to work out how to make Articulate storyline do what I want and I have been making ever more complicated slides.

 

Thus far at least they seem to be working although it frustrates me that Storyline does not have a feature which allows you to put more than one data entry field into a slide without having to do through the whole performance of setting triggers outside of the field to actually select the answers. 

It is also frustrating because I am yet to work out how to tell Storyline to unselect a box if the user changes their mind. As it stands at the moment,  if the student selects no and then changes their mind to select yes both boxes 'correct' and 'incorrect' boxes will be selected forcing the slide to return with a wrong answer. 

However I am still having fun trying to make things bend to my will....

Sarajevo, Mostar, Srebrenice. Experience, Remember, Learn.

This is not anything to do with e-learning but it is about education, about remembering and about learning.

Travel broadens the mind. Or in this case opens your mind to things you knew were there but didn't fully understand. I remember the war in the Balkans, I knew it was happening, I knew bad things were happening but I didn't really grasp the magnitude of it until I went to Bosnia, saw the bullet holes, the rows of freshly dug graves and the bags of bodies that are still unidentified almost 20 years later. Having been to this beautiful country and met people who will go out of their way to pick up 4 strange foreigners because it is raining I want to try and explain it, to myself and to anyone that is interested but hasn't had the opportunity to experience the beautiful scenery, the wonderful people and the heartbreaking history that is still visible and will be for many years. 

Like any city Sarajevo his its monuments to past residents. I personally have always found a sense of beauty in graveyards, especially in places where they still exude a sense of family and togetherness. This set of old stones (Muslim graves have a stone for head and feet) to me shows a life well lived and an afterlife to be cherished. In Sarajevo however, my overwhelming feeling about its cemeteries was somewhat skewed because of the sheer number of them.

Every neighbourhood has one, and they are large. That is not to say that they aren't wonderful memorials to people that have been lost in the city but for me it was very hard to see so many and covering such a short space of time. The majority of the dates are between 1992 and 1995 when the city was under siege. 

The dates are even harder to look at on the children’s memorial where the names of young people who died during the conflict are remembered. Zuko (Suad) Adi 1994 -1995.

The city bears its scars as well as the people, much of the city centre has been rebuilt and restored to its former beauty but some buildings, or rather shells of buildings, still remain to show the damage the was done to the city, very recently, in my life time. It is also apparent in the hills surrounding the city which, from a distance, look like a hikers paradise. Tree covered mountains, spectacular views but inaccessible to anyone. The countryside was mined during the war and still is, a problem which is still claiming the lives of innocent people.

Leaving Sarajevo you can take one of the most spectacular bus/train routes imaginable to Mostar, a strikingly beautiful city with a crystal clear river running through the centre spanned by very a famous bridge. Constructed in the 16^th century and destroyed in 1993 after standing over the river for 427 years. A piece of world heritage that was destroyed forever in one mortar hit. The bridge has been rebuilt and is now a UNESCO world heritage site but it is clear that it is not the original structure.

The rest of the city also has its scars, more so than in Sarajevo presumably because of financial limitations. The scars are still displayed with a certain kind of pride to the thousands of tourists that travel through the city every year and there are still many many buildings that have been almost totally destroyed although many of them have been reclaimed, to an extent, by street art. Using the bullet holes in the walls as part of the picture I hope this is a sign that the city and the people are healing because it, like Sarajevo is a beautiful city with kind, welcoming and generally amazing people who have experienced and witnessed things that most of us can only imagine and could in no way begin to understand.

The sieges in Mostar and Sarajevo however are only part of the history. The name Srebrenice is probably familiar to many from the news broadcasts of the 90's. I know that I remember hearing it as a child but the full weight of what happened there cannot be comprehended, even a little, until you have stood at the memorial in Potocari. The memorial to the thousands of people killed there, in what was at the time a UN safe zone, and the 10's of thousands who were forced to leave during the process that became known as ethnic cleansing.

The memorial is the burial site of people who were killed there on July 11^th 1995, most of the of them Bosnian Muslim men, and were then buried in mass graves around the country, some of which are still to be found. The memorial shows the names of all the people buried there, currently that number is over 6500 and holds entire families. 

I have visited war memorials and holocaust memorials but only here have I witnessed the freshly dug graves and been around the relatives of the people buried there. Every year on July 11^th more people are laid to rest, this year over 400 victims. Almost 20 years on and people are still being identified and many more are still missing and will in all likelihood never be found. Meaning some families will never get the closure they need.

I was also given a somewhat unique opportunity for someone in my position to visit the facility where victims are given back their identities. On top of the many thousands of victims already identified and returned to their families the ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons) facility still has over a thousand remains to be identified. Many of these bodies are not complete and may never be complete leaving families with a decision to bury whatever percentage of their loved one has been found or whether to wait and hope more will be found. This is a decision no one should have to make and for many of the families in the area they are making this decision multiple times for husbands, brothers, sons, fathers.

I am still not sure I have processed in my own mind the magnitude of seeing so many fresh graves, so many grieving families, so much work still to be done but I hope by sharing my experiences that more people will take 5 minutes to think about what happened in Bosnia and maybe take a step closer to not letting this kind of thing happen again, to anyone, anywhere.