The Educated Kiwi
Prof Dev
Ultra Fast Broadband and NZ Education
Aug 16th
After attending the Learning without Limits roadshow hosted by Marg McLeod (Change Manager, Broadband In Schools, Ministry of Education) and Douglas Harre (Senior ICT Consultant, Ministry of Education) a few points struck me…….
Why strive to provide Ultra Fast Broadband in NZ Schools? While I totally agree with the following points made at the meeting:
•Online world now integral to students’ lives
•Increasing evidence that learning in online environments can significantly enhance engagement + lift achievement.
•Particularly effective for students who don’t respond to traditional teaching methods.
•Students can collaborate and learn anytime, anywhere and from anyone.
•In other words – learning without limits
I do believe we need to carefully identify how we are intending to use this resource and, just as importantly, how we are going to pay for it!!
The issue is that since ‘Tomorrows schools’ was introduced in the 1980′s we have all become ‘self managing’ and while that has allowed each community and school to make its own decision on how they do their “Core business”, I am increasingly concerned on how that is impacting ICT costs and ICT for Learning in schools.
While all schools understand their own community best, often there is nobody in the school that understands ICT infrastructures and how they relate to the successful implementation of learning in the school. Consequently, this job is left to the IT Technician or some classroom teacher with an interest or some ‘spare’ time. This often results in schools spending large amounts of $$$ to the vendor with the flashiest solution rather than the one that is best fit for both the school and the staff who will need to use it. Talking to schools, they are continually pelted with sales promotions for IWB’s, Software solutions, LMs’s, E-Portfolio solution, Phone solutions, wireless access etc etc etc ….and now its all the companies trying to sign schools up to fibre as fast as possible before the overall fibre Tender is announced in October.
I believe the most important aspect of the meeting last week was the Ministry basically asking for a mandate from schools to look at tendering for the ongoing cost of Fibre access to the school PLUS the data used. While this would come out of our bulk grants, the pricing they would be able to get for 2300+ schools would have to be better than we can get individually!! Our meeting unanimously ‘passed’ for this to happen so if we are willing to do this then perhaps the climate is right to put back into place some Educational IT specialists with geographic ‘regions of responsibility’ who are not advisors but individuals employed by the Ministry (maybe from ‘tagged staffing’) with the responsibility for liaising between the schools and vendors and who have the responsibility of ‘ticking off’ major IT purchases for ALL schools in the area. This would allow them to organise regional tenders for all the items that schools are presently trying to buy ….and due to ‘economy of scale’ the deals the schools would get would be a major financial win.
Then the next trick would be to set up the same sort of regional positions to provide ongoing IT professional development leadership ……but that’s a whole other post in the making!!
Just for those of you who were wondering what’s available presently via the National Education Network …if you are lucky enough to be on it :
Moodle …the hidden cost of Ownership
May 13th
The Hidden cost of Moodle use is more than other LMS providers in the New Zealand market ……….YEAH RIGHT!!
Recently the Ministry MLE roadshow visited Tauranga and I had some calls from local teachers who attended asking about the hidden cost of running Moodle in a school as it was indicated that running Moodle could be more expensive than one of the commercial vendors (eg Knowledgenet or Ultranet). I decided to sit down and work out :
1. How much has it cost our college to run it
2. How much does commercial support cost
so………
Costs for us to run it at Katikati College, Roll 950.
Hardware -well we started using it 6 years ago on a rebuilt old Pentium box which we then moved last year to generic server that runs Moodle and our static website with raided 300GB drives and 4GB RAM (as a virtual machine ..so we can easily move/backup it) …hardware cost : $3500
Software – runs on Ubuntu Server (free) , Moodle …well free
Time to set it up: Well initial set up took Richard and I maybe an hour the first time (including server install)
Time to maintain: Richard would be lucky if he spends 2 hours per month …and most of that’s adding new modules he likes the look of or adding functionality.
Time to train staff: Hmm …the big one …well that’s been huge but its just been seen as part of the PD we would provide for any new system we bring into our college that adds value….so actual cost $0
Commercial Support
So if you don’t feel happy to do this yourself I found a number of companies that actually specialise in Moodle installation, support , training and hosting (no pesky servers onsite). Try Catalyst (Ministry development partner) or Totali ….just 2 of many companies that offer cost effective solutions for Moodle.
What do we need to compare this to?
Well Knowledgenet has its pricing on its website
For Katikati College:
Install cost : $6600+GST
Monthly Cost : $336.67 +GST
So to be fair there is no hardware cost at all but it would cost our college $11000.00 the first year then $4400 per year after that!! …..sorry I just don’t see the added value!! In fact recently at the KAMAR conference Richard stated that for the install cost alone he would maintain a Moodle installation for life!! (feel free to email him!!).
Sure I’ve heard the comment that Moodle is not as ‘easy to use’ as other LMS’s ..I really dispute that …it all depends on the level of commitment to Professional Development your school is willing to put into implementing a Learning Management System ..and isn’t that the same for any ‘new’ initiative in a school ?
Finally for all you doubters out there have a look at this http://docs.moodle.org/en/Top_10_Moodle_Myths
Thought it really sums it up as I think just because Moodle has no company actively marketing it in NZ we in the education sector does not make it any less relevant or applicable?
Finally Moodle has over 20 000 registered installations worldwide ..all in areas with multiple LMS’s available …can that many people really be wrong?
#lats09
Feb 25th
Well so far Kelvin has made it to Learning @ School. I will be there Tomorrow for our Breakout in Session 6 on Moodle. Our group will be given a logon (this is their firstinitialsurname and firstname as password) to the Tek Moodle site so they can have a play around and add courses, work with blocks and plugins and generally see how you can use moodle in your school. We will also be looking at how easy it is to put moodle into your school and customise it.
Also feel free to come and see us about any of the other ideas we have been involved in from phpmotion (school youtube) to the wiimote IWB and pens.
Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students
Oct 25th
Being a long weekend I have finished a few books and one of the ones I should have blogged about a while ago is “Doing School”. I brought this book from Amazon after having listened to the author on itunesU. The basic premise of the book is that the author followed five successful students around for a year and reports back on how they got through the academic stresses of that year.
I won’t review it here as there is plenty of reviews on the amazon page linked to below but I found it really made me think about what I wanted for education. That I am not happy to continue to teach like we have done for the past fifty years and that if we always do as we have always done we will always get what we always got, which really is no form of progress.
iLearn and Issuu.com
Aug 16th
TUAW linked to iLearn today which looks an interesting publication. Most interesting though was the method it is published on Issuu.com. There are a large number of e zines here but all online rather than the zinio redaer I used to have on my tablet PC. Which I see offers all kinds of magazines for download. Hmm might be a way of saving paper on all those pcworlds that wind up in the office propping up desks.
Time4Innovation Conference
Jun 4th
This years Time4 conference is now in its second week so pop along for a look at some of the content and of course our presentation over the BBQ.
Learning to change
May 11th
I always love finding new videos that just say how I feel so thanks to Rich White I found this one.
Okay twas good
Oct 2nd
So we have been attending the exe workshop at Auckland Grammar today. I guess we had initial skepticism as to the value of the tool but I’m now happily creating quizzes and integrating rich content into Moodle effortlessly. While it can look tricky at first once you have got your head around the importing and which file type to use it is very simple.
Professional Development on the go
Aug 16th
For the last six months I have been a podcast addict. It started by downloading BBC radio shows which reminded me of home and now I download at least 10 podcasts per week. The best podcasts are those which are made by professionals, unlike our amateur offerings (have to start somewhere), and my particular favorites are from the TWIT network.
This Week In Tech puts out a number of podcasts all hosted by Leo Laporte, they are entertaining and informative and the 1hr 20mins I spend commuting are also spent learning. This is the answer to the question of how do we keep up? (Who uses Dreamweaver?) Content ranges from in depth security on ‘Security Now‘ to parenting in the digital age on ‘Jumping Monkeys‘. All these podcasts are found on www.twit.tv and many more can be found in the iTunes store free of charge.
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