As you start reflecting on your school’s use of Ultranet in 2011, you should firstly be able to identify whether you feel it has been a successful year or not. Whether your answer be positive or negative, it’s never too late to go back to basics and re-identify the benefits of using an LMS and how it fits with your vision for eLearning and wider school initiatives.

To help with your reflection, we’ve put together a few questions to guide you in your thinking and hope that this exercise will provide you with a clearer picture of what changes need to be made in order for 2012 to be your best year yet. Depending on how you feel this year has gone, we’ve provided two sets of reflective questions:

If you’ve had a good year…

• What is happening across the school in current classroom practice regarding the use of Ultranet?
• How many positive outcomes achieved through the use of Ultranet can you identify?
• Does the school have a shared vision for eLearning which supports and underpins the use of Ultranet?
• To what extent is Ultranet becoming a core resource within the school? How will this look next year?
• What needs to be continued; what needs to be done differently to embed the system more deeply?

And not such a good year…

• What are the links between the school’s strategic objectives for the year and the use of Ultranet?
• What are the challenges you need to address next year in order to make progress?
• Have you been able to establish models of effective practice within the school?
• How can you implement a variety of ongoing different support strategies that suit your staff?
• Is there accountability for making steady progress towards the achievement of the agreed objectives?

Wherever you are in your LMS implementation journey, remember that it is a continuum and will take time to get to transformative practice. Take forward steps that are right for your school and set about bringing the whole school community together in this online space.

One aspect of the Media Gallery that we get a lot of questions about is the use of videos, especially in terms of optimising them for the web. Although Ultranet’s Media Gallery does have a file compression/conversion processor built in to it, it obviously can only work if the source video was compact enough to get uploaded in the first place!

So to help with this commonly asked question, we’ve written up a new FAQ article in our Online Support Portal.

It covers the basics in terms of what software might be good to use for optimising your videos, and also some general tips on what key aspects of a video influence its overall file-size.

Go have a read, and see if it helps you out!

Here are the snippet outlines of what we’ll be presenting:

As you can see, we’ve aimed to include topics that will interest those unfamiliar with Ultranet, whilst adding in extra value for those wishing to extend their Ultranet further.

For those that would like a timetable of the presentation roster, a downloadable version is available here.

We look forward to seeing you all there. Don’t forget that we’re happy to take any questions or just catch up for a chat whilst we’re down in Rotorua, so don’t be shy—come by and say ‘Hi’!

Ultranet is flourishing in the region, with 57 schools using it to date. This BatchGeo map gives you an idea of where they all are:

Five schools presented aspects of their implementation journey or how they use their site:

• Adrian from The Cathedral Grammar School outlined how vital the LMS was during the February earthquake, not only as a communication tool but as a way for learning to continue as students were displaced. He also talked about his experiences of the interoperability between PC School and Ultranet, and benefits of using the Parent Portal.
  
• Cade & Nick from Christchurch East School shared with us how their goal for developing an online environment for learning ties in with their key strategic goal of engaging the whole school community through the use of digital technologies. Since starting with Ultranet at the beginning of this year, Christchurch East have come far and we’re sure one of the keys to their success is encouraging team based self-review against their implementation targets—to enable barriers to be identified and subsequently strategies to be put in place to address these.
  
• Carl from Lincoln High School highlighted the difficulties of implementing a tool like this in a school as large as Lincoln High. One of the professional learning opportunities offered this year is focusing on a specific Year 9 class and the 5 teachers involved with this class—learnings from this should enable and encourage a wider rollout.
  
• Anne from Villa Maria School showed us some of the activities happening within the LMS at their school, including the library area where they are encouraging students to create book reviews. This, along with other ideas such as online profiles for student monitors, is encouraging students to become involved.
  
• Craig from Christchurch South Intermediate explained how Ultranet was their ‘one-stop shop’ for information within the school and community. He described the different ways Ultranet’s features have been picked up and used to support learning and day-to-day school activities.
  

Hopefully those that attended got as much out of the afternoon as we did, and this has encouraged us to provide more opportunities like this around the country. We’ll be sharing some videos from the meeting soon, so watch this space!

This year we have four Ultranet related breakouts at ULearn—each quite different so as to provide something for everyone. We look forward to seeing you there!

Enhancing a Learning Community with Technology (Breakout 2)

Stuart Armistead & Geoff Booth, Stanley Avenue School

This session will cover the journey of the creation of a shared vision of the Stanley Avenue Lifelong Learner. It will then outline the actions we are taking to bring this vision to life, including the twist of emerging technologies. These emerging technologies include Ultranet LMS, Net-books, Mobile Devices and apps from the Android Market. The use of these devices has been aligned with the school’s charter goals of creating students ‘in charge’ of their learning, and enhancing communication between home and school.

Are we there yet? The LMS journey (Breakout 3)

Joanne Thom & Tim Berends, Ultranet team

With the myriad tools available to educators, and an ever-changing learning landscape, today’s classroom teacher may feel overwhelmed. Many schools have made the decision to support their teachers by introducing an LMS (Learning Management System). And so begins a journey. However, just as with any successful journey, there are fundamental questions to ask, and preparations to be made. A road map is required so that your travellers do not lose their way.

This presentation will look at supporting LMS implementation in secondary schools from a facilitator’s perspective. We will discuss the different approaches made, the challenges encountered, and the strategies used by a range of schools we have worked with as facilitators. We will also ask participants to think critically about their own schools, and their own teaching practices, to help them shape effective road maps for an e-learning journey.

We’re on to a GOOD THING (Breakout 3)

Craig Robinson, Christchurch South Intermediate

As a school we want to develop in our students a passion for learning. We want them to embrace challenge, build independence and celebrate diversity and our LMS has become a key contributor to achieving this. It may be the enhanced sense of community generated by the social learning network; it may be the rich feedback that students will receive from their peers and parents in their e-portfolios; it may be the rich engaging 21st century web 2.0 resources in the online classrooms that ignite a passion in our students; it may be our website that helps keep our community informed and feeling a part of our school. Whatever aspect of an LMS that you look at, all we know is that we are onto a good thing and we are excited by that.

Learning in the driving seat, a Tauranga Moana Cluster Road Trip: off-road/on-line! (Breakout 3)

Sandy Bornholdt and the Tauranga Moana Cluster

From the onset the Tauranga Moana Cluster had a strong vision to establish an online professional learning community to bring the cluster together and to provide rigour to the face-to-face professional learning community. The premise for establishing this so early on in the journey was so that the cluster would be able to use the online learning community to ‘add value’ to the concepts around ‘new professionalism’, and blended learning, as well as explore ways to link teacher / student learning, family and whanau communities together through cluster initiatives.

“On the road to e-Learning, make sure that Learning is in the driving seat, and Technology is in the passenger seat with the map. Learning decides the destination, Technology helps you get there.” – Ian Fyfe

The LMS, Ultranet, was chosen by all the cluster schools as the online vehicle to support the cluster vision due to its ability to provide multiple pathways for developing theory into practice; for the development of reflective practice, for modelling blended learning approaches, and to develop collaborative learning opportunities. One of the key successes so far is that teachers have been able to transfer their PD/PL directly into their classroom practice.

The schools in the cluster will present a snapshot of how they are individualising and linking cluster initiatives with their own school visions and action plans. Find out about how online social networking is being used: to promote the principles of Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, to develop student voice and grow reflective practice. Find out how virtual classrooms are being used to explore the principles of blended learning, to develop key competencies and unpack literacy progressions.

Whilst this blog was on the drawing board, it got me thinking about the definition of a blog, and what the Ultranet blog would contain.  When asking a few customers what they would like to see here, the responses were as expected – product news, new educational research, sharing stories from Ultranet schools, etc.  One comment… “keep it about the product please, as too many vendor blogs veer off into something completely unrelated”… was a little surprising, but it brought it home – whilst we’ll aim to include information and learnings from other parts of the education spectrum, we’ll always endeavour to bring it back to an LMS context.

The blogging component of Ultranet is an integrated feature within uSpace (our social learning network) and is available for each student or teacher with an Ultranet account.  This blog is internal only, allowing users to publish content for all or selected buddies and teachers without the associated risks and management of publishing online globally.  Asking students to blog regularly has many worthy learning objectives – writers and responders are greatly encouraged to develop their thinking, analytical and communication skills.  The bloggers’ knowledge of the authentic audience means that students will work harder on their writing than when the teacher is the only reader.  By creating, polishing and publishing a blog post, students are:

• expressing their creativity, both in their writing style & content and use of multimedia
• collaborating with peers by taking on board comments by others to alter and improve a piece of writing
• improving their ability to communicate effectively and make sure they are coming across in the intended way
• connecting with others outside their immediate peer group
• improving their critical thinking skills by carefully considering how they present their ideas and opinions

How do you use blogging in your classroom/school?  Is it to showcase the great learning that is happening from day to day, or to extend the students’ literacy and thinking skills?  Let us know!

Kat

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media.

]]> http://www.ultranet.net.nz/blog_post/pedagogy/?p=657/feed 0 http://www.ultranet.net.nz/blog_post/news/?p=685 http://www.ultranet.net.nz/blog_post/news/?p=685#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:43:15 +0000 uadmin http://www.ultranet.net.nz/wp/?p=685 After having to tackle a few last-minute hiccups with SMS-LMS Interoperability, we’re proud to announce that Ultranet 2.3.4 is finished and is being deployed to schools at this moment. The full list of changes can be found in this announcement document, but in summary the main highlights are:

• A completely redesigned Media Gallery module, focusing on giving more space and presentability to your photos and videos, plus adding in support for audio files.
• A brand new page module called the Categories module, which provides a much better way of organising your menus and sub pages if you have a densely populated website or virtual classroom.
• Enhanced support and options for SMS-LMS Interoperability, Single Sign-On (SSO) and Live@edu.
• Dozens of other tweaks and new features to make running Ultranet better, such as integration with Google Analytics (for checking site hits and statistics).

We’re looking forward to getting this out to all our schools as soon as possible. If you’re currently running Ultranet 2.3.3 and haven’t heard from us already, expect an email notification soon advising of your upgrade date and details.

In the meantime, feel free to shoot through to us any queries you may have, and if you get stuck with version 2.3.4, don’t forget to check out the new tutorials in the Support Portal.

One of our focuses over the next year is building stronger connection with and between our Ultranet schools, and the blog is our first step in establishing better communication lines with our customers. We intend to use the blog to not just keep you all informed about happenings with us, but also share our thoughts and findings on effective online learning and excellent uses we have seen across our schools.

There’s much more to come and we’ve got a lot of other plans brewing both for Ultranet and our online presence, so stay tuned and do let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions!