Twynham School Learning Gateway 2007-10. Serialisation on SharePoint in Education.
Firstly, I hope you dont mind indulging me this morning but a little context is needed.
Twynham School is about to reach its three year anniversary of working on e-learning in education with a Learning Platform. Lots of things were already happening when I arrived in September 2006 on the e-learning front: the school had SharePoint for staff and student gateways; podcasting was very well developed especially in languages; streaming media was in place; a wide range of web technologies were being trialled through our Leading Edge work. In October 2006 one particularly innovative Psychology teacher pioneered a ‘Gateway’ as he called it for his 6th Formers to use as a communication tool and resource area. Mr Brown was even innovating with a Psychology blog before I knew what blogging was!
All of this was the precursor to our first whole school work with a Learning Platform which began on March 22nd 2007 when we launched our Revision Gateway. Within a year the tech guys working on this development had produced a 30 page guide to our work which simply became know as ‘The PDF” in internal circles. This led to our excellent (at the time!) but now outdated showcase site know as supporting learning. In the last two years a lot of development has taken place and as I looked back at ‘The PDF’ I realised it was time for a serious update!
As a result I have put together an e-book called ‘Twynham School Learning Gateway 2007-10′ which is currently 28 pages and 5 chapters long. By the time it is finished it should be around 35-40 pages and 8-10 chapters long and will be made available both through this blog and our new showcase site as a complete e-book on Monday March 22nd. During the next 3 weeks I will be blogging 2-4 pages of the e-book a day as a serialisation here on SharePoint in Education.
What the e-book is and is not.
The main aim of the book is to give an overview of the development of our Learning Gateway over the last three years. It is not intended to give a detailed account of how and why we did everything- that is the purpose of this blog and the many presentations we give at events. A version with all the detail in would be over 100 pages and is perhaps a proposition for another time. The e-book is also not very text heavy but contains over 50 screenshots so far and will only be about 5,000 words when finished. Hopefully the main idea is to share our practice and maybe even inspire?! Well lets not hope for too much…. Chapter 1 will start today.
An open letter to Samsung re: Samsung N510 issue. My mobile is switched on.
Dear Samsung
thank you for getting back to our supplier regarding the issue with your faulty Samsung N510’s within 1 working hours of me sending you the first open letter. This is indeed a very speedy response and you saved me the cost of a stamp which I am sure will please our school finance officer who is currently doing her frantic end of year sums. My nan did after all say, ‘Michael, look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.’
Our supplier has informed me that you will be sending an engineer to our site to repair the 12 faulty netbooks and inspect the remaining stock for defects. This is excellent news and I am sure it will help to restore the respect we have both for yourselves as a company and your netbooks. We hope to be able to write positive news to the 12,322 people who have so far read the first open letter and will doubtless be keen to see how this story ends.
One point of concern is we have not yet had direct contact from you to confirm this despite our supplier providing you with all my contact details. I have just checked my mobile and it is off silent and awaiting the xylophone sound which should herald good news. It would of course be an excellent story to write of how you visited in half term and resolved all our issues so that no further disruption to learning took place. It would also ensure that I do not receive any more emails like the one I received from a teacher we shall call Mr P who is understandably upset with the current context. I have displayed the email below for your perusal:
Hi Mike or Sylvia,
(it is disappointing that he does not know my name after 4 years at the school)
Not sure who to send this to but I’m afraid I have a complaint about the netbooks.
I was recently given room 16 with the netbooks due to another year group needing a computer suite. This would be fine if we actually had a full set of netbooks but there were only 17 due to the problem with the hinges. I had the same issue two weeks earlier with only 20 netbooks and was told it was being dealt with as a matter of urgency.
Surely we cannot continue with this? When will Samsung deal with the problem?
Many thanks
Mr P*
* names have been changed to protect the innocent.
I look forward to your swift resolution of this issue.
Best wishes
Mike Herrity (mobile is on)
An open letter to Samsung re: Samsung N510. Lessons from the Prius.
Dear Samsung
As you will know we have recently become customers of yours through our purchase of netbooks, specifically the Samsung N510. Since October we have purchased two sets of these Samsung N510 netbooks with three years warranty. My rationale for purchasing your netbooks is well founded given your reputation in this category but not without challenges. Our school has only ever purchased Dell machines in the last ten years due to the reputation they have established in the school as a provider of high quality, powerful and durable machines. Persuading budget holders to switch to Samsung was very difficult but your reputation in the netbook category gave me great confidence.
Despite this I now find myself with an unravelling netbook deployment strategy in which 20% of the machines we have purchased are currently unusable and have been so for up to 4 weeks. This has caused significant challenges for teachers who can no longer provide 1-1 machines to students. Whilst I appreciate that problems can occur and do not advocate the use of social media to constantly complain about companies the initial lack of action and the recent nature of your response to our issue leaves me compelled to take action.
Within 10 weeks of rolling out your Samsung N510 netbooks one of our IT support staff noticed a machine with a split hinge. Given the context of the school with very limited behavioural issues and co-operative students it seemed highly unlikely that this was caused by a student misusing the machine. Over the following 2 weeks we have had 6 more Samsung N510 netbooks also with broken hinges. Having reported the first machine broken we were told this was not covered by the warranty and we would have to pay to repair the machine. We have contested this judgement and referred this to our supplier.
We now have 12 Samsung N510 netbooks with hinge problems in total with the same fault and your recent response to our staff via the supplier has led to this letter. Despite our claims that the Samsung N510 has a design flaw or issue with build quality we have today been told that you have had no other issues identified with the machine from other customers. I find this an incredulous response and inappropriate in the context of the body of knowledge currently available on the Internet. I would therefore like to support your enquiry with supplementary material.
Could I ask you to take a moment and look at one of the many search engines available online as an evidence base for this enquiry? I have listed a number which you may want to consider.
Given that we have a hinge problem with the Samsung N510 I started my search with the phrase Samsung N510 hinge problem. You will notice that Google has already kindly made a suggestion of the enquiry by the time ‘Samsung N510 h’ is entered into the search box. The short url for this search is http://bit.ly/9fRope
From here you will find 16,200 search items returned and whilst I have not looked at each page the first three give a strong suggestion that there is a problem with the design or build of your Samsung N510 Netbooks. As a visual illustration please see below.
Our Smasung N510 hinge problem is identical to the one shown in the clip above and whilst for a short time the hinge can be clipped back over a very short period of time they become permenantly broken.
Samsung my issue with this incident is not that you have a problem with a machine which has impacted on us significantly. It is that your response via our supplier suggests that nobody else has identified this as an issue and it is our fault. This seems highly unlikely and has left us considering the return of all our netbooks and switching to another supplier. Whilst I have waited for a suitable response from you I have not shared this problem with a wider audience as I would like to give you the opportunity to resolve this problem to our satisfaction. However 4 weeks since our first return and the recent response above is simply not acceptable.
I will leave you with the comments of a colleague on twitter who is considering a major investment in netbooks for their school. Being already aware of this issue with the Samsung N510 he said ‘Its stopping me looking at either for our scheme. 120 laptops a year heading to Dell I think. #Vostro V13 http://bit.ly/bfIoWV’. It would be great to hear from you to confirm that you accept there is an issue with the Samsung N510 and will resolve this to our satisfaction. Recent media coverage of the Toyata recalls should surely confirm that whilst problems will always arise with products it is the way in which the company responds to these problems which dictates how we percieve them.
You can contact me by email mike.herrity@twynhamschool.com if you would like to discuss this further.
yours sincerely
Mike Herrity
SharePoint Products and Solutions: Muhimbi
One of my favourite SharePoint companies at the moment is Muhimbi. I came across them during 2009 via twitter and found them to be one of those companies who have created something special- really useful products which meet a clear need. Since then they have extended their product range further and have a number of high quality products, three of which I wanted to share with you today. The great news is the first one is free!
SharePoint Infuser
Have you ever added a custom content to a SharePoint site and then had to add it to every singe site within the site collection manually? SharePoint Infuser overcomes this by automatically adding any custom content to all pages in the site collection. What I like about the team at Muhimbi is their site also contains a blog with great examples of how you might use their product. Cant imagine how you would use SharePoint Infuser? The blog shows you two great examples including adding search as you type to every SharePoint page and cleaning up a new SharePoint site by removing unesessary elements of the page.
PDF converter for SharePoint
My favourite tool as a heavy end user and a real time saver. PDF converter for SharePoint does exactly what its name suggests and converts common document types to PDF. The include the main Microsoft suite of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio and InfoPath. End users in education will use this facility endless times within the year and the ease of use shown below shows just how much time you will save.
SharePoint URL Shortener
Have you ever sent an email to staff or students with that ridiculously long address hoping that you copy it correctly? SharePoint URL Shortener overcomes this, again with real ease. A one click function allows you to create a short URL similar to services like TinyURL but within your company network
Email formsgenerated by 123ContactForm
Mike
Snow days and the effective Learning Platform. Staff connecting with the Learning Gateway.
Does the Learning Gateway support staff working when the school is closed.
Of course the Learning Gateways are used by both students and staff and so one of the other questions is did staff find it helpful on the snow day? The Gateway contains a separate area for all our staff including support staff to get key notices, look at their timetable, search for a student and access relevant data about them and whole classes and access key school documents. As well as this they have staff only subject areas for department documents and resources. Walking around the school site on Friday a number of staff commented on using the time during a snow day to update a learning area or adding schemes of work. This is supported by the statistics below with the snow day the second bar from the end.
Twynham Learning Gateway Staff visitor numbers
Again I have taken the two week trend which shows around 170-190 staff (120 teachers plus support staff) a day access the staff section of the Gateway during the 9 school days shown above. On the snow day this was impressively high with over 150 staff choosing to login and complete work online.
Twynham School Staff Gateway
From the usage analysis during the recent snow day it seems clear that the TwynhamLearning Gateways are an embedded aspect of both student and staff use. Both groups clearly use it to support both learning and teaching beyond the classroom. Its impact was further made clear to a member of staff at The Year 14 presentation evening held on Wednesday 6thJanuary. A student now studying Sociology at LSE asked if she could have access to the Learning Gateways for her first year at University. When asked what the reason for this was she said she missed the quality and ease of availability of resources that she could get from Twynham School’s Learning Gateway.
Snow days and the effective Learning Platform. What happens when you further engage students?
Filed under: SharePoint, Twynham School, User Adoption
What happens when you further engage students in aspects of the Learning Gateway?
One interesting thing about the timing of the snow day is the fact that it followed a major launch the day before. On Wednesday 6thJanuary we launched our new Online Options system to the whole of year 9 in assembly. We have had an Online Options system for three years at TwynhamSchool but a new build aimed at further engaging students with a face lift and new videos was quietly made live on Monday 4th January. After the launch on Wednesday morning we would expect a surge in numbers as students can independently look at all possible GCSE subjects from both within school and at home. The statistics for the first week of spring term are below.
Statistics for the launch week of Online Options and the new site
The statistics show that students started to find the site on Monday and Tuesday when returning to school. On Wednesday and Friday when the launch plus PSHE lessons being in the IT rooms to allow students to look at the site saw 247 and 269 students visiting. What is astonishing is the highest day for visitors during the week was Thursday when 271 students visited the Online Options site even though the school was closed. The feedback on the new site has been overwhelming positive and the evidence shows that when something is both well created and seen as valuable by students they will use it heavily. With just 250 students in year 9 the vast majority visited the site on the snow day with some students from other year groups taking an inquisitive look. Looking at the number of pages viewed some students viewed as many as 280+ pages on the new site.
Student comment video on the French Options page
Uploading a video to SharePoint 2007 in seconds
A quick post to show you my favourite feature on some of our new SharePoint solutions. The video below shows a system we have built which allows you to upload a video to a SharePoint page in seconds.
Snow days and the effective Learning Platform. Students connecting with the Learning Gateway
Filed under: SharePoint, Twynham School, User Adoption
Closure day 7th January 2010. How did students connect with the Learning Gateway
On Thursday 7th January when the school closed the notice on the website reminded parents and students that the Learning Gateway was available to support students with their study during the closure day. Whilst we do not expect students to use just the Learning Gateway as they had homework and textbooks available the Learning Gateway hosts a rich range of learning resources to support students. With A-level and GCSE students completing modular exams the following week having both GCSE and A-level Revision Gateways well resourced should be a fantastic resource.
Twynham Learning Gateway Student visitor numbers
The statistics above again show the last 5 days of autumn term and first 5 days of spring term. On 7 of the 9 days when the school was open around 900 students logged into the Learning Gateways, mainly from within the school. On the last day of term before Christmas student logins are below 500 as the school closed before lunchtime. The highest day of logins was Wednesday 6thJanuary when a large amount of training on the Online Options system was taking place. The overall trend is 900 logins per day. On the snow day (second bar from the right) when no school computers were available 774 students logged into the Learning Gateways from home. This is an astonishing 86% of the average logins on a normal school day. What is clear is that students see the Learning Gateway as an integral part of their learning.
Maths Revision Gateway helps students to prepare for the GCSE exams in January
