Moving from the VLE to a ‘VLEcosystem’ using web 2.0 services.

Welcome screen for various stakeholder groups: each user has an account.

I'm a Governor and occasional ICT teacher to Years 2-6 in a small rural primary in Suffolk. Like thousands of other schools, mine has no real ICT skills and very limited budgets, but paradoxically this means that I'm incredibly fortunate: for the last five years I have been able to design and implement an ICT strategy which suits us and could suit others. In a nutshell, over that period we've moved from ICT Suite to netbooks and iPods and iPads, from MS OFfice through OpenOffice to now entirely cloud-based tools, from client-side apps to an LA-supplied VLE to our own, handbuilt, Google Apps-based VLEcosystem. I hope that a quick look at these screenshots will be enough to give you a flavour of the sort of approach I favour: icon-based, intuitive, functionality-based, good-looking, simple. This front end is entirely built in Google Sites: collaborative, hosted, intuitive and free. For me, the proof of a platform is whether it gets used, and in our case that is without question the case: it’s being used day-in, day-out, by non-technical people to perform real-world tasks. Shared calendars, shared documents and email, of course, but also the school newspaper (edited daily in school and from home by students), the school blogs (every class and every student has a Posterous blog), the school radio station (mp3s posted to Posterous and available as podcasts in iTunes) and the public web site (edited by a number of completely non-technical people and automatically including all the above.

Teacher area - all the things they need to get at in one place.

Our VLEcosystem now houses a mix of core Google functionality (the stuff that comes for free with a GApps for Education account), additional Google and 3rd-party tools from the Google Apps Marketplace, other web resources and Web 2.0 services. It could just as easily be built using Microsoft’s Live@Edu, the ZoHo suite of cloud-based apps or a number of other tools. It’s not the tools so much as the culture that matters: we’re not training students to use MS Word, we’re training them to know how to connect, communicate and collaborate in the online world that is their territory.

Our mantra is 'Safe. Simple. Free.', and we stick as close to that as we can, only paying for tools if they really show some benefits, like Incerts, the cloud-based assessment/ tracking/ reporting tool we use. All the tools except one (Edmodo, and they will soon introduce this) offer Single Sign-On, so the users only have to remember one login/password, and we're using this approach down to Reception. An unexpected benefit of this approach is that it represents a coherent strategy: we don't have to think too hard to see how a new piece of kit or a new service slots right in. The iPad? A lot of the Apps have email, so the kids email their work to their name and it updates their e-portfolio in a Posterous blog - without them knowing anything about how that happens.

Student area: create, communicate, collaborate in lots of different ways.

Maintenance is extremely lightweight, at least as far as the network side of things is concerned - Google and the other services we use do that for us. I haven't had to answer a single 'it's broken' call in a year except when our broadband goes down - our ADSL connection is truly appalling but that doesn’t matter: the bandwidth usage of Google Docs is surprisingly low. If you followed the recent Google Teacher Academy at all, you'll have seen people waxing lyrical about the teaching and learning possibilities of this stuff, so I know I don't have to sell you on that. What I hadn't expected, however, was the effort that Google are putting into answering the objections people face when moving to the cloud: from recalcitrant staff, over-protective network administrators and well-intentioned but outmoded LEA thinking. There's a mass of stuff out there now to support the arguments for such a move, and PLNs (Professional Learning Networks on social webs such as Twitter) can supply more at the drop of a hat. The Google Teacher Academy, the reaction I got from the educators in that room - 50 people chosen from thousands of applicants practicing in all branches of education all over the world - and the follow-up I’ve had since, showed me that many other schools would be interested to know how to they could do something along the same lines as we’ve done. I know how tough budgets are for small schools, and don’t want cost to be a reason for them not making the move, but this needs to a commercially-viable activity. I don’t think that’ll be a problem, given the savings that can be attributed to a move to the cloud.

I'm not quite there yet on the precise nature of the offering, but it will be some mix of the following:

● An inspiration session to get people fired up about the possibilities

● A starter pack of guidelines, templates, cribsheets, tips and tricks to help schools get through the process with as little hassle as possible. Not just the setting up, but the day-in, day-out use of the system for non technical staff, some of whom only feel comfortable with a laminated 'How To...' sheet somewhere close by.

● A set of policies and other document templates to protect the school

● Remote assistance (all of this stuff can be created/edited/modified from absolutely anywhere)

● A 'trusted friend' service , offering advice, recommendations and reviews of new tools, technologies and techniques as they become available (and they do, constantly!)

The commercial VLE is simply the wrong answer to a question that's been overtaken by events. Could do better, and I think this is how... Mark Allen@edinthecloudsmark.allen@edintheclouds.com August 2010