Having read
Derek's blog post this morning I was eager to reply and thought I had best come and share my response/ideas on my own blog too.
His post was sparked off by a recent (14 Jan 09) Ofsted
report and he also provided a link to this nice little
video report (2min 4osec).
The basic finding in the report was that
"Despite expectations, the use of Virtual Learning Environments across schools and colleges has been slow to take off". They also found
that
"none of the schools had a VLE that covered every subject area comprehensively". (This is the problem I am facing at my school as I ponder my public presentations to parents in order to encourage parental involvement in their son's learning).
Personally I believe there is value in offering students a VLE to support their learning. Not to act as a substitute for attending face-to-face classes but as an additional form of reinforcing content and a "safety net" to help students who have missed work due to sports exchanges, illness or those who are disorganised and have lost their class material. I also believe parents value the easy access to relevant and up-to-date class material as a means of supporting their son/daughters' learning at home.
While often the initial practice for teachers is to make available such things as class notes, worked examples and lab write-ups (static learning resources), with experience and confidence teachers will hopefully develop and provide more dynamic and interactive opportunities such as forums, polls, self-marking quizzes etc. I believe this is best encouraged by providing "just in time" professional development when staff are ready and not in the early days of the VLE introduction.
I've talked to colleagues from a range of schools and the general consensus is the VLE in their schools has not been adopted by many teachers. Most commonly a few teachers have grabbed the opportunity and embraced it whole-heartedly while the remaining staff have ignored it. What I think the government should consider is the AMOUNT OF TIME it takes to create a VLE. The amount of non-contact time a teacher has during their day is thought to be better spent on the day-to-day tasks required to be an effective teacher face-to-face and leaves little time to provide a "replica" of their work and additional interactive tasks which students may or may not use to reinforce their learning on the schools VLE.
While there are many reasons VLE's are not adopted as readily the "officials" may like, I believe TIME is a major factor! Particularly when NZQA are increasing the amount of internally assessed NCEA achievement standards which requires teachers to: 1) Write/modify the assessment task, 2) Mark the assessments, 3) Internally moderate the assessment. I would much rather invest my time preparing, developing and enhancing a VLE for my students than spending that time conducting the internal assessment.
Perhaps those of us who have embraced the VLE concept and developed engaging tasks which foster creativity could be provided with an external assessor to carry-out the NZQA internal assessments to help ease the work-load burden placed on the 21st-century teacher these days.
Derek also mentioned that the New Zealand Ministry of Education has convened a reference group. I heard the list of people who made up this group read VERY quickly at ULearn08' but have not managed to locate this group or any of their work. The only name I remembered was Kelvin Maine, Katikati school, whom I wrote to but seemed he was dealing with more of the hardware side of the matter. I am very interested to read their guidelines and practical solutions. I thought (ideally) there would be an element of consultation with NZ teachers who are using a VLE or perhaps a forum where people could contribute but it seems this is not the case.
Here is one for New Zealand teachers, a FREE eportfolio tool - My Portfolio - FREE for NZ schools over 2009. Before jumping in "boots and all" it would be worth finding out what it would cost to use My Portfolio in 2010 and beyond. I have not found that bit out yet... need to find the small print.
