My school and the VLE

The objective of this course activity is to collect some basic information about your school’s VLE.

Your task is to find out:

• Which VLE your school is using (e.g. Fronter, Moodle, Frog, Blackboard, etc)?
• Which company or organisation supplied the VLE and what support do they offer?
• What support is offered by your local authority or other agency?

You should keep notes of your findings so that you can reflect on them in later Activities and draw on them in discussion with others and in developing your school’s implementation plan.

The objective of this course activity is to collect some basic information about your school’s VLE usage.

Your task is to collect data on the extent to which the VLE is used. This may be best collected from the staff responsible for its management. VLEs will usually provide such staff with usage reports. Typical data that you should collect will include:

• how many staff make use of the VLE
• the extent to which students use the VLE
• the extent to which pupils/students and their parents can access the VLE and the extent to which they are/will be expected to (and actually do).

You should keep a record of your findings. This may either be the reports themselves and/or summary notes.

The objective of the activities in this part of the course is to develop your understanding of the ways in which the VLE is used in your school setting, and the plans being used for its implementation.

Set up meetings with your headteacher and, if appropriate, other members of the school leadership team to discuss their vision and plans for the implementation of the VLE. Questions to ask include:

• What plans the school has already put in place for implementation?
• How do these plans tie in with the wider school vision and Development Plan?
• How the staff training is being planned , including which members of staff have been trained and to what level?

You should keep a record of your findings, including:

• a copy of any existing implementation plan
• notes on your meetings with the headteacher/other senior leaders.

At the end of the course, in Activity 10, you will feed back to the headteacher and leadership team any proposed developments to the plan in the light of subsequent activities.

Set up meetings with other staff who have been trained to use the VLE, or those that you know from the usage reports are active users. Questions to ask include:

• the extent to which they use the VLE to support their professional activities outside the classroom (e.g. planning, record keeping, communicating with colleagues or parents)
• the extent to which they use the VLE in their teaching
• the types of activity they use it for with students
• the strengths and weaknesses in its use as they perceive them
• their reflections on their students’ attitudes to its use
• the impact it is having on students’ learning (e.g. in terms of motivation, behaviour, engagement with the curriculum, collaboration, performance, results).

You should keep a record of your findings, including:

• notes on your meetings
• any evidence that staff have provided you with about how they use the VLE or the impact it is having on them or their students’ learning.

The objectives of this course activity are to:

• summarize your findings from the other activities in this part of the course
• reflect on those findings ready to share with others.

While carrying out the other activities in this part of the course you will have collected a range of notes and data. You should now reflect on these and use them to carry out a SWOT analysis. A chart is available for this here [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .