Did you miss me?

It's been frantically busy and I haven't had time to do much other than run from meeting to teaching to .......
However, I have been to an inspirational conference, run by ULCC, called The Future of Technology in Education.  The format was 3 speakers talking for 20 minutes each followed by a panel of the 3 speakers answering questions.  This happened 3 times and the audience stayed put, didn't have to make any choices and there was just enough time for questions, followed by discussion as you queued for coffee, lunch, tea or a drink after the event, paid for by Microsoft.  Aside from the fact that none of the speakers were women (come on, folks, I can think of 5 women who would love to speak on the subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition), the conversations on and off the podium were truly energising.  If you didn't like a speaker, you could tweet or check your emails.

Back to Moodle.  Staff love the PDP (personal development plan = eILP) in Moodle and are very keen to have a go.  We are slowly drawing the information from the MIS system but this hasn't gone as smoothly or as quickly as we thought originally.  Lesson 1:  A key player in getting the systems to talk  only works 3 days a week and is allowed to take a holiday so this needs to be factored in.  It does seem to me that this key role probably needs full time cover but I'm not a senior manager.  Lesson 2:  The administrator needs to be up to speed and available, as well as trained.  We're advertising for a web developer who will take this role and the advert went out on Friday.  At the moment, I'm the administrator.  Thanks to Chris Miles' excellent staff development for OCVC booklet - How to Use Moodle (thanks, Chris), I'm learning how to add tutors to courses so they can see their students PDPs.  It's been an interesting experiment putting course codes and tutors together.

Introducing this has made us re-examine all of our systems which is probably a good thing. I think we were warned that this might be the case.  So Lesson 3 - there is NO replacement for project planning though I'm not sure that we're very good at this in FE.

I have now created a Moodle course for staff and added some people who are coming for PDP training tomorrow.  Fingers are crossed.

PS - I still don't love Moodle.  When will I learn to love Moodle?  I got an iPhone (giving my Nokia 95 which I loved to a needy son) at the same time as we started with Moodle.  I now have learned to love my iPhone but I haven't got there yet with Moodle.  I guess we don't know each other well enough yet.


I love Inspiration.  Truly, deeply and madly.