TimeTabling..

Last year when I started my new post as an MIS manager, I was faced with the problem of organising a number of events at the college I worked at. The college had an intro day event for prospective students where they could attend a selection of lessons for subjects they had applied for. In addition local feeder schools were invited in on different days to try out nominated sessions (essentially it was a marketing activity).

Each event typically involved 200-300 students attending a total of 50-80 sessions taking place over 2 days. Prior to my joining the college this had been managed manually (!!) but as you would expect this posed a number of problems.

1. Whilst we wanted to provide enough sessions we didn't want to have sessions with only a couple of students in them. But allocating manually frequently resulted in hugely unbalanced sessions because students could have their subject choices met in a different order students allocated earlier were not efficiently allocated causing problems when allocating students further down the list
2. Quite often we were left with a lot of students who could not be placed in sessions because of clashes (and combinations that would work were already full).

It's difficult to explain but anyone who has attempted this kind of timetabling will be all too familiar with the problems involved. It was labour intensive and inneficient. 

I decided to code a solution in Microsoft Excel using VBA code. The code uses artificial intelligence search methods to try every possible allocation and choose the most efficient. It automatically set balances and generates a programme for each student that can then be mailmerged into a custom individual programme. The spreadsheet also generates a set of registers for each session. 

Once set up you can run the allocation again and again to find the most efficient combination of sessions to meet your needs. 

you can download a free copy of the spreadsheet here 

New Moodle Design for Ludlow College

After a long break I intend to start trying to get back into the swing of posting to this blog. Quite a bit has happened in the last few months including a new role at Ludlow Colege as the MIS manager responsible for developing systems within the college. One of my first tasks was to update the Moodle theme and add some of the slider code I've been developing.

I wanted to develop a theme that was professional and very easy on the eye whilst at the same time having a more 'magazine' like feel to the layout. Many themes developed for Moodle end up looking the same; resulting in students being a little 'switched off' I wanted content that was reasonably easy to update. I have included my standard forum slider (that makes use of the Jquery BXSlider) and adapted a new version that uses the JQuery SlideDeck. Both have been adapted so that they take their input from posts on a Moodle forum. The slide deck version also integrate fancyframe to enlarge images and a PHP image resizer that resizes the uploaded image to the forum.

 You can view the front page here

Wordle - beautiful words

Another site for making content more interesting, put simply you can paste any text you want to and the Wordle site will generate an image with the words arranged as a word cloud. Words that appear more often are shown in a bigger font. See below for an example of a Wordle made from a short passage from a Midsummers night dream:

You have complete control of fonts, colours and layout directions or you can simply click 'randomize' until you find a combination you like.

It's particularly good for collections of definitions. It isn't a 'magic bullet' but it is a useful addition to a collection of approaches for a teacher trying to make content varied and interesting.

This week I have mostly been working on..

I've been interested in the idea of including parents more in A level delivery for some time. This is largely based on the fact that students are very tight lipped about their studies to their parents. I know we are meant to follow a pedagogical approach to learning but the sad fact is that there are significant numbers of students who fail to see the cause and effect of not working now leading to them failing later. Effective parental involvement can lead to better results.

I want to enlist parents by keeping them closely informed of students progress. I've also noticed that in recent years the number of parents with email addresses is almost reaching 100%. The solution was to develop an email newsletter system that can embed individual data sets in each newsletter in graphical format. What this means in essence is that you can embed results graphs for an individual student.

Students can also see how they are progressing, it provides a good way to give students structured feedback on their progress.

An online editor allows you to insert 'merge' fields. The user can choose from a variety of email newsletter templates. Taking the concept further I have also added functionality to embed RSS feeds, Flickr Feeds and Twitter feeds. This means that current content is very easy to add.

Although still in development it's coming together nicely. Currently it uses CSV files uploaded but later it is my intention to link it in to Google spreadsheets. I was also considering adapting it as a Moodle Mod so that it could take data from the Mark Book.

The really cool thing about the charts I embed are that they are generated dynamically in PHP so you don't need to store hundreds of images on your server.

Presenting Prezi

Every so often you come across a web 2.0 site that is really special, Prezi is one such site. It lets you produce eye catching presentations that are much more interesting to look at than PowerPoint. Presentations are set on a huge canvas that you move around as you add content. You can zoom in as well as zoom out as you move between the elements of the presentation. The effect is difficult to describe but students love it.

Coca Cola Company on Prezi

The interface for creating your Prezi is one of the most intuitive that I've ever come across. It has loads of features (too many to list here). Trust me and take a look, you won't be disappointed. http://www.prezi.com

Email Newsletters Re-purposed

Because of the way Moodle themes work courses can all start to look the same. One way around this is to use email newsletter templates (there are many free available on the internet) as a header for your course. This has been very well received by our students and definitely give a more polished impression of your course.

We use the template to provide useful information about the course such as schemes of work, who the tutors are and crucially because we have very long courses, section links to different topics.

It does require a little work uploading the embedded images and updating the src attributes of the image tags to point to the uploaded images in the files area. Tip: keep all your image files for the template in a subfolder.

You can find a variety of free newsletters here

Xerte Online Toolkit - strange name, great software

Xerte is a free open source product for creating interactive learning materials. There are a couple of variations here. Xerte which is a desktop application and although immensely powerful and flexible it does require a degree of technical expertise to use. Still if you have some experience of simple scripting it shouldn't pose too much of a problem. 

The alternative is the on-line toolkit which can be installed on a web server and provides simple point and click functionality with a wide variety of different interactive pages. I promise that once set up this bit of software is an absolute joy to use.

One of the BIG pluses of this approach is that the learning materials are stored and edited on-line. This means that you don't have the hassle you have having to edit and re-upload powerpoint presentation. The other advantage is that the system has accessibility built in.

You can view an example I have created embedded below (it provides the code to do this!):

You can see a showcase example from Xerte here

Xerte Toolkits home page is here

First Mod to Moodle

I've just finished working on my first mod for Moodle. I've developed a simple slider based on bxSlider and jquery. I've integrated it with a moodle news forum so that as posts are added to the forum the slider will automatically show the new post. Any image attached to the forum post will be used as the image on the left. If no image is attached a default image is used. Content is clipped at a limit specified as a setting. Clicking anywhere on the slider will take the user to the relevant post in the forum.

The new code sits in the forum folder and the slider is displayed through the use of an iFrame. The good thing about this approach is that the iFrame code can be pasted into the HTML view of the content management interface of Moodle. You can see an example below:

This can be placed on the front page or at the top of a course. No changes were made to Moodle system files, although it does require some extra files being copied to the /mod/forum/ folder

I'll have a 'P' please Bob..

Sometime ago I wrote an educational quiz in PowerPoint based on a well known quiz in the 80's (those of us of a certain age will remember it well..). Anyway the other day I rediscovered it...It really was rather good.. You can download a copy here.

What I liked about my solution is that the questions are typed into the Notes section and then the game board was built dynamically from the first letters of the questions. When a 'cell' is cicked the question is displayed, click it again and the cell turns blue, again and it turns yellow. In this way student teams have to attempt to build a solid line of colour from edge to edge. This means that it can be easily adapted for any number of quizzes.

Cool Iris Gallery

Cooliris is a free flash based gallery that can easily be integrated into any website, content management system or virtual learning environment. What's really special about it (apart from the fact it looks and works brilliantly) is that it can be configured to read from a Flickr account. This means that gallery images can be easily managed by the user on Flickr and and new images or changes are immediately shown through the Cool Iris gallery without the need for paying a web developer to update your pages...I clearly haven't thought this through have I...