DX2 update going live

The Warwickshire Learning Platform is currently undergoing a (long awaited) update to DX2 and should be live by the end of Feb. Most users won’t notice much of a difference, those who manage their schools memberships and passwords will find they have much more management and control over their schools accounts.
Just the one account please
Users will be able to belong to different establishments and have different roles. A parent who works for the County Council but is also a school governor may currently have three We-Learn accounts. These will be able to be merged into one account with access to all required areas with one log-in.
More groups please
There will be an addition of Governor, Teaching Assistant and Other to your school membership groups. This makes it easier to assign permissions, for example if you have governor pages or Interest Space you can now add the governor group rather than individual user names. You can assign people to these groups manually within the platform.
Managing accounts
Administrators will be able manually create new membership accounts directly within the Learning Platform. You will also be able to edit account details for existing users within their school, such as a users role and access levels. If a student moves school or is attending lessons at another school you can request a transfer to a new school.
There are many other features being introduced in the update, we’ll know more once it is live and report back our findings.

Update:
DX2 is now live. One issue uncovered that Admin users can no longer download "All" Usernames from their establishment. They can still however select to download specific groups, e.g. "TeachingStaff" or "Students". Fix expected over Easter.

Create your v-Me

The most important thing to remember when updating your profile, is to do your V-Me! If your character is stuck wearing pyjamas, you need to go to “My Space > My Profile > Change v-Me” after logging in and dress yourself up.

You can choose different pets…

Sports…

Hats…

And more to make your v-Me just how you want it.

Log in here and update your v-Me now (We-Learn required)

Warwickshire Teachers’ Forum on the Learning Platform

We have launched a new Warwickshire Teachers’ Forum on the Learning Platform, where school staff can contribute to discussions about Academies, Pensions, Changes in Education or add their own topics. The Learning Platform is an ideal place to host this forum, with it being a secure managed site for We-Learn users.

The Forum is pretty simple, with just three pages and a blog all navigated to via the top banner, you’ll find any news, events, documents and links all within the site. All We-Learn school staff in Warwickshire are invited to take part and contribute their thoughts, it’s also a chance to let Teaching Association Leaders, Senior Managers within the Authority and Senior Local Authority Officers know what you are thinking.

Visit the Warwickshire Teachers’ Online Forum here, remember you will need your We-Learn log in to access the site.

Integrated Disability Service on the Warwickshire Learning Platform

We have been hard at work creating areas on the Learning Platform with the Integrated Disability Service, allowing Warwickshire school staff, pupils and parents to access resources, documents, videos, news and updates as well as add to discussion boards. 

The Integrated Disability Service is a partnership, bringing together Warwickshire County Council, the NHS and Connexions. One contact opens the door to a range of services to support children and young people with additional needs and their families at home, school and in other settings.

We have developed areas for the Hearing and Deafness team, Visual Impairment, Physical Disability, Complex Needs, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Transitions and Young Carers. Each area has specific staff who have been trained up on how to update their pages and content.

 
The Visual Impairment team have information about equipment, top tips and lots of resources including links to programmes to assist users who are visually impaired.

Moving into Adulthood have developed interactive activities which have been embedded in the site to teach pupils the meaning of transition.

The Autism area has lots of resources such as the ASD Toolkit DVD and videos of teachers talking about their experiences.

The Young Carers secure membership area includes news, events and photographs of events, we will be inviting carers to blog about their experiences in the form of a diary to share their experiences with others who may be in similar situations.

The site has recently been opened up and we are excited about using these pages to assist teachers, pupils and parents find resources and information.

Visit the Interest Space here http://bit.ly/WCCIDS (We-Learn log on is required)

Embedding Cooliris picture walls

We’ve been recently looking at ways of displaying photographs and images in the Learning Platform, we’ve not been overly convinced with the new BETA web parts to display photos.

I stumbled across a post about how to configure a Cooliris picture wall using a Learning Platform picture library as the source, getting around the e-safety issues around hosting school photographs on external websites like Flickr or Picasa.

By tweaking the Picture Library RSS feed and uploading the Cooliris flash file, we’ve successfully created a picture wall using images within the Learning Platform. The good thing about this is that the picture wall can be placed on a different Interest Space to display the photos.

In the Looking for Learning Interest Space, we have teacher community pages where teachers can upload their photographs. The picture wall has been placed on the Student community pages allowing them to see the uploaded images.

We’ve also used these on our Wedgnock Gallery Interest Space, where we showcase schools artwork that is on show at our Professional Development Centre.

Walls were built using the online tool found here http://www.cooliris.com/yoursite/express/builder/

Cooliris discussion on the KLP site (log on required) is here

Using ICE to aid transition

A number of sites have been created in the Warwickshire Learning Community to aid Year 6/7 transition. These “Moving to …” Interest Spaces have been set up with the help of Secondary Schools to give future students an insight into their new school.

One of the main features of these sites is the virtual tour, allowing visitors to see a map of the school and click on the rooms.

We have used Microsoft ICE to stitch together 360 degree photographs of rooms, exporting the images as a Deep Zoom Tileset and then uploading them into our Learning Platform. 

The images can be scrolled left and right and zoomed in or out.
The sites give students a real feel for the school they will be attending in the new school year.

Yr 6 pupils can also ask questions in the site which to be answered by the Secondary School Staff.

They can see what a typical day consists of

And check out what their new school uniform.

These Interest Spaces have been developed by the schools with the help of their E-learning advisers. Workshops were held where school staff could learn how to develop their site and incorporate the interactive school map and ICE images.

Warwickshire CYPF homepage

Due to the last Warwickshire CYPF homepage being removed by a guest user, there is now a new home page for the Warwickshire CYPF establishment (locked so can't be removed again!)

Inspired by Bing, using a table with backgrounds from the Enjoy Warwickshire website and just typing the text over it.

Plan is to keep it simple and rotate the backgrounds every so often.