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)

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.


 

Looking for Learning Interest Space

The Looking for Learning Interest Space is coming along well. This site is aimed at teaching staff and pupils with areas for small clusters of schools to upload/share information as well as areas to be updated by the LA.

 

Home page

 

 

They wanted areas for each of the 13 clusters and then teacher/pupil areas for each cluster, definitely a challenge! Instead of creating a silly amount of Interest Spaces there is one for teachers and another for pupils, and then created a page per cluster.

 

Cluster Groups:

 

To make sure only people from a particular cluster can access their page, a membership group for each cluster was created and permissions were set on each page to allow only the appropriate group to access the page. It seems to work well, members of the Coleshill Cluster can only get to their page

 

Coleshill Pupil cluster page:

Content is currently being uploaded by the schools using Colshill as a pilot, which will be presented to a room full of teachers in May.