Greetings dear hearts.

The people who have spoken of the need for integration and the necessity to
step back from technical issues and think about learning and teaching are
completely right!

In introducing a VLE, the aim is to support and enhance the learning and
teaching process. It's all about PEOPLE, not about computers. We want to put
information at people's fingertips, make it easier for them to learn, make
it easier for teachers to get on with what they are good at - TEACHING - and
not spend their precious time slaving over a hot photocopier and messing
around with some of the more mundane bits of administration.

It needs to be easy for a teacher to prepare a resource... and there are 2
reasons why it has to be the TEACHER who does it: -

1. No college can afford an army of webmasters to do it for them.
2. If the teacher has done it themselves, they know precisely what is there
and how it is laid out, and so is empowered to direct the students through
it... no plaintive squeak to the web team of "Where did you put that
material?"

To accomplish this, we need both to choose VLE software that makes it easy
to put material in, and ensure that the teachers are given opportunity to
learn both how to use the VLE and how to actually prepare material to go on
it.

Thus a staff IT training programme needs to address these points, building
up both general IT skills (if you can get all teachers to ECDL level, that's
a good grounding for most of what they will need to do) and any specific
ones, for example, getting them to make simple web pages using something
like FrontPage (or even the 'save as HTML' button in Word!).

It's important to empower teachers so that they can create their own
resources... but they'll need specialist help as well. For example,
structure and content management can be quite difficult to master; so
providing a framework into which they can place their resources can be
helpful. You may wish to prepare templates which they can either type into
or cut'n'paste into, thus providing uniform resources - even giving each
subject their own template if you like, with different colours and layout so
that as students make their way through the system it's immediately obvious
where they are.

Hugs and kisses,

Megan.
ILT Champion, Stoke on Trent Sixth Form College.

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