Our resident Totara expert Ben Wagner explains how using the LMS in schools can help improve your staff’s training and CPD.
For those that haven’t heard of it, Totara (pronounced “To-Tra”) is a workplace-focused LMS used by organisations around the world for compliance training and continual professional development (CPD). It’s based on another open source LMS, with additional extensions on top to add the feature set required in a modern workplace environment. The idea behind the system is to reduce barriers to training and ensure that learning can take place at any time, anywhere, ensuring that staff can keep on top of their training.
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There are a huge range of risks online for students, staff and schools when using the Internet. Fortunately there is a wide range of (generally) free online resources available to help us understand the risks, implement policies to mitigate them, and teach people to make sensible decisions online.

We’ve highlighted 6 resources that everyone working within education and with children online should be aware of, in order to prepare for using the internet and understanding what to do when coming across any potentially harmful content.
Childnet are a non-profit organisation who work to ensure the internet is a safe and enjoyable place for children. They produce a great range of free resources to help staff and students learn more about risks and how to understand and manage these in school www.childnet.com.

KidSMART is part of Childnet and provides useful resources such as lesson plans, leaflets, posters, activity days and interactive games for teaching eSafety as well as information for parents www.kidsmart.org.uk.
SWGFL are a another not for profit charity trust and a recognised leader in e-safety, not just in the South West. Policy templates, checklists and a wide range of learning resources for both staff and students are available for free www.swgfl.org.uk.
ICT4Collaboration are specialists in providing technology services to educational organisations and are part of the Yorkshire and Humberside Grid for Learning. They provide local ICT training events all across Yorkshire as well as useful online resources www.ict4c.co.uk.
IWF is the Internet Watch Foundation. They are the UK Hotline for reporting criminal content online, including child sexual abuse content and criminally obscene adult content. If you have content of this nature reported to you it is important that you do not investigate or try to access it. Just go to the IWF website at www.iwf.org.uk and report it. The process is anonymous and confidential.
CEOP, The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, part of the UK Government’s National Crime Agency, is an organisation consisting of police officers who work to prosecute online child sex offenders, including those who produce, distribute and view online child abuse material. CEOP operate a similar online reporting tool for incidents such as grooming or people acting inappropriately towards children online. This can be found at www.ceop.police.uk.
Related Content
Webanywhere eSafety – Visit our dedicated eSafety pages to find out more about the issue and how to prevent any online issues.

On May 21st Webanywhere awarded Bush Hill Park primary school with our first ever Flagship School status as a reflection of their superb website and embracement of e-learning and technology within the classroom.

The standard of e-learning at Bush Hill Park has been marked as a huge success in the UK, with their site embracing modern, responsive design that works just as well on mobile, tablets and laptops as on any standard PC. Their use of the Blog, Learn and Messages app within School Jotter also reflects a school that truly believes in an e-learning future, and with a large stock of shock proof iPads they have the hardware to back up the rhetoric.
Bush Hill Park’s Computing Teacher & Subject Leader Mr Fateh Singh accepted the award in a ceremony hosted by the school. When asked about how he felt about receiving the honour he told Webanywhere “It’s been a great success to get to where we wanted to be. We love the website, we love the design, we love working with Webanywhere.”

The award is the first of its kind to be handed out, with Bush Hill Park being the first to achieve the standard of excellence Webanywhere is hoping to bring to schools across the country. With more nominees in the pipeline however, it won’t be long before another one of the Flagship School plaques finds it’s way at another one of these exceptional schools – it might even be your school next!
To see how the event went, check out our mini-documentary on Bush Hill Park and the future of e-learning:

If you’re a Webanywhere customer and you think you’ve fully embraced e-learning and are utlising technology within your school, feel free to contact us at events@webanywhere.co.uk and apply to be a flagship school.
Related Webpages
School Jotter – Find out about the online platform that Bush Hill Park Primary School use to create and manage their website and e-learning facilities

This week it is Staff Blog week here at Webanywhere, so each day we will be sharing with you a new blog post from one of our employees. Today it’s Keith Taynton talking about when he taught English as a Foreign Language teacher in Japan and Sweden and witnessed the impact that technology can have on student engagement.

I taught English for several years in Japan where, despite its status as a highly developed technological society, technology use in schools is surprisingly low. Most schools only use computers to teach a computing curriculum. I never saw a school using a virtual learning environment like School Jotter, and in this respect, the UK is much more advanced.

This post is about how I introduced a learning platform into my English class as a Foreign Language teacher in Japan and observed student engagement and learning outcomes skyrocket.
I had a contact in a school in Sweden and we decided to use the learning platform website to connect our junior high school students (aged 12-13) together for them to practice English, a second language for everyone, in a practical, real world way. The platform was styled as a poster upon which multimedia elements could be pasted. For example, students could record a short video introducing themselves, add pictures and text boxes and decorate it with clipart and so forth.
Being able to practice the four skills of language (reading, writing, speaking and listening) in one environment for a real purpose thoroughly engaged all of my students, even the ones who perceived themselves as weak at English. The motivation and novelty of the project helped them to focus on applying their learning and the reward was more than just a score – it showed them that they were not alone in their struggles to learn English and that it was a very useful thing to learn because it opened doors to the outside world that monolinguals do not have.
In short, the website gave both sets of students exciting opportunities to reach out and apply their academic studies in a useful way. Foreign languages are a fairly obvious candidate for technology enhanced learning, but with a little imagination this could be applied to many other disciplines. Imagine studying music and being able to connect with schools in other countries to hear what their music sounds like, the instruments they use and even co-composing music. Geography and history could be brought to life by sharing stories with peers who live in foreign countries, enriching both sides by breaking down stereotypes and boundaries.
All these are possible with the technology available today. You’re limited only by your imagination.
Keith Taynton

Related Webanywhere pages

Read some of our case studies to see how we’ve engaged other teachers, students and parents using technology in the classroom.
EdTech15 is an upcoming education technology conference based in Leeds, featuring talks from influential leaders in the education technology field, visit the website to find out more.

 

“A VLE would take too much time”

“We’ve never used one before so we don’t need one”

“My staff aren’t so confident with ICT so it’s not for us”

Do these statements about Virtual Learning Environments sound familiar? I’ve heard each of them countless times over the course of my teacher training, subsequent years as a teacher and especially as I’ve delved into specialising in their usage.

It is very easy to label a VLE in the same way you would some unnecessary paperwork or a new fad dreamt up by a politician.

What if a VLE was labelled the same was as any other resource in the school resource cupboard? It becomes much more valuable and less scary when staff in school start to realise that a VLE is simply a tool that can be brought out when the occasion suits, which doesn’t have to keep chugging along behind everything you do, keeping everyone back at school an extra 30 minutes a day (even as ‘someone who knows’ about VLE’s, I can think of a hundred things I’d be better off doing as a teacher than being sat behind a computer updating a VLE on my own at 5:30).

The weighing scales in the resource cupboard; do you use them every day? Every maths lesson? Even the counting blocks have their time and place. A VLE is no different. In exactly the same way that you decided to use a physical resource, a VLE can be picked up and dropped into the curriculum as and when it fits you as a teacher and your children as learners.

Perhaps you’re onto Report Writing this half term. It would be great to compare the difference in format between newspaper articles and website articles, and then have the pupils write their own on an online Portfolio. They can even then peer assess the articles right next to professionally written articles at the touch of a button. Then, say, next topic, you are studying Shape Poetry. It would be fantastic to LEAVE THE VLE OUT COMPLETELY! Shape Poetry can be so beautifully written on huge pieces of A3 paper and coloured more creatively than a computer can handle.

Therein lies the secret of VLEs. They are brilliant when you use them as any other tool in your cupboard. Learn their advantages and disadvantages. What advantage will a specific function give to your class and your lesson? That Wiki tool will be brilliant for the collaborative writing part of the next topic.

After all, would you really shoehorn the weighing scales and counting blocks into taking your registers? Teaching Shape Poetry? You could, but you’ll hear “That could take too much time”, “We’ve never done that before so we don’t need to”, “My staff aren’t confident in doing that so it’s not for us”.

Related Webanywhere Pages

Here at Webanywhere we developed School Jotter a VLE which is developed by educators, for educators.

Mobilegeddon is here. In February earlier this year, Google announced that any sites that aren’t mobile-friendly will find their search rank plummet from April 21st, making it extremely difficult to find your site if it isn’t readable on mobile. It comes as very little surprise to anyone keeping an eye on website traffic over the past few years, nearly 60% of all internet browsing is now done from a mobile or tablet, which is why Google is now making it a top priority. This is something that schools need to fix if they want their site to remain in the top hits in Google.

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Our friends over at Early Childhood Education Degrees recently published a great infographic on how technology hardware is being used in schools, and we wanted to share their fantastic work with you. Click through to see the full infographic, with some excellent stats on how schools are engaging with new technologies:
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One of the biggest topics in e-learning at the moment is “gamification”, but there are a few misconceptions about what exactly this is, how you can implement it and how it can help students to learn. We’ll be covering these below, but in its essence, it’s taking concepts from video games and applying them to learning.

What gamification isn’t

Some educators see the word “game” in the title and baulk, having memories of substandard and outdated education software with more focus on entertainment than teaching. Likewise pupils might be sceptical of approaches to insert educational concepts into what’s traditionally seen as a “hometime” activity. This isn’t gamification though. While there’s certainly merit to a synergy of education and entertainment, gamification instead refers to methods of incentivising more traditional approaches, turning tasks into “games”.

What gamification is

Video games generally work on ideas of work/reward relationships – by putting in the work, you get a reward, for example defeating an opponent leads to the player gaining a piece of treasure, or completing a level and receiving an achievement. These can then be compared with others’ results, adding in elements of competition. This contrasts with learning environments, where aside from the long-term educational benefits, students generally have relatively little to gain in the short-term. By introducing achievement points & light-hearted competition, you let students track their own progress.

How you can implement it

The easiest and most efficient way to apply game-based principles to your teaching is through use of a VLE or other online environment. An open-source VLE has the ability to award badges which can display achievements and track progress. These can then be shared and compared with others, with rewards (both digital and physical) given to high achievers.
By a similar token, our own Merits system (free to School Jotter users) uses the concept of Merits as a currency for students, which can be spent either on customising their avatar or purchasing physical goods. This applies the rewards concept to learning and behaviour.

What this means for you

Gamification means more engaged students, who spend less time passively learning and more time actively discovering new information, for a proper flipped classroom experience. By incentivising hard work we appeal not just to students’ desires to better themselves but to show that they’ve bettered themselves. Engage your students, reward hard work and improve your results – gamified learning is a fantastic way to teach.

With the recent hacking of Sowerby School’s website, we’ve had a few customers contacting us concerned that the same could happen to them. We want to reassure all of our customers, whether they use School Jotter or any other of our products, that your security is our primary concern. The vulnerability through which Sowerby’s website was hacked is not present in any of our software, so you can rest assured that your content is as safe as it can be.
That said, there are certain precautions that we recommend all users should take. While a lot of these are common sense, users are often vulnerable to “social engineering” attacks, and we want to make sure you’re as safe as possible. We sat down with Webanywhere security and development expert Arthur Howie who had a few tips for us.

1. Never tell your password to ANYONE

Your login password should be a private string of characters that only you know. Any person with whom a password is shared is a potential vulnerability in the system. Our technical support will never ask for your password.

2. Don’t use the same password for multiple things

For convenience’s sake, it might be tempting to use the same password on your email accounts as on your school website’s login. This is very bad practice and means that if someone unscrupulous gets access to one of your passwords, all of your accounts are potentially compromised.

3. Make sure your password is complex but memorable

For example, don’t use “password1” – this is not good practice at all and is very vulnerable to “dictionary” attacks, where a hacker might try lots of common passwords. Your password should be a mixture of upper and lower case characters as well as non-alphanumeric ones if possible (ie #!£$%& etc). This will make you much less vulnerable to these attacks. It’s good practice to change it every few weeks as well. A great way to make a password secure while still being easy to remember is to simply make them long phrases.

4. Don’t use an easily guessable password

It can be tempting to use the name of a pet or loved one as a password as these are usually uncommon words, but you really shouldn’t. This is information that is easily searchable on the web and will be one of the first things an attacker tries.

5. Make sure your “secret question” is something only you know

In order to reset your password you’ll often need to answer a “secret question”, the answer to which you’ve previously set. This might be something such as “What school did you attend” or “Who is your favourite singer”. This information can often be gleaned from social media accounts or other sources, leaving you vulnerable, so make sure it’s not publicly available information – in 2008 Sarah Palin’s email was hacked in this way.

6. Ensure your antivirus is up to date

On any computer where you’re going to be entering personal information, make sure you’ve installed antivirus software – this is often available for free through your institution or even your personal bank. Without one, software could be installed without your consent and potentially capture sensitive login information.

7. Be careful what you click on

NEVER click on a link you’re unsure of. An email that purports to come from your bank or the government might simply be trying to “phish” your data. Antivirus software can sometimes prevent against this by scanning links ahead of time, but it’s no substitute for proper practice.
All that’s needed to keep yourself and your school safe online is to take the necessary precautions. We’re confident in our security at Webanywhere, and we want you to feel safe as well. If you have any concerns or questions regarding security or anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 0113 3200 750, or email helpdesk@webanywhere.co.uk.