Moving from the VLE to a ‘VLEcosystem’ using web 2.0 services.

Welcome screen for various stakeholder groups: each user has an account.

I'm a Governor and occasional ICT teacher to Years 2-6 in a small rural primary in Suffolk. Like thousands of other schools, mine has no real ICT skills and very limited budgets, but paradoxically this means that I'm incredibly fortunate: for the last five years I have been able to design and implement an ICT strategy which suits us and could suit others. In a nutshell, over that period we've moved from ICT Suite to netbooks and iPods and iPads, from MS OFfice through OpenOffice to now entirely cloud-based tools, from client-side apps to an LEA-supplied Uniservity VLE to our own, handbuilt, Google Apps-based VLEcosystem. I hope that a quick look at these screenshots will be enough to give you a flavour of the sort of approach I favour: icon-based, intuitive, functionality-based, good-looking, simple. This front end is entirely built in Google Sites: collaborative, hosted, intuitive and free. For me, the proof of a platform is whether it gets used, and in our case that is without question the case: it’s being used day-in, day-out, by non-technical people to perform real-world tasks. Shared calendars, shared documents and email, of course, but also the school newspaper (edited daily in school and from home by students), the school blogs (every class and every student has a Posterous blog), the school radio station (mp3s posted to Posterous and available as podcasts in iTunes) and the public web site (edited by a number of completely non-technical people and automatically including all the above.

Teacher area - all the things they need to get at in one place.

Our VLEcosystem now houses a mix of core Google functionality (the stuff that comes for free with a GApps for Education account), additional Google and 3rd-party tools from the Google Apps Marketplace, other web resources and Web 2.0 services.

Our mantra is 'Safe. Simple. Free.', and we stick as close to that as we can, only paying for tools if they really show some benefits, like Incerts, the cloud-based assessment/ tracking/ reporting tool we use. All the tools except one (Edmodo, and they will change) offer Single Sign-On, so the users only have to remember one login/password, and we're using this approach down to Reception. An unexpected benefit of this approach is that it represents a coherent strategy: we don't have to think too hard to see how a new piece of kit or a new service slots right in. The iPad? A lot of the Apps have email, so the kids email their work to their name and it updates their e-portfolio in a Posterous blog - without them knowing anything about how that happens. Maintenance is extremely lightweight, at least as far as the network side of things is concerned - Google and the other services we use do that for us. I haven't had to answer a single 'it's broken' call in a year except when our broadband goes down - our ADSL connection is truly appalling but that doesn’t matter: the bandwidth usage of Google Docs is surprisingly low.

Student area: create, communicate, collaborate in lots of different ways.

If you followed the recent Google Teacher Academy at all, you'll have seen people waxing lyrical about the teaching and learning possibilities of this stuff, so I know I don't have to sell you on that. What I hadn't expected, however, was the effort that Google are putting into answering the objections from recalcitrant staff, fascist network administrators and resistant LEA personnel. there's a mass of stuff out there now to support the arguments, and your PLNs can supply more at the drop of a hat. In my admittedly biased opinion, the commercial VLE is the wrong answer to a question that's no longer relevant. Could do better, and I think this is how... The Google Teacher Academy, and the reaction I got from the educators in that room - 50 people chosen from thousands of applicants practicing in all branches of education all over the world - showed me that maybe other schools would be interested to know how to they could do something along the same lines as we’ve done. I’m busy thinking how to structure this: it needs to be commercially-viable, but I’m not looking to fleece anybody and I know how tough budgets are for small schools. Very happy to answer any questions you may have at any time. If I can be of any assistance to you in your own endeavours, I would love to help. All the best, Mark Allen@edinthecloudsmark.allen@edintheclouds.com