Securing success via FROG

Have been having a big think about lots of things today, was at the regional SSAT Heads steering group and we were talking about organisational efficiency, this, combined with an email I received from our examinations officer really got me focused this afternoon on how exams information could get integrated into FROG from SIM's. Like many schools we use SIM's to manage all of our student examination entries. We receive statements of entry from the examination boards that are paper based and get distributed to students for checking. Of course, they promptly loose them, having not transferred information to their diaries. Wouldn't it be great for the system to generate an automated examinations timetable, populate their own diary with this information and maybe help them start to put together a revision schedule. Our KS4 guidance leader is trialling the use of http://www.myrevisionplan.co.uk/with our Y11 students this year. This system helps students create a unique and personalised revision programme based on their examination entries. The concept is a good one, but there are issues with data interchange and management. It would be great to have this kind of functionality within FROG - hmmmm, is this an idea for a widget I wonder? For me, getting students to take ownership of information, identify problems and seek support is part of them developing as independent life-long learners. Putting students in control and encouraging ownership by providing them with access to this type of information would be a big leap forward.

This approach could also be extended to enhance parental engagement. Through the parent portal it would be fantastic for them to see their children's external examination dates inserted into their own personalised diary - identifying both the student and the examination, date, AM/PM. There could also be an examinations tab for parents to visit to get the overview of all the entries for their child. As result are know for various modules (some courses are modular), results could be populated.

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Forum Functionality

Frog wardens are doing a fantastic job at policing the forums - they are having a much more positive impact than if they were being policed by staff. The forums have now been live for 3 weeks and level of student interest AND responsibility is high. To date only had one issue to follow up on, was notified by FROG WARDEN (Y9 student).

However there is some key functionality missing in the forums - ability to delete a whole thread as well as an individual post.

What has become evident is that these issues getting dealt with very quickly, often within minutes of posting by our FROG wardens means that poor conduct does not become a catalyst for further poor conduct.

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Working with FROG on Parental Engagement

Had a very interesting meeting with Jonathan and Craig at FROG today using Adobe Connect. Although FROG have access to what I am assuming is a sandboxed SIM's implementation back up in Halifax they're interesting in seeing real implementations of SIM's. Meeting raised a number of key issues - do all schools use same SIM's codes for registration, in the same way. The biggest challenge by far is the very different way that schools will have implemented Assessment Manager to cater for their own data needs. There is no national schema of naming conventions for aspects held within assessment manager which creates some interesting challenges to solve. However, marksheets are used to aggregate data for departments. These could be used as a staging post for getting data to FROG, interesting.....

From my perspective it was a really interesting meeting as it has shaped FROG's development angles for me and has helped me to gain an understanding into a little bit more as to where things may lead in the future and the developers route that may be taken to get there.

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Student use of forums

One of the immediate gains and short term wins of our implementation of FROG as our learning platform is the use of forums. The school has set up a number of forums to engage students from day one and start developing a culture of collaboration, not just between staff and students, but more powerfully between students. Forums have been put in place for all subjects - creating HW help forums, forums for student voice as well as one for fund raising, FROG. Students have suggested a number of additional forums they would like. Interestingly enough these have all revolved around school related activities. We know have one for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme as well as Computers and Technology. I see the forums as a powerful 'hook' to keep students engaged whilst staff and departments rapidly deploy there own resources onto FROG, managing the momentum of FROG and keep it going is crucial over the next 8 weeks.

The forums are also proving to be a useful conduit for communicating developments and ideas from students back to me as there is a FROG suggestion forum - the posts in here are really interesting and very insightful, showing that students have a really clear grasp of the power of the technology and how they would like to see it being used.

The way that forums are implemented works in a fool proof way, but the more we use them the more potential we can see within them to enhance engagement through ICT. Developmental points for FROG for forums:

• The most important - once you have added to a thread you get emailed when someone replies. This is crucial particularly for staff. For example, our governors are starting to use the forums really well. Unless they check the forums regularly they do not get prompted when a new post is made. Likewise if a student submits a new topic for homework request, they need to get notified as and when someone responds.
• Embed URL's into posts, rich html formatting of posts, including smilies, images
• Can see number of posts made by user - number of posts could equate to credits that have some value? food for thought.
• Can quote a previous reply as part of post
• Nested forums / sub-forums

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Musings about SIM's

Lots of recent conversations that I have had with all sorts of people (Headteachers, county advisors, SIM's administrators) have really opened up a can of worms regarding SIM's - namely assessment manager, and attendance and how data can be defined and presented very differently from one school to the next.

This may not seem like an issue for schools, but it is certainly an issue for developers. SIM's databases have grown in a very dynamic, organic way - often reflecting the people in the school and the way they work, with systems changing when personnel change. When SIM's was conceived I don't think Capita even thought that they would be opening access to the database to third parties. It is this lack of vision and standardisation with MIS data that is going to be an interesting challenge that developers are going to have to contend with - how can we get a solution that fits all schools when schools have very different looking back end databases in the way that they work.

From a third party developer's perspective I can see the problems (we'll call them challenges) that they are going to have to contend with over the next few months as products become available to present data (hopefully information!) to various audiences, including parents. Let's start with a few of the problems that I can see straight away:

• All schools use assessment manager in different ways to store attainment data on students. There is no set naming schema for aspects (fields) in SIM's that schools have been encouraged to adhere to. The only pre-defined data structure, with naming conventions in SIM's is the common transfer dataset - used by primary schools to export data from their systems which then gets aggregates by LA's and then sent out to respective secondary schools. With developments in FROG this is going to be an interesting challenge. In effect schools are going to need a degree of control as to how field mapping is undertaken so that the right data is mapped to fields in the FROG database. This is a rather simplistic analogy but it will do for the time being.
• Attendance codes - do all schools use exactly the same codes in exactly the same way?
• Volume of data - providers really need to develop live links back to the database so that large volumes of data do not need to sit on their own systems. This needs to be transparent to the user in terms of access speed. I can see FROG being at an advantage here as the majority of FROG servers are installed locally and have local access to the SIM's server. It is going to be interesting to see how web hosted solutions deal with this, they are going to need access to SIM's data over the web - this creates it's own set of speed/QoS/security issues.
• Some schools set up different aspects for reporting rather than date stamping one field. E.g. reporting a subject three times a year, aspect may be coded Art7.1,Art7.2,Art7.3. The nomenclature used will vary considerably from one school to another. This is going to cause problems when aggregating data for the purposes of presenting progress data in the form of line graphs etc
• Defining aspects, the data validation rules that schools use will not be consistent from one school to the next. When an aspect is set up, such as a grade aspect one school might just be using KS3 standard codes for levels and letter codes for things such as dis-applied etc... But other schools may be using sub-levels to give a more granular feel to progress measures. E.g. sub dividing levels into thirds (4a - top third of level 4, 4c - bottom third of level)
• The SIM's data you see is sometimes dependant on how it was input into SIM's, this is down to Capita and is going to cause headaches. It should not matter the method used to get the data into the database. Whatever way you query it, it should give the same result!
• Trying to work with the SIM's database - self explanatory! The database has been built of a number of years without Capita stepping back, rationalising systems and doing re-writes.

Being selfish and thinking about our own platform and FROG puts a number of really interesting balls in the air. It's almost as though there is the need for some sort of admin console that is the engine through which the school can contextualise the SIM's data for integration and use within FROG. Am going to have a think about this before I chat to Jonathan North on Friday.

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Parent Portal - Attendance

Attendance is one of the compulsory elements of online, real time reporting as outlined by the DCSF for one of the 2010 targets.

Vision

Parents can access attendance data - not just as a pie chart but as a yearly summary so they can actually see the assigned marks. Invariably when parents look at a pie chart they will start to question the data. It would therefore be sueful for them to have access to a yearly summary. Alongside this if they have particular dates they want to query an online form can be used to send information back to the school to ensure that records are up to date and correct.

This is very attractive from a school perspective as it would help to catch those 'missing marks' and ensure data integrity - in many cases, improving school attendance statistics. Parents can make contact through the portal to advise our attendance officer of changes that can then be made. We can take this is an authenticated source due to authentication within the parent portal.

Issues as far as I can see:

• Do all schools SIM's attendance codes in exactly the same way - is there consistency so that this can be coded into FROG? What do other platforms such as SERCO do?
• Aggregation of data back to a FROG server is going to eat up storage - live data connection back to query the SIM's database is the future. Will also give access to pseudo-realtime reporting of data. Interesting that Becta in the toolkit do not really shed any light on how the term 'real time' reporting should be interpreted.

All schools are set attendance targets via Local Authorities DCSF. One of the issues with attendance data is giving it a context for the parent so that the reported headline figures are easy to interpret. This is something for individual schools to contend with.

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Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement

At Costello we are at an interesting crossroads with regards to the development of a parent portal. We have something waiting in the wings, ready to go public, but are currently working closely with FROG to develop some of the key functionality that will help us to realise the 2010 targets quite a bit earlier.

The Becta toolkit suggests a normal of key milestones to manage this change: allocate responsibility within your school leadership team (guess that's me), assess where your school is regarding online reporting using the Becta framework, consult all stakeholders including governors, staff, parents and learners to agree the strategy and vision that suits the context of your school, consider how progress could be made in each of the four framework strands and plan accordingly, contact your local authority to discuss specific plans, initiatives or partnerships that may already be in place, consult ICT suppliers, advisors and consultants to investigate possible solutions to support your school vision.

We we have got to so far is this, our whole E-Learning procurement was really based on a wider E-Strategy remit, with full stakeholder representation to shape the broadbrush vision. I am currently going through the Becta framework to see where we are, more out of curiousity than anything else as I know we have the capacity to incorporate enhanced parental engagement and have the capacity for change management.

One of the key drivers at the moment is the establishment of a parent focus group that is going to focus on unpicking what parents actually want to see and be able to do with regard to the education of their children. I put an article in the current newsletter (went home Friday to all parents) and have already received a few emails from parents expressing an interest in working with the school to shape our vision for the parent portal. The other driver to get this group established is that I want to be able to feedback this information directly to FROG. I am really excited about the opportunity to work, once again with a third party to develop what I am sure will be a product that can lead the marketplace and well ahead of its time in terms of key functionality.

I am hoping to get a meeting set before the christmas holidays so that I can bring the group up to where we are at the moment and give them the opportunity for some blue sky thinking. I am hoping that much of what they will be saying and requesting has been scoped already but it is important to get people involved and take some ownership of new developments.

I am toying with the idea of going live with our current portal soon - something that I have been running through in my own mind for a couple of weeks now. On the one hand I recognise the advantage of going live with a fully fledged product but on the other I could be using the forums within our current parent portal to get more feedback and keep parents informed as to what key developments are next on the horizon. Decisions, decisions. I know that I would get far more feedback from the masses by doing this than holding a meeting, but it would be a very different kind of feedback. That parent focus group will be the forum to ask lots of probing questions to shape ideas. I think the two approaches can compliment each other.

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Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement, moving towards online reporting: Toolkit

Yes, all research does point to parents being able to have a positive impact on student attainment - it's official. The Becta toolkit (published May 2008) outlines how parents can and do have a positive impact on their children's attainment at school. It is all about how we can get parents more involved in this process cloud called education. I think there is a link between the experience that parents had at school and those experienced by their children. The challenge in theory, is a simple one - how can we get more parents to engage in their children's education, more of the time. How can we put them in the driving seat to pull information when they want it to help foster a true working partnership, seeing parents setting and securing high aspirations for the futures of their children. It is about educating parents about education, giving them access to information that they can use to reinforce expectations at home but about empowering them to work collaboratively with their children and teachers - even other parents. How much of this are we going to be able to do with Web 3.0 - really exciting times ahead.

What I found really interesting by reading this document is that there seems to be quite a large emphasis on pushing information out, with some two-way communication of information. Personally I think the key point here is being missed, it is not just about information but interaction and setting opportunities for broader collaboration. The Children's Plan states - 'receive and access information about their children’s work, progress, attendance and behaviour when and where they want'. But it is this and so much more, is it all about receiving and accessing information? I question whether what would be presented to parents is actually information in the first place, isn't it data? Information is data that has been processed, data is raw facts and figures. What is so important is that whatever data we produce for parents is processed in such a way that it is meaningful information. Just having some obscure percentage attendance data for example, may not really be very useful for a parent. It needs putting into context and interpreting, often into layman terms so that we are inclusive. Your son's current attendance of 85% is below the school average, over the course of 5 years this is the equivalent of missing x weeks of school - is far more useful for a parent than just a percentage alone.

There has always been this triad relationship in education between institutions, students and their parents and current technology should be underpinning the foundations of this 3 way relationship. When this is done successfully pay back is huge, there is a strong, underlying learning community - all parties can access and interpret information but it is also putting parents in the driving seat that little bit more to secure improvement - not just for their children but for the whole school through extended collaboration and involvement in broader improvement projects.

Within the toolkit there is a nice diagram (Section1:4) that did hit a chord with me and that was that whatever is done needs to be timely, manageable and meaningful - exactly what is taught within many an A-level ICT course for system requirements. I think these are very pertinent and can be used as a useful steer when opening up the whole conversation about functionality and key requirements of a parent portal. Something that I will endeavour to remember when developing future posts on this topic.

Without getting into really detailed discussion about the component parts of a parent portal the underlying core values that will be communicated through a strategic vision can be fairly easy to list - I am really interested to see what you think on this, so please feel free to leave comments.

Benefits to parents

• In control, they decide what they want see and when
• Data is turned into useful information that is easy for parents to understand and interpret
• Parents develop a deeper understanding of the educational experience their children have
• They feel empowered - opportunities to collaborate and get more involved with the school
• Enhanced capacity to support their children's education
• Enhanced dialogue with teaching staff
• Direct support to help raise their child's achievement
• Engagement with community learning projects
• Access to resources to help shape their understanding of their role - parents play a very important within education

Benefits to school

• Improved dialogue with parents
• Enhanced parent support
• Enhanced parental engagement that will enable parents to impact more on whole school improvement projects
• Parents feel empowered to make more of a difference
• More efficient workflows for administration
• Enhanced communication between home and school
• Seamless integration using IT systems
• Teachers with more time to focus on delivering high quality lessons
• Re-focus parent consultation evenings
• Sustainable schools - less paper!
• Open up more opportunities - family learning etc

Benefits to learners

• Showcase work to parents
• Enhanced support at home - parents in position to be more supportive, be more positive with praise and take an interest. This leads to improved motivation and engagement
• Developing systems that address the way in which they interact with modern society
• E-Learning engages learners, providing them with tools to access the world of collaborative work and sharing of ideas on the Internet

Benefits to broader community

• Effective marketing and administration of community learning opportunities
• Enhanced social networking through the parent portal - e.g. discussion forums for parents to engage in
  

I'm sure that I will be putting some posts together that try and capture the key functionality of a parent portal over the next few weeks so watch this space.

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Data security - issuing credentials to parents

Was at a meeting today where I was talking to some colleagues and throwing some ideas around regarding parental portal. It struck me after the chat we had that there are a myriad of issues to think through regarding data security. The government has just released the latest interim report on data security/handling guidelines. Schools fall under this broad banner and also have to comply with these guidelines. It does throw up a few points to consider when shaping our parent portal.

Firstly - according to the guidelines we cannot send a username/password home via the post for parents. This presents a few initial problems. Having had a think about this there are a couple of ways forward. A system of identity verification could be set up that works in the following way:

Parent visits public page - puts in answers to a few personal questions - answers validated against MIS data - e.g. DOB of eldest student in school, postcode, mobile no. etc.... They are also prompted to enter their own personal email address - this information is data mined and attached back in to the parent so we have an additional contact email. FROG the sends user logon details via automated email back to parent with a validation hyperlink to activate account. Parent logs on with system generated password and then must change it immediately. By collecting an external email address in this manner it is easy to integrate a lost password option into the system.

Other method is crude and comes with bigger administration overheads - physically give parents the details at face to face events such as parents evenings - this would only have to happen in Y1. In subsequent years it would be Y7 parents who do not have any older siblings that would go through this process

Similar issues arise with the disseminations of user credentials to users of say, a transition portal.

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Forums

One of the most anticipated areas of the learning platform are the forums. To generate and perpetuate student interest and buy in to the Learning Platform from day one we wnt live with a small selection of forums, But before we did we made sure that we had students apply to be moderators, so that when use increased we did not see lots of issues growing with them. What has been every interesting is the students response to the forums - particularly the forum I set up to encourage students to make suggestions as to how FROG could be developed.

A few ideas have come our from our students directly about how forum functionality could be improved, summarising their feedback:

• Can edit own posts
• Can quote a previous thread in a reply
• Embed some html into posts - including url's and smilies, links to hosted images etc..
• Display some MIS data with user, such as what year group they are in
• Voting for threads so that the list becomes one based on preference of user selection (I know this is coming in future releases)
• Put the total number of posts of the user to date
• Automatically generated email sent informing you of response to one of your posts - currently only way of seeing new posts is to regularly check forum. This is crucial for staff who have not time to develop this as a new routine.

It's been pretty clear that many students immerse themsleves on forum's (such as phpbb/vbulletin based systems) when at home - they have high expectations as to how they perform and are disappointed when systems donot meet their expectations. Students are exposed to so much information on the internet that they are quick to make decisions on the quality of content and presentation, something that clearly affects perceptions and level of buy in. One student in particular had an interesting vision about the learning platform having some sort of virtual currency. So that the return of marked assignments would equate to points/credits that would be combined with points earnt through activity on certain forums and other activities such as posting work to a gallery, school attendance etc.... These virtual credits would then have the potential to be exchanged for items from the school shop - or virtual commodities - layouts/components for their profile, avatars etc....

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Update of labels - FROGDEV

For those members of the FROG development team that maybe subscribing to this blog I have added a label just for you - FROGDEV. I will be applying this label to those posts that have some information that may help shape future product developments.

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