Rationale

At Paignton Community and Sports College we are using the Internet as a teaching and learning tool. This website is the second part of a phased introduction during September 2010 to a ‘mashup’ or state of the art web  technologies that are going to be the foundation for the ‘Online Learning’ into the future at Paignton Community and Sports College. This is based around several key features: Firstly that all the features of this system should share a common login with the same username and password for everything. This will help students and teachers access the school network as well as all the online facilities. Secondly that ‘blocks’ to learning are removed. It is not acceptable to ask students to navigate through the network to find resources for learning; it should be easy! The learning resources should be available 24/7 from school, home or anywhere else. We want to ensure that the technology infrastructure can deliver rich multimedia resources anywhere. Students who do not have access to computers at home should make use of the ‘FREE COMPUTERS’ offers or spend time in facilities such as school or public libraries where they can get access to the resources out of school hours.

How are things going to work?

Google Email and Google Docs

The first thing that we have already done is to partner with Google so that our domain name ‘paigntoncommunitycollege.com’ is now using the Google servers for all our email. This has already made a significant difference to how email is used within the College. Some of the benefits (which are many) are that Staff and students have access to the amazing Google Docs. These are a facility where anyone with an account can create ‘Word’ like documents, spreadsheets, presentations like Powerpoint and upload and store files upto 7GB. One of the most useful facilities is ‘sharing’ documents so that more than one person can collaborate on the same piece of work at the same time. For our students it also means that they can produce coursework without needing any software other than a browser on their machines at home. Future developments, we are looking forward to are the ‘Google Wave’. Partnering with google has now meant that we will now always be ‘state of the art’ as Google release new features for these systems almost weekly.

WordPress Multi User

We have introduced the hub of the public system as http://www.paigntoncommunitycollege.com this is the place that you will always go to to get easy links to everywhere else. This website has a Content Management System (CMS) based on the open source software platform called WordPress. It is however more than it looks as it isn’t just a website. This site has the ability for college faculties and members of staff to have their own website or ‘blog’ built into the main school website. They can therefore login to their own website and keep their own news and curriculum developments up to date. Apply for a blog here! Parents and staff can take advantage of the Calendar system provided by Google docs to attach the public School Calendar to their mobile phones should they wish. /calendar

Video Server

The next really important feature is that we have built and are hosting within school our own video server. This is configured on the domain www.paigntonvideo.com. The video server will allow video to be served across the network within school with no limts to speed because of Internet access. The video will be coming from a server inside the school. Why video? – We are taking advantage of a new way of delivering the curriculum via tutorials. These tutorials have been a feature on the Internet for many years and are a huge part of the content of youtube. We are using screen capture technology as well as real HD video to develop learning resources and lead/introduction lessons for many subjects within school. Contact me for more info: dominic.miles@paigntoncommunitycollege.com.

Moodle

The next big feature for teaching and learning is the introduction of moodle as another open source software resource to organise and store teaching and learning resources. Moodle is a facility used by many thousands of Schools, Colleges and Universities around the world to deliver curriculum online. Our moodle Installation is at http://www.paigntonmoodle.com.

Wider Web 2.0

The paigntoncommunitycollege.com website is a platform to enable teachers and students to add their own news,  links and resources . There are countless other web based facilities that we hope to promote such as the Dropbox facility where anyone can register and get a very clever online storage system of upto 100 GB but 2GB for free! This system synchronises between your computers and phone so all the data is up to date on each machine… Very cool.

Review

So all these main school facilities share a common login and allow our students and teachers to access information with a minimum of ‘clicks’. We hope the new WordPress website will become a major hub for ‘Jumping off’ to the other places. See the online learning BLOG! –  paigntoncommunitycollege.com/onlinelearning

paigntoncommunitycollege.com
paigntonvideo.com
paigntonmoodle.com

This system has been developed by the ICT Teachers and Technicians at Paignton community and Sports College.

For further information please contact Mr Dominic Miles, Mr Andrew Thomas or Mr Craig Gorman.

Tutorials

googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/

All About Google Docs

Getting Started Guide Docs

Getting Started with Spreadsheets

Getting Started with Presentations