I have finally had time to upload the students work onto my VLE. I was really happy with the work they did for their last project and I'm excited to share it with you. Now on the homepage of my VLE there is a slideshow of all the students work from the last project 'Dreams'. Changing the home page for the website to the students work makes it look a lot more personal. It looks like their website rather than mine.
Creating the slideshow was extremely easy. In edit mode I went under the basic tab and they have a varitey of free things you can add to the website. I chose slideshow in the end instead of a gallery because on a slide show all the work gets seen and it keeps moving rather than having to select.
I asked the students to pick their favourite image from the project (they had to produce between 4-6), and I used it for the slideshow. Each image gets around 4 seconds, I tried out which speed would work best because I didn't want the slide show sitting on one image, I wanted all the work to have a chance at being shown.
I'm also glad that the slide show function has an autoplay button. At first I thought you could only use the slideshow if you hit the play button. But under advanaced you can change this.
I've started to put new resources on my VLE. Pinterest is my most used teaching tool, I use it practically every lesson when I am introducing a new subject, photographer or project. On the VLE I have put a section called Pinterest boards, Pinterest allows you to create small 'widgets' (just a smaller version of Pinterest with a link), where my students can find all the images and resources I used in a particular lesson. The students have found this really useful, and no longer ask me what photographers we looked at last lesson.
Something that I really want to do with my VLE was to create Photoshop tutorials for my students. Tutorial videos are huge and you will see thousands on Youtube. But I want to create specific tutorials, looking at what we have done that lesson, or what I think will be useful for the future.I have learnt loads off video tutorials, they are quick and easy to follow as you can pause it whenever you need to, and you can watch it as many times as needed.
A downside to using the weebly for education site is that to upload video you need to be paying the subscription fee, and my VLE is a free web page so I don't have this feature. But you can have HTML code. So I uploaded the tutorial to my Youtube account then took the HTML and copied that onto my web page.
It was really quick to do and the video can play straight from my website. So it doesn't send you to the Youtube channel, which I like because I wanted the video actually embedded onto the website, I didn't want it to send the students to the Youtube account.
The website I used to create my VLE is Weebly. I tried a few different websites but I found them very limited with the design, and very limited with the amount of space. I used Weebly to build my photography website, and I find it extremely easy to use, it has plenty of space and it is well designed. So I was very happy to find out that Weebly had another website builder for education.
I hadn't seen this website builder before, so I had to do a bit of research to see if it would work as a VLE. With this version you can add a class to your website, each student gets a log in, and they each get there own basic web page. I'm not sure if I am going to get the students to use their own web page as part of the class because I don't think I will have enough time to go through it with them, as they have a lot of deadlines coming up. But I will encourage them to use it in their own time.
I kept the design for the website quite simple at the moment as the students are still getting used to it. But for the home page of the website I plan to have a gallery of the students work.
The builder has a two or three different ways of displaying images, I am hoping to have something like these two on the front page, but with the student's work. I haven't quite decided which one I prefer.
The website also allows for students to submit their work online and you get it in an email. I have recently tried this with my students. The only problem we encountered was that you could only upload one submission at a time. Since I was getting the students to upload between 4-6 photographs, this proved difficult. I have suggested from now on that the students create PDF files and upload them instead of each individual image.
I am looking forward to adding more resources to this website and to see how it develops!
