The start of my VLE (virtual learning enviroment)

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!

Barriers to the effective use of technology in education

Technology has now worked it's way into every part of our lives, including learning. I'm not only talking about education, but we use technology to learn everyday. YouTube and Wiki How tutorials are now used world wide. As discussed in my last post How technology has changed the way we learn, as teachers we need to support life long learning. These skills need to be given to students during their education, otherwise we aren't equipping our students with the best tools.

Mind map of the barriers to the use of technology in education:


To create this mind map I looked at a book by Megan Poore called Social Media in the classroom; A Practical Guide.  There are many reason why there are so many barriers for using technology in the classroom. The internet especially is very hard to police. Institutions like colleges and university don't want to be held responsible if anything goes wrong. 

(Somekh 2007) asks the question, can you really have people sitting in a computer laboratory doing assessment on screen and ensure that they will not cheat? Using technology in the classroom should improve lessons, not make them harder. I can completely understand that getting technology in the first place depends on funding and budgets. Some colleges and universities may not have enough funding to get all the resources you want. But after all technology is just a tool to aid learning. 

Using social media in the classroom rewards both courage and enterprise. Be intrepid: get out there and try new and different things… but always within the limits of safety. (Poore 2012) 

There are many barriers identified in the mind map I created. As Poore says in the quote above it is all about safety. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are a perfect example of education being used safely online. VLE's allow the students access to all the educational resources within a safe environment.

There will always be barriers to new advancements in education. It is important to find a way of using new advancements in a positive way. Eliminating all the barriers will be pretty much impossible, but as long as the institution is willing to try to overcome certain barriers like cost, copyright, branding etc. it can be very worth while. Other barriers like students posting offensive material, will have to be policed by staff. The students will have to be made aware of the consequences of using the technology in an inappropriate manner. 

If we are serious about education, then we must embrace the best tools that are available to us. If that means accessing tools that are hosted by social media services that are not supported by our organisation then we must find ways of making that access happen safely that responsibly.

(Poore 2012)

As the quote above states, sometimes there is new website that you think will be excellent for your students. If you really believe that it will be beneficial you have to come up of ways to make it safe for your students. I know when I was at college we weren't allowed access to YouTube. My course was a creative media course and our lecturers believed that we should be allowed to access YouTube as it was an excellent source of research. It was granted, but the lecturers had the responsibility to police the media site, to make sure we were using it in an appropriate manner. 

Poore, Megan Using Social Media in the Classroom: A Practical Guide (SAGE 2012)

Somekh, Bridget Pedagogy and Learning with ICT: Researching the Art of Innovation (Routledge 2007)