Nottingham High's use of open source blogging platform Wordpress goes far beyond student blogs, using this flexible software as a complex content management system to deliver educational content and manage digital resources.
Nottingham High School is an independent school for boys with around 900 pupils aged 11-18
Background
Lord Dearing’s Languages Review recommended the use of technology to provide access to learning and to support both flexibility and greater learner autonomy. It also highlighted the potential of web-based resources to offer pupils access to language learning support materials in their own time and without the pressure of peer observation.
Given that our school offers our pupils access to dedicated ICT rooms at breaks and both before and after school, coupled with the fact that the vast majority of our pupils has a computer with internet connection at home, the Modern Foreign Languages department decided to trial using Wordpress to provide our Spanish students with online access to grammar explanations, interactive exercises, games, podcasts and listening and reading resources which could be readily accessed both at school and from home.
It is important to point out that Nottingham High School does not yet have a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and, therefore, we have had to look to alternative solutions to deliver the sort of functionality that a VLE would otherwise be expected to provide.
Implementation Strategy
When we first considered using a CMS, we looked for a means to offer our students online access to the digital resources of the Spanish department, which consisted mainly of Hot Potatoes exercises, flash games, pdf worksheets, mp3 sound files and videos.
We opted to use Wordpress because of the intuitive nature of its interface, making adding new resources easy and therefore more likely, and because it offered great functionality in terms of adding resources with sound and video, including podcasts.
By concentrating more on the content management features of Wordpress and less on its blogging capabilities, we created a website which focused on content organised according to topics and key stages (GCSE and A Level) as well as on easy and intuitive navigation.
The idea was that our website would be a gateway, not only to our own resources, but also to selected external web-based resources, providing our Spanish students with an attractive one-stop-shop for all their learning needs.
Teachers, students and parents
As well as providing educational content to our students, we also sought to bridge the home-school divide, not only in terms of access to language materials, but also in terms of showcasing our pupils’ work to a wider world audience, not least their own friends, parents and family.
We therefore decided to make the most of Wordpress’s blogging functionality by adding a blog to the main site which would serve the dual purpose of communicating current information to students and showcasing their work to their friends and family.
Curriculum applications
Wordpress and other Open Source content management systems have the potential to be used across the curriculum, not only in languages but also wherever a platform is required to deliver educational content online.
Given that a VLE is not yet available to us, our Wordpress website has afforded us some of the functionality a VLE such as Moodle would offer at very little cost, as only hosting is required. It is however conceivable that a CMS based website could co-exist with a VLE, as it would plug the gaps in functionality present in many VLEs, particularly in terms of blogging.
Also from a financial perspective, the use of free and open source software has given us the opportunity to showcase our students’ work not only to existing parents, but also to prospective ones. Given that we are an independent fee-paying school, Wordpress has given us excellent return on investment as far as our marketing is concerned at events such as Open Days and also generally in internet-based inquiries.
A very welcome advantage has been Wordpress’s versatility in terms of customising the look and feel of the site and its intuitive functionality: adding new pages to the website or new posts to the blog is a simple process which requires no previous knowledge of web publishing.
We are looking to promote the use of Wordpress across the Modern Foreign Languages department in the short to medium term. Other departments have already started to show interest in what the MFL department has achieved and are investigating the possibility to use Wordpress in a similar way.
We are also very interested in Wordpress’s multi user version - Wordpress MU - which allows for multiple websites and blogs with a single installation, opening the possibility to offer each subject, department, student group or even individual students the possibility to create and maintain their own website or blog under one main website.
Once the Wordpress source code has been downloaded, a school would only need to ensure their web host enables access to MySQL databases in the server.