Award Winning Open Source at Notre Dame High School

Paul Haigh, assistant headteacher (specialisms and innovation), describes how open source has provided a 'virtual school' for all the stakeholders at Notre Dame High School in Sheffield. Notre Dame is one of a number of schools using open source to have gained the prestigious Becta ICT Mark, and this year it went on to win Becta's Excellence Award for Best Whole School in Yorkshire and Humberside.

Here's what Becta have to say about the school:

Notre Dame is a Catholic secondary school with a diverse intake, with triple specialisms in technology, humanities and leading edge. It fosters an outstanding culture of innovation in its use of ICT across the whole school community. This is at the heart of its vision, and is driving the school forward both in the cycle of continuous improvement, and in the excellent progress made by students in developing and applying their ICT skills. Notre Dame also has a good reputation for collaboration and sharing ICT practice through its various activities with national organisations.
Notre Dame's virtual school is an excellent example of its innovative use of ICT to support personalised learning. This flexible and bespoke resource has improved communication between students, staff, parents and governors and incorporates Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, secure voting and live feeds. The content includes revision resources, teaching tips and e-safety advice. A dedicated innovation team supports these developments, and crucially empowers all teachers to share and develop their ICT skills through formalised curriculum innovation responsibilities.
A further strength at Notre Dame is its effective and efficient use of electronic data. The school follows the data management mantra of 'enter once, use many times' and has sophisticated electronic assessment systems, including a management information system that supports data collection, collation and storage. Parents have full access to their children's data in a Real Time reporting system that exceeds the expectations on the Online Reporting targets for schools.

School context

Notre Dame High School is an outstanding school (Ofsted 2005, 2008) with a national reputation for excellence in ICT (ICT Mark holder, Becta Consultant School, ICT-Register Focus School, Becta Excellence Award winner 2009- Best Whole School, Yorkshire and Humberside) and a strong remit in sharing good practice (High Performing specialist School with Leading Edge specialism, National Support School, Host of a City Learning Centre).

The school is a Catholic comprehensive drawing a diverse intake across the ability range from all parts of the city of Sheffield; all groups of students make outstanding progress. There is a strong ethos of continual development through innovation and adoption of new practices and new technology. This has existed since being one of the first schools to take on the then only specialism; Technology College status in 1995 and the school still holds firm to the original ethos of Technology Colleges to advance the use of new technologies in all aspects of the school.

The school has opted out of the ongoing managed service for BSF but is taking part in the aggregated procurement of ICT equipment. This was possible because the school is so far down the line of transformation through new technology it was able to make a special case. Workforce reform is highly advanced and a large team of non-teachers work at all levels in the school. A large ICT technical team can be supported as the school has contracts to support several schools and the on-site Hallam City Learning Centre, and whilst this means more work it does mean a large talent pool with several I graduates working in various roles and symbolises the school’s entrepreneurial approach to development. One, the Virtual School Coordinator, looks after much of the open source web applications as outlined below and is an active contributor to the Open Source community.

History of open source tools at Notre Dame

The school has been using significant Open Source tools for around 5 years to make up major parts of its ‘Virtual School’ (The term is used rather than Learning Platform or Virtual Learning Environment as the school has personalised web tools for each stake holder group; not just learners, but also teachers, parents, support staff and governors)

Open source tools include:

A Joomla! portal hosting various public and private web sites (access authenticated by Active Directory integration)

The Moodle VLE linked in with the Mahara e-portfolio system

Web publishing of network directories and ‘my documents’ through Gleamtech

An open source search tool meaning curriculum resources based on Office documents can be searched for without the need to tag

Integration with commercial tools

The ‘Virtual school’ is presented as a single portal based experience to users even though it is made up of multiple tools, in addition to the open source tools listed above the following commercial tools are fully integrated.

• Microsoft Windows architecture and Active Directory account management
• Microsoft Exchange server running Outlook 2007
• Serco Facility MIS

Integration with home-grown tools

The virtual school is completed by various web enabled database tools developed in-house, these include the IT help desk, a premises job request tool and other admin systems.

Why open source?

The Open Source tools and commercial tools have each been chosen on merit as best of breed but the Open Source tools can generally be said to have the following appeals to the school:

• Interoperability
  The seamless ‘Virtual school’ portal works from a user’s perspective because of interoperability between the tools, so for example students can view ‘my documents’ on the Windows system through the Joomla portal, Teachers can benefit from integration of the MIS with the VLE so class lists can be access on Serco Facility from within Moodle
• Rapid development
  The school doesn’t have to wait for a new software release hoping a new development is included; development happens all the time
• Global army of developers
  Developers share a community ethos with a willingness to share. Free and immediate support is available through web based communities and a growing network of face to face conferences such as Moodle Moots, these trigger partnerships and soft federations between schools using the same tools who share good practice. Notre Dame coordinates a city wide Moodle user group and collaborates with a national family of schools who use Moodle with the Facility MIS.
• No contractual tie-ins
  Allowing the freedom to adapt and makes changes strategy as technology evolves.

Future plans

The school has deliberately avoided single sign on to all tools, especially with teacher’s accounts to maintain better data security as teachers can be known to walk away from logged in machines. This may change; especially as the school is keen not just to have separate tools integrated under one ‘virtual school’ but develop the sharing of data between tools to be viewed simultaneously through one web screen.

This would mean, for example, a student’s home page wouldn’t just have a link to email, there would be a live number of unread messages showing on a personal home page or information such as behaviour events, house points, printing credits, academic progress with respect to targets- all of which is available via links, could be seen on a single personal dash board.