Date:
16/07/2010 ULCC hosts MaharaUK 10 conference
Mahara
Mahara in School
By kstacey - Posted on March 24th, 2010
Can anyone share their experience of using Mahara in Secondary schools?
As network Manager for a large secondary school in Gloucestershire we are currently hosting our own Moodle / VLE which has proved very popular. Our Moodle Site is also fully integrated with the school MIS system, with all classes / timetables being automatically populated with staff and students.
Tagged:
What is Mahara? Mahara? Mahara? Mahara?
Those interested in e-Portfolios - and in Mahara in particular - may like to check out the answers I have begun to formulate for four key questions about Mahara:
1. What is Mahara? (versus Moodle): http://derrin.biz/?p=74
2. What is Mahara? (versus Facebook or Ning): http://derrin.biz/?p=85
What's on your bookshelf?
By Admin - Posted on March 8th, 2010
Packt publishing have a rather nice line in technical guides to a wide range of software applications, with a particularly strong list of open source titles. A couple of new titles look interesting, and I hope to include reviews when I've had chance to read them.
Michael Badger's Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide, covers the basics of Scratch, covering some elementary programming concepts in the process: "This book provides teachers, parents, and new programmers with a guided tour of Scratch's features by creating projects that can be shared, remixed, and improved upon in your own lesson plans. Soon you will be creating games, stories, and animations by snapping blocks of "code" together." [Sample chapter]
Also of interest is a book, Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios by community member and unconference presenter Glenys Bradbury and others introducing Mahara, the popular e-portfolio, blogging, social networking software that, thanks to single sign on with Moodle, is the platform of choice for many institutions: "This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself." [Sample chapter]
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.
Mahara e portfolio for schools
Session style:
Presentation 
Presented by Glenys Bradbury of TDM, an official Mahara partner
Introduction: I am proposing a session on presenting Mahara as an an eportfolios for schools. I will briefly introduce the background to the open source mahara project, the links with the open source VLE Moodle project before looking at some of the features.
Mahara individual learning profile store needs feedback on copyright
By Alan Bell - Posted on June 10th, 2009
The Mahara e-profile store which plugs in to Moodle is a great way to provide all learners with a profile of all their achievements.
It is GPLv3 licensed and there are no proposed changes to that, however they are deciding what to do about the copyright of contributions. This is an important issue and is explained in detail in a post to the Mahara forums.
Tagged:
Mahara 1.1 released
Mahara is an e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Built on the concept of individual student ownership it is unlike many 'top-down' orientated systems. In Mahara the learner controls who and what others can see of their collection of work, or artefacts, by establishing 'Views' or screens which they construct and share with an appropriate audience. The artefacts can of various types: documents, images, blogs, resumés, multimedia, hyperlinks, RSS feeds and contact information. So she might create different views on her work for friends, tutors or teachers and even potential employers.
