VLE vs. showmyhomework.co.uk

For the last year and a half I been getting to grips with the school VLE (Kaleidos) and how it can be used for sharing data with parents, delivering content alongside lessons, providing information and for setting and monitoring homework.

There have been quite a few benefits with using Kaleidos to set and monitor homework, where I can:

• see who has accessed the home work,
• see who has said that they have completed it,
• record marks and comments for each individual pupil in the mark book,
• provide electronic versions of home work that I have given (if the pupil has lost it, they can now reprint it themselves),
• accept electronic submissions (useful for the PowerPoint HW!),
• link the home work to framework objectives,
• provide links to online resources.

The pupils can see an overview of their homework’s (due/overdue) when they log in, as well as any new messages. There may well be a few more benefits, but perhaps not noticeable enough to be listed above.

It is all well and good listing the benefits of such a system, but there is a need to be aware of the problems too:

• The system is slow (by definition, it is not a slow service, but by comparison it is slow when compared to the websites that are visited regularly, ie. bbc.co.uk, facebook etc.) – I don’t have any evidence of this except from the experiences of myself and the pupils.
• The system is complex and therefore alienates itself from a large number of pupils and teachers. Courses have to be set up, pupils allocated, resources uploaded, forms filled in – all sounds reasonable, but not truly intuitive with this system.
• If pupils transfer classes, the class doesn’t update automatically – they have to be added manually (and data is lost, not transferred when a pupil is removed).
• Waste of bandwidth and unnecessary pages. When a course is created with the purpose of sharing and recording home work that is set, an interest space for the class is created (whether it is going to be used or not) – quite wasteful! (impact could well be negligible though)
• Time consuming. There aren’t any quick options to post a homework for one of your classes. When entering data, it has to be done record by record – no importing (eg. from an excel file). When exporting data, it isn’t organised in a way that can easily be used.
• Implementation. The system has an air of incompleteness about it. There are always features that are ‘coming soon’ – good in the sense that it is continually being updated, but bad in the sense of ‘they should have thought of that sooner’ (eg. still unable to search forum posts!). Whenever there is an update to the system, something else always seems to break (RSS feed functionality within the system was broken for three months).

Kaleidos has an impressive feature list, but has lost a lot of confidence from it’s users due to the way they have been implemented.

Now I will look at showmyhomework.co.uk as a potential alternative to Kaleidos (only for the purpose of setting home work). Within a few minutes I had signed up to the website, set a homework and was able to explain to someone else how they could view the homework. It doesn’t matter if others can see what I have set (as I have nothing to hide) and there isn’t any personal information listed, apart from my name. Parents and pupils can quickly see what homework has been set, through use of the filters.

As this is a new website, I would imagine that there will a lot more functionality added over time as it is used to a greater degree by a wider demographic. There is already a premium feature (currently free) that enables reuse of resources (uploaded by others). There is no further information regarding this at this time, but it does seem like a reasonable feature to charge for (file storage), but only if the file management interface is well thought out along with a rating system.

I will now go through the main features and then suggest improvements/features.

• Easy to set up a homework and attach a file.
• Homework can be filtered by year, class, subject and teacher.
• A teacher can view all homework they have set in a calendar view.
• The teacher is emailed on the day that the homework is due.
• Homework cannot be added retrospectively (making it harder for a teacher to cheat the system).

Possible improvements / feature requests:

• Create a unique identifier for a particular class (this could be used by a pupil to only show homeworks for their classes, used with an RSS feed and other features as below).
• Compose an email, with attachment, that when sent to a unique address adds the homework for the relevant class.
• Use a QR code that takes a pupil to their homework. For example, I could give each pupil in 7x1b with a sticker that has had a QR code printed on it. They can choose to stick this on a poster next to their desk at home or in their planner (along with a sticker for each of their other subjects). They can then use their mobile phone or webcam to read the code, which then takes them to their homework info (via use of a unique identifier).
• Statistics interface – how many Mathematics homeworks have been set this week/month/term/year.
• Profile option to decide whether to display firstname or just initial (I have set my firstname on my profile to be just ‘T’, but that means that emails I receive start with ‘Hi T’).

For ease of use and potential take-up, it would be a good idea to start using showmyhomework.co.uk and if additional features are required (as outlined for Kaleidos), then the teacher can decide to make that move.

I would be interested to hear about experiences with other VLEs and how homework is set/monitored electronically.

www.showmyhomework.co.uk | www.learningplatform.rm.com

Is there anything that I have missed? Please comment below.