http://www.ilford-school.co.uk/bb/index.php?app=blog Community Blog List Syndication Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:42:12 +0000 a-worton@ilford-school.co.uk (Ilford Grammar School) IP.Blog 60
You can read about that here.

On the bright side, it gave me the opportunity to take a good look at the lead competitor, Invision. The move to version 4 of vbulletin adds a cms, blogs and other community tools into the forum mix and IPS (makers of Invision Power Board and other goodies) produce the same sort of software in their recently released version 3.

I must say, I got a little excited looking into IPB. It's a much better platform than the vbulletin 3.x series and reminds me more of codeigniter (which I love). It certainly looks to me that vBulletin, the once king of forum software has been overtaken by the competition.

I caved in a few days ago and bought the full set of Invision's software at bundle price. I've been working on our management information system to get it to spit out pdfs of the Michaelmas reports from the gradebook written over the summer, so didn't get a chance to start playing with it until today.

Invision is very different to vB, but I think that's got a lot to do with 5+ years experience with one and a fresh look at the other. I'm slowly learning the features and limitations, but testament to just how exciting playing with the new software is - it's 12:30 am and I haven't left work yet.

I have the gallery, blogs, portal, calendar and forums up now and I love the site look - which is a deliberate minimal adjustment from the default theme to help with upgrades. The major work will be shifting the main website pages into the content section of IPB, but I read that I can include any code in them I want, so I may be able to shove my scripts inside a template wrapper.

The community features are quite nice with Facebook interfaces and other neat toys to play with, but it may well be interesting to open the forum section up to parents, past students and our current. I'll have to have a fiddle with the authentication system as it supports LDAP, so it would be nice to could get it to synchronise accounts with the network.

Last time I did that with Moodle though it would intermittently fail to send packets across the firewall from the DMZ. Intermittent login failure isn't good on front facing software :/

What I really want to do is sort out the cobweb sections of the site; uniform and lunch menus are in need of a revamp, and the virtual tour could do with an update, but I'm off on a trip to Cambridge this weekend so I guess it'll have to wait ]]> Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:15:00 +0000
Science assessment is now complete from Key Stage 1 to 3 and Mathematics is the next main focus, with assessment across all years this term in place. In addition to this, provisioning the test development interface to staff has opened up the computer assessment to a range of other subjects; ICT, Design Technology, History, Geography as well as verbal and non-verbal.

The goal is for front facing student and parental access to assessment data on an ongoing basis - although this is more useful in some subjects than others. Mathematics is a good example - assessment usually takes place every few weeks, so an ongoing picture is more useful than say in science, where a unit takes between a half-term and a term, meaning one to two formal assessments a term.

More frequent data in this case may be a record of classwork and homework, although in many cases these aren't score based, don't necessarily reflect student progress and require a time overhead to type the data in to the gradebook which could be utilised for planning, marking, or assessment. Additionally, the feedback value of these

The most useful data therefore is probably the formative/summative testing information, as it gives a breakdown of the unit objectives and student performance against each. In some cases, there is both computer and teacher assessment data - where each moderates the other.]]> Thu, 04 Mar 2004 10:04:00 +0000