OPENHIVE September 2010 Release: What is new

October 11, 2010

As a team we love to build new features and capabilities; things that make your lives easier, smarter and more fun each and every day.   With OPENHIVE, all our customers receive future product releases as part of their subscription, at no additional cost.  So customers have the excitement of something new every year, benefiting from the latest technologies that help them do ‘things’ faster and easier.

So let’s delve into our new September 2010 OPENHIVE release: what’s new?

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Create Ad Hoc Classes on the fly
We’ve developed a new instant class creator feature that allows you to flexibly create new groups/classes beyond the formal class and timetable structures that are imported from your MIS system. On top of this capability, OPENHIVE automatically creates a new collaborative web space in OPENHIVEportal and new email distribution lists within OPENHIVEmail.  So if you run poetry classes or drama clubs outside of your normal timetable this is a brilliant new way to manage your extracurricular activities.

ad hoc class

Improved resource selection
We’ve redesigned our resource selection view in OPENHIVElearning. Now in just a few clicks you can view all documents and resources across all of your document libraries in your school, by class, by year or subject and reuse materials in your courses.  In addition, we’ve added new capability behind the scenes so that if a student doesn’t have access to the resource/document library, OPENHIVE recognises this and gives them access permissions on the fly.  It’s time to say goodbye to access problems.

resource


View all your chat discussions in one place
We have improved the chat functionality within OPENHIVElearning. Now teachers can view all of their chat discussions with pupils across their classes in one place.  What was John struggling with on this topic? How did I guide him and has he followed my advice?

New Tooltips to help you on your way
We’ve added some new tooltips to make our VLE even more intuitive. Hover over some of the buttons and tooltips will appear guiding you on what to do next.

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New Dashboards for Parents & Teachers
We now have a smarter, quicker dashboard for parents to instantly see their child’s attendance, punctuality, attainment and assessment information. Parents can now toggle through the visual charts to show information, this week, this term or this year – quickly seeing the ‘here and now’ data that’s most useful to them, along with quick indicators against the class average scores.  Parents can also customise their dashboards and print reports to share amongst the family.

Teachers also now have a similar view to allow them to view information on every child across classes.

OPENHIVEinsight Dashboard

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Get access to Windows Live SkyDrive, Office Live and Live Messenger
With OPENHIVElive you get so much more than email.  We take the hassle out of provisioning Microsoft Live@edu services by linking accounts directly to your MIS via OPENHIVEiD. In this latest release, we deliver 10GB email storage, 25GB of online storage through Windows Live SkyDrive, collaboration and document sharing through Office Live Workspace, Live Spaces and Live Messenger.  You can also enjoy Live Writer the flexible blogging tool for learners.  See the screenshot below: editing Word documents with integrated Live chat.

Integrated MSN and Word Editing

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OPENHIVE Primary is here!
Totally customised for primary schools, we’ve taken the best features of OPENHIVE and weaved them into new and exciting interfaces to engage younger learners like never before.  Your portal, virtual learning environment, email service and parental reporting solution have been tailored for primaries, making OPENHIVE more intuitive and engaging for key stages 1 & 2.

Primary Portal 2

Keep up to date on new releases!
If you want to keep abreast of new developments for OPENHIVE subscribe to our free community newsletter by emailing subscribe@openhive.net or follow us on Twitter @OPENHIVE_Net.  Enjoy playing :-)

Filed under: Blog, News — Tags: , , , , , , — Ceri.McCall @ 8:28 pm

A User-Centric Design Philosophy

March 8, 2010

Adoption

At i2Q/Synetrix during the development of the applications making up the OPENHIVE platform, we adopted a number of new working processes and technologies like Agile Development, Microsoft Silverlight with a new (Model-View-ViewModel) application architecture, and a User-Centred design process.

Applying an Agile development process has improved our delivery. Silverlight has enabled us to provide rich, flexible and powerful user experiences which in conjunction with an MVVM architecture have allowed the smooth integration of interface and logic.

Informing all of this is the User-Centric philosophy we aim to follow in the design and development of all our applications.

(more…)

Filed under: Blog — Tags: , , , , , — Jason.Rousell @ 3:41 pm

Technology Adoption – Teaching and Learning First

February 17, 2010

Catching up with the blogosphere today I came across Dai Barnes’ blog post titled “VLEs, what/who are they for again?” This struck a chord with me as it was one of the many questions we pondered upon whilst sketching out our early ideas for OPENHIVE.   Our thoughts revolved around: “what’s wrong with existing learning platforms today?”, “why aren’t teachers using them?” and “what are the blockers?”

As the discussion unfolds on this blog post there are some really crucial points being surfaced.  What difference does technology make to teaching? What are the stumbling blocks that limit the widespread adoption of technology amongst teachers?

Andy Kemp commented “This in my opinion has been the major stumbling block to a widespread adoption of VLEs and other technology in schools as for some teacher it requires a significant change of practice. And for many of our excellent and experienced teachers this does not equate to an improvement.”

In all of this, I see the importance of both “choice” and “flexibility” for teachers and their technology, alongside other tired and tested teaching methods.  Look back into the annals of time; a newly published book has rarely been adopted as whole.  Teachers have always taken the bits they wanted to use and blended them into their own teaching materials, and it’s the same for technology.  Teachers aren’t going to immediately abandon their tried and tested approaches, but they will experiment and evolve their practices. It’s like the first time a teacher provokes a discussion in class around a topic rather than presenting what is needed to be understood. It’s small steps at their own pace. Technology is just another string to the teachers bow, it can add richness, diversity and allow learners to move at their pace.  Choice of tools isn’t just for teachers to enjoy!

The comments succinctly remind us that “every teacher, like every student, is different and we must help them find which bits are right for them”.

This is exactly why choice and flexibility has always been a core element in our philosophy behind OPENHIIVE.  We acknowledge that teachers have different teaching styles, preferred approaches and varying levels of ICT skills and so we built OPENHIVE in a way that fully integrates a vast mix of teaching and collaboration tools in one place.   Some teachers may prefer to use email to communicate with learners; others may enjoy using forums, instant messaging or video conferencing.   OPENHIVE helps teachers to blend and weave different technologies into their teaching.

By offering this choice of integrated learning technologies from a single database (connected to the school’s MIS system), schools are able to deliver a solution that allows teachers to use the tools that suit them, their learners, their subject and class.  Teachers adopt new services with greater ease and the learner has one seamless learning journey in OPENHIVE.

Importantly, the modular nature of OPENHIVE means that there are opportunities for both leaders and followers when planning the implementation and adoption within a school. A teacher can utilise the applications with which they’re confident and build upon these strengths.  Utilising the more technologically savvy teachers, who often have a good understanding of the pedagogic benefits that technology brings, helps to create an environment in which teachers, as learners, can set their own targets, based upon their aspirations and skills.

So, successful adoption of learning technologies comes down to design, usability, flexibility and choice. It’s true that not everyone will use an array of learning technologies available to them.  But let’s remind ourselves that it’s using the relevant technology that makes a positive difference that’s most important.

Filed under: Blog, Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , — Ceri.McCall @ 5:51 pm