Collection: ATS2020: Technology and Tools for Assessment of Transversal Skills

ATS2020 User Support - Guides for Tools (D. 2.4)

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This page is a collection of guides for tools for the ATS2020 pilot. It contains introductions to Mahara and Office 365/OneNote Class Notebook. Collected are further presentations (mainly slides and screencasts) on certain operations and/or tools within the mentioned Learning Platforms (mainly Mahara) and points to answers for frequently asked questions around Mahara and Office 365/OneNote Class Notebook as well as to further reading and information.

These guides for tools do also reflect the further development of tools and technology for ATS2020, as upgrades of the platforms incorporated changes done to suit the project ATS2020 (like a new dashboard for Mahara).

This ePortfolio page is mainly devoted to the technological side of tools, with a strong focus on the project's main platforms (Mahara and O365/OneNote Class Notebook). For scaffolding tools for assessment, as developed for ATS2020, please refer to the ATS2020 Resources Portal.

Workshop: How to choose an ePortfolio platform

At the ATS2020 Final Conference on 2 February 2018, the following workshop was held:

ePortfolios: Pedagogical Contexts and Choosing an ePortfolio Platform

Facilitators: Andrea Ghoneim, Danube University Krems (Austria) and Nicolas Kanaris, Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (Cyprus)

Research in a variety of contexts supports the pedagogical potential of ePortfolios. This is supported through the ATS2020 Learning Model and this workshop will focus on two potential ePortfolio platforms Mahara and Office 365/OneNote Class Notebook which were used by schools in the ATS2020 pilot implementation.

The material used at the workshop can be found in this collection, at the page devoted to "Tools and Affordances for Student-Centered Learning and Assessment"

New in Mahara 17.04

Assessment with Mahara

Group pages

In the Trainer Online Forum, you can find a page showing how students (and teachers) can work collaboratively in a group. The Screencast embedded in the page is done while this very page was created :-)

Quick help: Change E-Mail-Address

Gregor shows you in the Group "Admin Support" how to change your primary E-Mail-Address in a few steps. Those of you who are Administrators of ATS2020-Institutions should BTW be members of this group as we will use it also for important informations on downtimes (rare, but sometimes necessary), bugs etc. Did we forget to add you? Please request membership or write to gregor.pirker@donau-uni.ac.at in order to be added.

Mahara QuickHelp: Lost Passwords

Those checking this page who are in the role of an institution admin might have this problem frequently: a lost pawwords prevents your user from entering Mahara. The slides below show you how to change the password of this user. NB: the user can also click on "Lost password" to get a link that resets his/her password. However, such mails do end up in Spam very frequently, so it is helpful to be able to reset your users passwords...

Mahara QuickHelp: Lost Passwords: The slides

Mahara: User Settings and First Steps

About the Screencast below

Screencasting is a good way to communicate instructions, like the ones for working with a program. I made a screencast on creating and sharing pages in Mahara with the free online tool "Screencast-o-Matic". You find the result below for download. If I published the result on YouTube, I could also embed the video in this page.

Screencast: Create and Share Pages

"My Learning" in Mahara

To work with the Mahara plugin "MyLearning" you can use

Webinar Recording "Managing Institutions in Mahara"

Webinar "Managing Institutions in Mahara" on Friday, 22 January 2016 (and "rehearsal" on 19 Jan): The Slides for the webinar are published below. The recording of the Webinar is available online here.

Manage Institutions in Mahara

Export ePortfolios from Mahara and import them to (another) Mahara

Recording of "Working with Groups in Mahara"

The recording of the webinar "Working with Groups in Mahara" (held on 15 April 2016) is available here, the presentation is below. Have fun with the group-work!

Work with Groups in Mahara

The Deliverable 2.4 as a PDF

Working with Office 365 and OneNote Class Notebook

Below, you can find the presentation that was basis of the ATS2020 webinar held by Nicolas Kanaris on O365 and OneNote Class Notebook in February 2016. Below you can find the presentation for the webinar. The workspace can be entered by ATS2020 Partners via our Sharepoint Site. External users and project partners alike can find guides for OneNote Class Notebook via the ATS2020 Resources Portal.

Working with MS Office 365 and OneNote - the 1st webinar (02/2016)

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OneNote Class Notebook as an ePortfolio

Edita Rabizaite, ATS2020 partner and known personally to many of us from the ATS2020 trainers' workshop in Krems, contributed to the MS Office blogs with a post on "OneNote Class Notebook as an ePortfolio" (posted April 20, 2016). As her didactic settings for creating ePortfolios within OneNote Class Notebook are quite similar to the ones used in EUfolio and ATS2020, her blogpost is almost a perfect guideline how work with Office 365/OneNote Class notebook could look like for ATS2020 pilot classes. She illustrates her work with graphics - and thus makes everyone eager to start trying out her/his own teaching and learning experience with OneNote Class Notebook!

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Introductory lesson for students on the use of Office 365 and the ATS2020 project

At the ATS2020 resources portal, a presentation and an instruction sheet give a suggestion on how to introduce students to the ATS2020 project and the Offie 365 learning environment. The lesson aims at introducing students to the project and its key elements, to explain their role and general tasks, to introduce the Office 365 environment. This is done through tasks/activities basing on the ATS2020 learning model (My learning journal, creating an ePortfolio).

The teacher can use the presentation as a tool for his/her lesson or use the ideas for a different approach using different tools (eg OneNote Class Notebook, worksheets etc.)

WA "ATS2020 Learning Environments"

The Working Activity (WA) "ATS2020 Learning environments" gives you a good insight into the ATS2020 tools and technology plan at the beginning of the project and a range of further links for working with both Office 365/OneNote Classbook and Mahara.

The old cover letter

E-Portfolio pages should be introduced by a cover letter. I drafted this one in February 2016 and refreshed the content a couple of times. As I find it outdated, again, I redrafted the description of this page to serve as a cover letter. Out of a sentimental feeling, I keep this cover letter, as well. (Andrea Ghoneim, 2017-07-27)

Dear trainers, partners, users,

the first Mahara guides of this collection were still made for the "old" Mahara (mahara.eufolio.eu), so some operations described below might look a little different. I hope, however, the pdf guides are still helpful for you to set up your own training material.

In addition to the pdf guides, you can find recordings of webinars which were held on the basis of some of these guides. Furthermore, you can find screencasts. Please scroll down for the newest resource ("Assessment with Mahara").

Please do not hesitate to post in the Trainer Online Forum or to contact Andrea Ghoneim if you want guidance material for any type of activities within Mahara. If you would like to have the slide presentations which are the basis for the pdf guides, I am also happy to share them with you.

And, of course, I can always offer additional webinars on request :-)

Funding

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Disclaimer

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Creative Commons license

Comments

Gasper Cankar
21 April 2016, 1:58 PM

Everything in one place! Thanks!

Andrea, this is awesome!

Andrea Ghoneim
21 April 2016, 10:20 PM

Wow, I already had a visitor! Thanks for the compliment :-) It was actually Nicolas who had the idea to collect all guidance material (there is also a collection of these files on Sharepoint).

In order to have _really_ everything in one place I added a screencast about "Creating and sharing pages with Mahara". We did this activity live during our workshop in Krems last year, but I thought there might be some trainers who'd maybe like to refresh their skills.

Of course, everyone is invited to reuse the material collected here for his/her own trainings.

Reet Taimsoo
25 April 2016, 3:34 PM

Dear Andrea, it really has been fun to create pages and try out things on Mahara. thank you so much for all these tutorials and explanations! I have a question about institutions: what do the members of institution ATS2020_Estonia see? are they members of institution ATS2020 as well? when I create an institution page, is it automatically visible for all members? or should I create a group and share the page?

 

Andrea Ghoneim
27 April 2016, 11:16 AM

Dear Reet,

the members of ATS2020_Estonia see only what has been shared with:

public (the whole WWW)

registered users

and 

ATS2020_Estonia

I recommend all administrators of institutions to register themselves also as "normal" test user with an "alias" (needs a 2nd e-mail-address and a new username). This allows you to see everything as your institution members see it. Sorry that there is no role "masquerading" in Mahara (yet) - meaning that you cannot simply choose an option like "view this page as a student" (I use this feature a lot when I work with Moodle...). Of course, all Trainers are invited to join all the groups (like ATS2020 Trainer Online Forum or ATS2020 - Two Day Workshop etc.), but they will need to send a request to be added. If you wish to add a whole group, please tell me + I will make you co-admin of the group, so you can add your teachers easily. I set the page "User Support - Guides for tools" to public - so everyone has access to it, even when logged out.

Andrea Ghoneim
20 June 2016, 9:21 AM

In the attached screenshot you see how you can place a page on your "watchlist" - for example, to see a student's progress. I will make a tutorial for assessment procedures, just hope for an upgrade that will make teacher's overview easier (it is now beta-tested and hopefully out in August).

Anastasia Economou
08 September 2016, 9:40 PM

good to have all these quick guides right on the spot when you need them.

thanks, Andrea

6 comments