For the last month, I have seen a shift here in the Seychelles at the school in the way that students share information – basically the way they are collaborating in their learning that they haven’t necessarily done before.
There are several reasons for this:
1. The school doesn’t have a VLE although it is looking into it.
2. There is a shared area for resources but these can’t be accessed at home.
3. The internet and ICT within the school is not 100% stable, partly due to the infrastructure on the island.
4. Until very recently although still not available yet the capacity and potential of the internet has been low until a cable from Africa arrived very recently here, in fact I was watching it arrive on my local beach all the way from Tanzania – check this out: http://www.nation.sc/index.php?art=27642
However since I have started teaching some groups here we have developed the need driven by the students to share large files after some quick checking of what they currently use at home in their social lives most kids had Windows Live Id’s. I introduced to them Skydrive but none of them were even aware it existed although they used hotmail all of the time.
If you are not sure what Sky Drive is although I am sure you are it is 25GB free online storage that you can share with your friends and teachers – that is what we are doing to connect the learning from school to home. So do you need a VLE?
For more information on SkyDrive check out my good friend the Tech Lemur’s post (he is one of the UK champions of Skydrive) http://techlemur.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/5-free-web-tools/
For an interesting read about VLE’s check out another friend of mine @timbuckteeth The VLE is dead or the VLE sucks: http://tinyurl.com/ybu62ph