Adopting a Learning Platform will be different for everyone, because everyone will have a different starting point and want to achieve different goals.
Merlin will be used by a range of educational establishments, for example, schools, children's centres and youth clubs. Recognising where you are starting from and what you want to achieve is an important first step.
Schools that have used learning platforms technologies effectively identified the following essential elements for success:
- Senior Management involvement
- A clear understanding of what you want SWGfL Merlin to do for your school community
- An action plan that details how you will support and train users.
Implementing Merlin has the potential to impact on all your stakeholders, ranging from learners through to parents, admin through to governors, and even how you engage with the wider community.
To help you get started, we have identified some key steps that will support you in your planning and preparation for a Learning Platform.
Be Prepared
Understanding how prepared you are for implementing and embedding new technology is an essential part of defining your vision. Implementing Merlin will involve the management of change for your community.
Local authorities in this region are encouraging schools to use BECTA's Self-Review Framework to support change management, and whole-school development of ICT.
Implementing SWGfL Merlin will focus on specific areas of the review process, including the following:
- Infrastructure / access
- Staff confidence/ competence with ICT
- Senior management commitment
- Time
- Support
- And, most importantly, a "can do" attitude
Share your vision
As a senior manager, you will be aware of how Learning Platform technologies are now being recognised as strategic tools in harnessing technology to support teaching and learning in your school.
As a school community you may prioritise one or more of the following key areas as your starting point for Merlin:
- Collaborate to support teaching and learning
- Enable communication within and beyond school
- Provide identical online services and resources wherever users are
- Involve parents and the local community
- Reducing the administrative burden on staff
Understanding what it is you want to achieve will enable you to develop your action plan
Develop an action plan
An effective action plan includes key milestones, resources, stakeholders and identified outcomes:
- Form a project team with senior management involvement and support
- Identity key priorities for development and agree the actions required
- Liaise with your local authority key contact to establish training and rollout timescales
- Engage with all stakeholders as the action plan is developed
- Appoint someone who is able to manage and communicate with everyone involved to ensure key dates and milestones are met
- Keep everyone regularly updated
- Regularly review progress.
Make Merlin work for you
This section is intended to help you decide whether the ICT systems you have available in school are appropriate to support your planned use of Merlin. SWGfL Merlin is an internet-based system, hosted and protected by the SWGfL, and all users will have their own personal login ID's and passwords, linked to their establishment. This means that all you need to do is go to the Merlin site and log in – from any internet-connected device in school, at home or elsewhere (such as a local library, Children's Centre, community facility, internet café, etc).
In the early stages you may decide to use Merlin with only a few users, such as a small group of pupils, or just staff, so your existing ICT infrastructure will not suffer too much additional pressure. However, over time it is likely that both pupils and staff may well need to use Merlin fairly intensively – whole classes or year groups, large number of users accessing it at once, using their individual user id's (apart from, perhaps, Early Years) to access their online personalised spaces.
To support this, you will need to make provision for many more systems to have access to the internet, at the same time as having access to school-based resources and information. This is most readily made available through a whole-school server-based network, to which all devices are connected. Your ICT infrastructure – servers, switches, cabled and wireless access, computers and other devices, and your internet access – will need to be appropriate, robust and very reliable. If your internet access is frustratingly slow, or software runs on your computers really slowly, or network login takes 20 minutes – then don't launch into using Merlin widely before making significant local improvements!
Once it is fully integrated with MIS providers, Merlin will need to be closely and continuously linked to the school's MIS, so that any changes made to the MIS (e.g a new pupil arriving, or a family leaving the area), can be reflected in the Merlin set up almost immediately. Additionally, should a pupil arrive in your school with a Merlin account already created by their previous school in the SW region, a Merlin account will already exist and this can be assigned to your school, keeping their existing e-portfolio and the contents of their personal space.