School systems

Moodle

Moodle – Moodle has lots of activities that enable students to communicate and collaborate:

• a variety of Forum types and the OU Blog to engage students in reciprocal conversations, or allow them to ask and answer questions

• Hot Questions - ask students what they need to go over again and others can upvote.

• Wiki - a basic wiki style space where students can collate text and multimedia to create a digital artefact/ shared resource

• Glossary - allow students to define course specific terminology together, encouraging peer learning and building up collective knowledge

• For more ideas, contact eden.digital@lse.ac.uk or consult our Moodle Matrix or browse our Moodle guides

Microsoft

• OneDrive – Personal storage includes 1TB of storage for all staff and students. All staff and students with an active LSE network account have access to a whole suite of MS products, all of which can save files in the cloud and allow for shared editing. Shareable files include

  • Word documents

  • Excel Spreadsheets

  • PowerPoint Presentations

• OneNote

  • See this guide on how you might use OneNote for teaching.

• Microsoft Teams

  – A collaboration tool based around a chat interface.  Documents can be uploaded to the Team for discussion and editing. Teams also has a shared inbox and calendar.  Staff and students can request a Team via an online form.  Any member of LSE (staff or student) can be added to a Team by the Team owner.

• Also see DTS guidance on collaborative working tools.

External Tools

1. Anyone who uses it is allowing it to access and use the contacts on their phone. Some people might not be happy about that.

2. WhatsApp / Facebook grants itself certain permissions over your content:

“In order to operate and provide our Services, you grant WhatsApp a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, display, and perform the information (including the content) that you upload, submit, store, send, or receive on or through our Services. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating and providing our Services”

1. There is no guarantee provided around the service – so the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the service is not in any way to be relied upon:

WE WILL USE REASONABLE SKILL AND CARE IN PROVIDING OUR SERVICES TO YOU AND IN KEEPING IT A SAFE, SECURE, AND ERROR-FREE ENVIRONMENT, BUT WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THAT WHATSAPP WILL ALWAYS FUNCTION WITHOUT DISRUPTIONS, DELAYS, OR IMPERFECTIONS. YOU USE OUR SERVICES AT YOUR OWN RISK AND SUBJECT TO THE FOLLOWING DISCLAIMERS. WE ARE PROVIDING OUR SERVICES ON AN “AS IS” BASIS WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES

That means, in terms of “using Whatsapp communication as evidence in case of complaints”, we won’t be able to provide any forensic evidence, and nor will WhatsApp provide any verifiability on any message sent through the network.