What is Moobis and why?

So on this Sunday after our [MLabs] little launch of the Moobis.se service, some questions have come in about Moobis and especially why we started it.

But let’s do this: we rewind the tape a bit. About 7–8 years… A municipal school in Stockholm that was really struggling financially, a school that had a couple of years of reconstruction, changes of principals and other things.

But… also a school that has a fantastic core of good and competent staff. Staff with a wide range of skills who are not afraid to use or show them. Staff who have fun together, like to bounce ideas around and create things together.

So what does this have to do with Moobis? Well, everything to do with Moobis and the idea behind Moobis. In the following years we learned that obstacles exist to be worked around. If we can’t get around them, we blast our way through. And if we really wanted to work with modern tools, try to make teaching meaningful and real, we had to squeeze everything out of the small resources we had.
With all the different types of hardware we and the students had, the idea of platform-independent tools became a reality. We started building web services and setting up blogs that would, for the most part, only need a web browser to work.

Kunskapshubben, Wordpress blogs, Bibblis, Mattenauterna and all these services come out of that. We were just trying to find simple solutions, without prestige and independent of status, that worked for us.
And we still do. Solutions that came from what we needed. From the school, by the school. Grassroots-developed. Slowly but surely the finances improved and finally got really good, as we got more and more students. We grew and gained even more top teachers. And finally we could also roll out equipment to students on a larger scale. And then we were ready.

We had our ecosystem of services. Looking around the world a bit, I get the feeling that most often people go the other way — that is, they roll out a bunch of equipment and then start thinking about how it should be used.

See for example the NESTA report about how England has spent around £1 billion over the past 5 years on IT in schools.

Slowly but surely schools across Sweden also started contacting us and lectures, round-table talks, study visits and other things are almost part of our everyday life nowadays. But we have a long way to go. It still feels like we’re at the starting blocks. But with fantastic opportunities.

Because there are many things we do not / have not been able to decide ourselves about, such as hardware and other bigger things, we have nevertheless had the opportunity from both the municipality and school management to operate freely regarding the possibilities of the web. A lot of freedom and hands off the cookie jar, but it isn’t like that everywhere and many testify to that in all the conversations I’ve had with school people around our country.
Not everyone also has the opportunity to build their own services, but the drive to use digital tools is there.

And that’s where we step in. Martin Claesson and I thought there is a gap that needs to be filled. A gap between the pedagogical workshop floor, where we need quick access to simple services — up to what is often ordered by municipalities and others in the form of complicated, locked-in, custom-built systems.

The possibilities of being able to build your own teaching materials, use tools that are actually used in the real world, showcase students’ work and let them have an authentic audience are just some of the advantages we’ve seen and continue to see.
Moobis.se is the first service we release. It’s a Wordpress multisite that makes it possible to set up blogs/websites with a few clicks and in a matter of minutes. It’s also ad-free.
I’ve seen some unpleasant examples of advertising on school blogs, but that’s another story.

It’s also a way of saying thank you. A thank you to everyone who fills us with energy, thoughts and ideas. And a hope that together in schools we can continue to build a modern school that is relevant to our students.

We hope that Moobis.se can be built by those of us who work in schools. If you lack opportunities, get in touch!

Join our Facebook group or email us. Thanks from us and don’t forget that what is always most important is the teacher. Technology is just a tool.

”What is clear is that no technology has an impact on learning in its own right…" - from the NESTA report

LINKS: http://moobis.se