My Moodle
I’ve been inspired by the course to create an online supplemented by a face-to-face tutorial for Physics 11 and 12. I’ve missed the classroom and would like to get back to working with kids. Here is the start of the course that I will transfer to one of my Moodle sites.
Flight Path
I’m quite happy to say that my wants and needs from the course as I set them out in my flight path have been fulfilled. I’ve added a snippet below.
Throughout the program I’ve been able to focus on learning about pedagogy and research related to educational technology as I already had a lot of technical experience. With that in mind I look forward to learning more about the pedagogy around the use of various activities an learning new ones which never fails to happen in this program.
I then plan on implementing, where appropriate, new tools, and utilizing new knowledge around pedagogical use to encourage/convince teachers that these tools will help their students in their learning, and improve their teaching toolbox as well.
Bates and Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS framework and Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) 7 Principles framework are a great place for me to start (and plan on printing them off and posting on my wall) as they offer a great way to look at practical and pedagogical issues around educational technology.
While I haven’t yet framed up the SECTIONS and Principles framework I do intent to! The course has provided a plethora of material and thoughts from colleagues that I have found very valuable! Works from Anderson, Alexander, Bates & Poole, Chickering & Gamson, Lamb (love his blog too), Perkins & Pfaffman etc. and their ideas will help me carry on the task of convincing classroom teachers that the use of educational technology is more than just a Learning Outcome. It will help me convince them that the use of educational technology such as the semantic web/web2.0 tools will allow for higher quality and collaborative learning, differentiated instruction, inclusion of parents/community/world into the electronic classroom, as well as better and more efficient use of a teacher’s time.
Reflection on e-Learning Toolkit
Following John Stringers’ lead I’ll breakup the toolkit into parts as well.
Moodle: There are some really big fans of Moodle and I am proudly one of them. I’ve had a lot of experience in Moodle and have worked with educators in my district to increase its use as an excellent LMS. While I didn’t spend much time looking at the inner workings of the UBC Moodle as I am familiar due to several servers I run, I am greatly appreciative that all users had administrative access to the server. I think having a sandbox where you can poke around the back-end is important for educators who are looking to implement an LMS in their classroom/school/district. This is especially true when many districts hold strict control over what you can do with technology and in some cases apparently (sadly) listen little to the needs of their teachers.
The splash page navigation was something that I had never thought of for my moodle sites. I’m quite happy to have seen this and will likely include it in other places. I will also share the ideas with my distance education school as I work with them to move past paper based course transferred to the web to actual web2.0 enabled courses.
Vista/Blackboard: A seemingly simple improvement/change to the Vista environment happened in this course for me. When I opened new posts in the discussions I was able to reply to them without losing all the other comments. In previous course I would lose the new comments after replying to just one. Simple but it dramatically increased my enjoyment of the discussions as I was able to easily read and reply without having to search through everything.
I found the course in Vista to provide a tremendous amount of resources including theoretical and pedagogical resources. Support and sharing through forums from other students was outstanding.
A few things needed some polish as I expect happens with a new course as is evident through the many announcements that mentioned changes or discrepancies between the assessment page and the unit pages for example. The announcement tool was very well utilized and kept me abreast of any changes that I needed to pay attention to. Much appreciated!
One thing I would love to know about Blackboard is how much does it cost UBC per server, course, student etc. I can’t recall seeing it anywhere in discussions or course materials.
Wiki: The e-Learning toolkit was a helpful collection of information and further resources for our various undertakings in the course. I did refer to it frequently; however I found that google search was generally my tool of choice when I forgot a specific piece of information.
I found having activities/reflections in the wiki along with activities/reflections within the course shell to be quite a bit too much. For a student struggling to keep up with new technologies and trying to complete everything would have been overwhelming. There should be one official place where students get the required work to avoid LMS fatigue.
WordPress: Another great tool that I love and have converted our school district public sites too. Now I just need to get a media/recruiting perspective into the minds of some of our principals to get more on their sites… I digress. Multiuser WordPress as UBC has nicely setup is a great blogging tool that allows for simple controls on users and viewers of the sites. Being able to allow people to sign up for their own blog and using the single-sign-on with the Campus Wide Login made this a pretty simple activity to get started (except for the frustration with the _underscores_).
I was glad to see it used again as it was in ETEC522 with David Porter and David Vogt except as individual blogs rather than just one. I would suggest using a RSS aggregation plugin for WP to pull in posts from everyone’s blogs so they can be display at one place. This provides a quick way for us to read each others reflection. An example is my districts action teams which post minutes to their own blog and a short snippet is added to the main page at http://mu.prn.bc.ca
Portfolio and SECTIONS Model
Here’s an assessment of the use of WordPress for an e-portfolio.
Students: Having used WP with students from grade 4 up to teachers and administrators, I’ve found that WP is appropriate for the students under the age of 18 and anyone who is technologically literate. Others need some hand holding mainly because of knowledge deficits with vocabulary and process in a web2.0 application.
Ease of Use: Again the technological literacy is critical for ease of use; however my training sessions using WP have ranged from 15minutes to about an hour for learning how to post, create pages, and add pictures. Relatively easy to use.
Cost: WP has free options (http://wordpress.com), or is simple to setup your own on an Apache server. Setting up your own web server is the complicated by but that is why you give your tech cookies through the year isn’t it? There are also education specific places for WP such as Edublogs (http://edublogs.org) which is also free. You can choose premium hosting from a wide variety of hosts for as little as a few dollars per month which gives you absolute control over your WP install as would installing your own web server.
Teaching and Learning: WP could easily be setup so that teachers and students could comment on each others posts in multiuser with different blogs or on a single blog where everyone is an editor. It doesn’t have the advantage of the read tracking that an LMS such as Blackboard/Moodle has. Using pages for course materials and posts for student work and replies for feedback it is an effective teaching and learning tool.
Interactivity: It is quick and easy to post and reply and can be simply aggregated into one space using RSS and tools like plugins for WP or outside tools such as Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/sd60 for example). You can also use a variety of tools for cellular phones, smartphones, iphones etc that allow you to post, read, and reply in WordPress.
Organizational Issues: Privacy rules in an institution along with the privacy wishes of students and parents where appropriate need to be addressed. Technology support is another issue that should be addressed. Does the organization support this kind of web application? Is the organizational infrastructure dependable? Alternately, is a third party provider a better choice and what are their terms of service/ownership/privacy?
Novelty: WordPress is a robust blogging tool with a very large community. Many online blogs use it for their blogging software. It is approaching it’s third version (currently at 2.8.2). It is community supported, open source, and free! While it is not new, it is a stable supported platform that instructors and designers do not need to worry about it disappearing.
Speed: WordPress has the ability to import an XML backup of another WordPress site. If the other site is still online it will also download all the media objects onto the new server. Amazingly fast to mount a new course from a blank XML copy of the site (analogous to resetting in Blackboard/Moodle)
Next Steps in Educational Technology
One step will be the printing and framing of SECTIONS and the 7 Principles for my wall in my office. Other than that I will move forward working with champions and the early adopters who desire to add technology and web2.0 tools into their classroom practice. It is my adamant belief that the time invested in learning new tools such as the ones demonstrated effectively in this course will provide students with a better education and help create better teaching and learning in our face-to-face and our distributed learning environments.
I also plan to host several technology nights for people who’d like to come in and learn more about safety, blogging and social networking. I think this may help to bridge the digital divide between our technological immigrants (parents/teachers/administrators) and our technological natives (our kids).
References
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Chickering, A.W. & Gamson, Z.F. (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), 3-7.
http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm
Boyes, J., Dowie, S. and Rumzan, I. (2005). Using the SECTIONS Framework to Evaluate Flash Media. Innovate 2(1). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=55. Accessed Oct 5, 2005.
Jarrod Bell