My experience with attempting to get grade 12’s to use LMS-like functionalities on blogs or wikis was part of extended PBL units. The more I read in this course, the more restrictive I recognize the main players in LMS like Blackboard but I also feel like their main value is as a base of mothership to other web tools.

In my first PBL experience, I jumped right in with an unstructured format and the students panicked. They were used to the structure and predictability of a traditional classroom and the only way they could rationalize what I was attempting was to believe that I was “making it up as I was going along.” It got better as soon as they began to understand PBL but they always pushed-back when it came to using sites as an LMS (“we can do this on paper; why use a computer?).

In retrospect, if I had started on Moodle and introduced the concept behind inquiry and PBL, I could have had more buy-in. At that point I could encourage them to make appropriate web tool and media choices. I don’t think you can start unstructured and then attempt to go back to a structured system: it’s one way traffic.

This ties-in with experience and context. My students resisted PBL because they were unfamiliar with it. If and when I teach students in the future who have experience with it and acceptance of LMS-like web platforms (like Wikispaces, Edmodo etc), then the jump to a full LMS with companion sites would be normalized. The insidious problem that I see in the public school system is that many teachers perpetuate they way that they were taught as the norm an silo themselves away from progressive pedagogies. The result is students that come to expect those traditional methods.

As new teachers come into the system who have used LMS in their own education – and have strong opinions on what they liked and didn’t like – there is an opportunity for change. Unfortunately there will be a lag time before that happens (let’s hope those new teacher will not be copying the linear delivery and control functions of Connect).

Right now I’m thinking of an approach where my blended class starts the year with an LMS an gets familiar with its functionality. After a period of time, we assess the LMS for likes and dislikes, then both students and myself present other web tools where the desired functions are outsourced. The class would then decide as a whole on those tools versus making it wide open, which would put demands on everyone to have logins to view each others work etc.