Our school needs a dedicated Moodle server.  Being a small rural community school, a Learning Management System (LMS) will promote learning beyond the classroom supplementing our face-to-face learning and supporting student learning and collaboration, as well as teacher collaboration.

Moodle is an Open Source Software (OSS) for course management.  Teachers will be able to create course content and manage online activities for students in their daily courses.  In a world becoming more and more technologically advanced we need to create opportunities to teach students how to learn in an online environment as more and more courses are being offered online, especially for students in rural areas where enrollment numbers might jeopardize course offerings (Barbour & Reeves, 2009).

There are other LMS software packages available, such as Desire2Learn, Vista/WebCT and Moodle.  These were evaluated carefully evaluation using a detailed scalable rubric focused on different LMS’s design qualities in terms of the SECTIONS framework, as developed by Bates & Poole (2003). The key categories of Students, Ease of Use, Cost, Teaching & Learning, Interactivity, Organization, Novelty, and Speed are adaptable to any school, and help ensure that all relevant issues and points are considered. Within our rubric, each of the eight sections further breakdown to identify the points relevant to the issues at our school.  These guidelines provided an ideal evaluation for choosing the appropriate LMS that will meet the needs of our school:  MOODLE.

Moodle has many online activities to engage Students in our school:  forums, databases, wikis, blogs, chats.  Since all students at our school claim to have computers at home this is a great opportunity to engage them in collaborative learning online at school and at home.  These are all Interactive activities to develop skills in social constructivism and social constructionism in a world built around communities of practice (Dougiamas and Taylor, 2003).  Other tools which I noted as being particularly relevant to our population of K-8 students would be the use of online quizzes and self-assessment where students could build their skills on taking ownership of their efforts.

Moodle is also easy to use and very well supported with online tutorials and teacher forums to help new teachers support and collaborate to build and develop their skills online.  Using the interface for only a few times I was able to essentially build my own blocks and in an organized course layout and I even saw how courses could easily be adapted, backed-up and changed for different users.  There are even demos and sample courses to explore online to help speed up your time on task and generate new novel professional ideas.

Most importantly, the cost of integrating a Moodle server in our school is negligible.  The software itself is free, it is very well supported on the web and our IT shared services department would install the program for free.  Really, the only costs incurred would be bringing in an expert to do a training day with staff to introduce and teach the teachers how to get started.  Even that cost could be drawn from our allocated PD funds for achieving our school development goal of better staff student communication.  With all these positives, the only question is:  how can we afford not to implement a Moodle server!

References

Barbour, M. K., & Reeves, T. C. (2009). The Reality of Virtual Schools: A Review of the Literature. Computers & Education , 52 (2), 402-416.

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.

Dougiamas, Martin and Peter Taylor(2003)Moodle:  Using Learning Communities to Create an Open Source Course Management System.  Retrieved online June 10, 2010  from http://www.editlib.org

Panettieri, Joseph C. (2007).  Addition by Subtraction.  University Business, August, 58-62.  Accessed online May 26, 2010 http://www.univeristybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=845

Perkins, M., Pfaffman, J. (2006).  Using a Course Management System to Improve Classroom Communication.  Science Teacher73(7), 33-37.