Category Archives: Online learning

Uses of online learning tools like forums, Moodle, etc.

STP #8: A chat with the gang

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It’s been long in coming, but the newest installment of the Savvy Technologist Podcast has finally arrived. But it’s not the usual STP. I’ve always enjoyed the Gillmor Gang podcast and I’ve wanted to do something like it in the educational technology category for a long time. Now that I’ve got the home studio operational I leaped at the opportunity to record a Skype conference call with some friends from “coast to coast.”

Steve Burt from Clarity Innovations is the moderator and I’m joined by Tim Lauer and Will Richardson for the inaugural Educational Technologists Coast to Coast Podcast. At least that’s the title one of us thought of about 10 seconds before I hit the record button. (It’s not a bad name, but other suggestions would be welcomed.) We hit a number of topics including Web 2.0 and its implications for education, utilizing the Web for school communications, frustrations about the slow uptake of Web technology in schools, student information systems, and each of us recommends a bit of technology that we think ed tech people should have on their radar screens.

Quick production note: you’ll hear some audio artifacts and a bit of distortion in the other guys’ voices. This is a result of the fixes that were required to bring everyone to approximately the same volume. It’s not too bad considering this is a first attempt, but I think we can crank up the production quality a bit next time. I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Download: STP-ETC2C (18.6 MB, 40:28)

The Internet Classroom Assistant

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I’m working as a mentor in several ISTE Institute sessions this year and one of the participant’s comments took me back several years to my first experience using online discussion forums with students. She was describing an idea for a student activity and my first thought was that it would be great to have the students interact in a forum setting about the work they were doing. My second thought was that there is no way for this individual teacher to set up her own server running Moodle to create an online course. Blackboard? Forget about it.

It’s easy to forget that even open source software like Moodle has costs associated with it. Not every teacher has a spare server or knowledge of configuring server software, much less a supportive tech department that encourages creativity and innovation. (Don’t get me started on that one.) What if there was a free service on the Internet that let teachers create online courses that could be used to post links, share documents, and host discussions?

That rather long intro brings me to the Internet Classroom Assistant. If you’d like to experiment with adding online components to your face-to-face classes, the ICA might be just what you’ve been looking for. The site has been around since 1998 and I think I used it with my high school physics class around 2000. It’s not fancy, but it’s free, simple, fast, and has no ads. Read about their philosophy and some of the ICA features. Does it do everything Moodle does? Not even close. Does that matter? Not for someone who wants to dip their toes into the online learning world and see how they like it.

Moodle update

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I installed Moodle on a spare server last June as an experiment. Since my district was an online learning pioneer in Minnesota and continues to work in that area as part of the Northern Star Online collaborative, it seemed logical to see if some of our teachers who have gained experience teaching online might be interested in incorporating some of those skills into their face-to-face courses. The results, at least in terms of popularity, have been dramatic.

What began as a little-promoted experiment has turned into a system that serves nearly 1,600 students in 150 courses across the district. We’ve got teachers and students doing online forums, journaling, sharing links, making wikis, and using many of the other standard Moodle modules. Most of the teachers are using Moodle as a simple course Web page system, posting links to relevant Web sites and uploading course documents, but the flexibility of the Moodle system makes it possible to start simple and add more interactive elements later.

I don’t know how long we can sustain the current growth rate, but I look for Moodle to take off in our elementary schools next. The elementary teachers who are using it love how easy it is to assess their students’ writing. I’m also planning to explore how Moodle can be used to support online staff development. So much Moodling, so little time.

Personalized RSS

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Steve Sloan has an interesting post today where he references a ZDNet article and talks about one-to-one, secure RSS feeds. Interesting concept and one I hadn’t heard of before. Steve argues that this could be a great way for teachers and students to exchange information. I can see some potential there, especially, as Steve suggests, in an online learning environment as a way of meting out content.

We’re looking at new student information systems in our district this spring. Wouldn’t it be cool if all the information that parents might expect to find if they visited the “parent portal” was available as a secure, personalized RSS feed? It would be quite a chore for individual teachers to generate all the information for each student’s feed individually. The real power is leveraging all the information that’s being generated automatically by the integrated student systems and sending it out via RSS to parents (and students). School events, discipline information, attendance, school menus, account balances, library overdue notices, changes in bus schedules, teacher communications, etc. would all be interesting to include.

Teaching tech-savvy students

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In an article (subscription only) in today’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Kevin Delaney highlights some of the really cool work that a couple Hopkins teachers have been doing with online forums over the last year or so. John Unruh-Friesen and Molly Wieland have been engaging their students in authentic and engaging conversations about things that really matter.

Meanwhile, students in John Unruh-Friesen’s advanced-placement government class at Hopkins High School conduct running debates on an online forum outside of the classroom. The students, mostly 12th-graders, tackle issues including the presidential election, the possibility of a military draft and the Middle East conflict.

What the reporter doesn’t mention is that John’s students’ work on the forum is extra-curricular. Here’s an example (from memory): Last year at one point, posting on the forum hit a bit of a lull. One of the students wanted to ignite some debate so he posted a new thread entitled “Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th Century.” Not surprisingly, a number of students took the “bait” and a lively discussion ensued. What did surprise me was the nature of the debate. One pro-Reagan student found an interesting graphic showing the growth of the U.S. economy during the Reagan years and used it to support his argument. Soon after, another student posted a graphic showing the growth of the U.S. debt during the same period. That’s the kind of learning and thinking that doesn’t take place during a regular class period.

Thanks to the language support built into Moodle, the online learning tool that our teachers use to supplement their face-to-face courses, Molly’s French students interact in a forum where even the menus are in French.

The fact that they’re writing for an audience larger than just their teacher makes a difference, and what they’re saying tends to be more conversational and relevant to the students’ lives. A recent exchange between the students involved college choices and the wisdom of rooming with your best friend in the dorm—all in French.

I know that Molly’s students write more now that they’re writing for each other and not just their teacher.

I have to say that it was pretty cool to be interviewed for an article in a national newspaper. Congrats, too, to my blogging colleagues Will, Tim, and Thor who were also interviewed.