• Read ‘Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns‘. Not only did I read the book, I blogged my reflections on it here.
• Learn more about teaching using Moodle. I chose this as a goal because my district was moving over to using Moodle as our learning management system (LMS).  Prior to that we offered on-line courses through Open School BC and their WebCT system.  Regrettably, I did not spend much time on this particular goal.  I was very familiar with Moodle from the perspective of a student and as a facilitator (thank you KnowSchools!) and I had taken an introductory course on Moodle in June.  I guess I’m just saying that it’s not like I was totally unprepared for the change over to Moodle.  I hope to write more on the change over to Moodle in a little while.
• Prepare for the two professional development sessions I will be facilitating at the end of the summer. I spent A LOT of time on this one.  In fact I probably spent too much time on it.  I’m guessing I put at least 10 hours of preparation for each session; the sessions were around 3.5 hours each.  In the end I enjoyed doing the sessions, but found that it is really difficult to design a session for all levels of technical ability.  I plan on writing more about these sessions, but at this point I’ll just leave you with the link to the website I created to support the course.  My goal was to provide participants with the information so that they could progress through the different topics at their own pace.

So, I feel good about how I did on two of the three goals and overall I’m pretty pleased with the PD part of my summer.  Now excuse me while I go and spend a bit more time learning to Moodle…

Photo by ohhector
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a distributed learning school (DL) and have limited face-to-face contact with my students. My students are in grades 8 to 11 and I am responsible for math and science. At this point, these courses are paper based. Their other core courses, English and Social Studies, are delivered in WebCT.

A challenge has been setting up an effective way to communicate directly with all of the students. Many of the 8s and 9s do not have an e-mail that they use, so e-mail communication is mainly through a family or parent account. We do have a school website where Google Calendars for each of the grades are posted. This has worked well in terms of posting time-lines and important dates, but not much else.  Add to the mix the fact that I have very few so called digital natives in the group, and perhaps you can understand my difficulties. (Teaching 21st century literacy skills to this group will be a whole other post…)

Wikis?

I have only dabbled in using wikis, so this past Professional Development (PD) day I set up test wikis in Wetpaint and Wikispaces. After tinkering around for a bit, I felt that I was just duplicating what I already have on the school website, so I don’t think that the wiki is necessarily the way to go to improve communication with my students.

Moodle?

I’ve used Moodle a little bit; as a participant in a few KnowWeeks courses, and I was part of an Open School BC pilot project delivering Science 10 through Moodle. My district is hosting Moodle in house (as part of the one to one tablet laptop program, I believe), but to access Moodle students have to get onto the district server using Citrix and then log onto Moodle. Citrix can be a little slow and has a nasty habit of kicking you off. I looked into a Moodle hosting service and they seem to fall into two groups–the “it’s too good to be true” $5 per month options and the “wow, that’s a lot of clams for a small school” $5000+ per year options.

WebCT Students’ Lounge

Photo by imedagoze
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An idea that my colleague suggested is setting up a “Students’ Lounge” in WebCT, in which all students would be registered. Announcements and batch e-mails could be easily handled here. In addition, almost all students should already be signing into WebCT every day. I have to find out if there would be any costs to setting up this ‘course’ and enrolling all our students.

Where It’s At

Right now, barring cost, the best option would appear to be setting up a Students’ Lounge in WebCT. I’ll also investigate to see if the district could be convinced to make Moodle available out of house (is that the opposite of in house?)

How Do You Do It?

If you don’t see your students face to face on a regular basis, how do you ensure that communication is effective and efficient? Are there other tools out there that I should be investigating?  As always, thanks for taking the time to read this!

• provide all 8 – 10 students with lap tops (currently we provide computers for most 8 – 10s, but laptops only to those students who will be traveling.)
• offer more ‘mini courses’ to 8 – 10s on specific web 2.0 topics–eg a mini-course on blogging where the students come to our school with their laptops to learn with each other how to set up and effectively use a blog.
• Improve our school website so that it becomes the effective portal that Jeff Utech discusses in his tech plan series.
• Move to a single Learning Management System (LMS)–currently we use Moodle, Web CT and we have paper based courses. I would like to see us move to something like Moodle (though I need to learn much more about it to fully understand all that it can offer). I’m leaning toward Moodle because it is free open source software and from what I’ve seen so far it does a pretty good job.
• Educate our students’ parents about the web 2.0 tools that we are using with their kids so that have less fear about their kids being on-line. Perhaps a series of workshops, or invitations to parents to attend and participate in the ‘mini courses’ that I mentioned earlier.
• Student Information System? Is ours working? Can it work better (I think so)?

I’m sure I’ll add more to my list in the coming weeks, but this is a start at least.