Our work in this area is really interesting and grabbing much of my attention. I have taken one independent learning course in the old days of paper and snail mail. I've taken several online courses - both for Act 48 credits and for college credit. I've never been part of a face to face class with an online component - I missed that wave. Now as we are looking at offering online courses and as teachers are becoming interested in offering their courses online, I've become much more aware of the workings of an online course.
What makes an effective online course?
Am I part of a cohort or am I an Island?
Do I have a schedule to maintain or do I set my own schedule?
And what does the answers to these questions mean as I'm designing my online content?
Now that we are gathering more experience about the workings of online courses I am ready to try my hand at building a course in Scoodle for training teachers which is stand alone and robust enough to award Act 48 credit. Maybe I'll begin with SchoolWires.....
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Learning Management Systems
Thoughts of this have been stirring around in my head for a few months - time to commit the thoughts to digital ink. :)
In December we invited a trainer from Remote Learner, Michelle Moore, to do some advanced Moodle training. We had her spend one day with the district ITSs and some folks from Computer Services then she spent two days doing sessions with teachers who are already using Scoodle and ready to advance to the next level.
Having some targeted professional development is so uplifting. Michelle is an extremely competent trainer, has classroom experience (Middle School Math!) and does a good job reading her audience. The day spent with computer services was a great opportunity to collectively reflect on our current Moodle implementation and to set some goals for next steps. Moodle has tremendous potential for allowing us to take quick snapshots of student understanding with immediate feedback (using quizzes) and also allows for transparent differentiation of content delivery and assessment using Groups and Groupings. It's always exciting to find more power in existing tools to give us some focus instead of needing to seek additional tools to accomplish our instructional objectives.
I look forward to investing more time doing further explorations of the power of Moodle and also look forward to sharing much of what we learned with teachers.
In December we invited a trainer from Remote Learner, Michelle Moore, to do some advanced Moodle training. We had her spend one day with the district ITSs and some folks from Computer Services then she spent two days doing sessions with teachers who are already using Scoodle and ready to advance to the next level.
Having some targeted professional development is so uplifting. Michelle is an extremely competent trainer, has classroom experience (Middle School Math!) and does a good job reading her audience. The day spent with computer services was a great opportunity to collectively reflect on our current Moodle implementation and to set some goals for next steps. Moodle has tremendous potential for allowing us to take quick snapshots of student understanding with immediate feedback (using quizzes) and also allows for transparent differentiation of content delivery and assessment using Groups and Groupings. It's always exciting to find more power in existing tools to give us some focus instead of needing to seek additional tools to accomplish our instructional objectives.
I look forward to investing more time doing further explorations of the power of Moodle and also look forward to sharing much of what we learned with teachers.
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