Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Week 5 Reflection: Blogs and Wikis...and Moodle?
I have been thinking a lot this week about how I want to set up the online component of my biology courses this fall. Should I use a blog, a wiki, Moodle, or a combination of all three? The Science 2.0 articles on blogs and wikis make good cases for both. All of these platforms allow students to be active participants both inside and outside the classroom. But after reading Eric's reply to a question I asked him... (http://teachingsscience20.pbworks.com/w/page/42245268/onlinediscussion), I decided to keep Moodle as my class page (teachers at our school are supposed to do so anyway) and maybe link a blog and/or wikis to that. I just haven't figured out yet how best to utilize those in my courses, or if I even need to since we use Moodle. One of the things I thought I could do with a blog was to have a different student responsible each day for posting a summary of what we did in class. Those posts, along with comments from classmates, would give us a complete record of the entire year. As for wikis, maybe they could be used for projects since students can be collaborating on them at any time from any location.
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I love the idea of having a different student posting each day. I don't know how big your district is in to Indian Ed but you could have the positioning be similar to a winter count. I also like that you haven't dismissed any one tool and that you can see the positives in them all.
ReplyDeleteI think it is a good idea to start simple and add. I think we all get overloaded. Three of the regular chem teachers used class blogs this year, including both tech mentors. You might want to talk to them about what worked and what didn't.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree that having a learning management system (LMS) of some sort is the best place to start. Many of the tools we have checked out would be great for a project here or there, but the bread and butter (so to speak) needs to be basic. Learning to effectively integrate online discussion is critical.
ReplyDeleteI was able to attend a few of the capstone presentations of Eric's advisees that focused on this type of interaction and came away with some good ideas. One teacher assigned small groups for discussion rather than the whole class. I am currently in a class that is doing this right now and I like that it is more "manageable" than when 30+ folks are chiming in. He assigned the groups randomly and would give them a current event with a leading question and students had one week to make their comments.
In my single classroom wiki project, I found that there was a pretty steep learning curve for students when they had the power to completely edit a web page. Some student's hard work went missing after lesser competent students took a try at it. Therefore, I like the idea of a wiki that they can only comment on, or a blog they can comment on. I would save the wiki they can edit for a specific project, and maybe once they got the hang of it try to incorporate it more often.
Sounds like you've put some thought and research into the different resources you can use in your class. I just wanted to mention that our school district requires the teachers to use Moodle. There is a blog feature on Moodle. Obviously it's not as fancy or detailed as a separate blogging website, but it still has the basic capabilities. I've only tinkered with it a little bit after reading your post. Essentially, all students have a blog setup under their profile. I'm going to explore it some more to see if has the features and capabilities that I'm looking for. If you decide to take a look at it, let me know your thoughts.
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