Re: [school-discuss] FOSS Professional development courses for teachers

On 16/02/2008, Richard Andrews <bbmaj7@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is some discussion going on in the linux users victoria edu-sig list.
If you're interested in subscribing you can follow the links to the subscription page from http://www.luv.asn.au .

I think your experience makes sense. My reason for starting this investigation is that my son has just started school and his school is rolling out MS Groove to all students on Intel UMPCs. Basic reaserch on Groove shows it to be a horrible vendor lock-in tool. The reason for the app choice, however, lines up with your experiences. The main driver for Groove seems to be to allow peer-to-peer learning and collaboration. Unfortunately I think the school has been sold a dud: reports I have seen show that Groove grinds to a halt if the number of devices on the LAN grows much beyond 20. The school has ~350 kids.

So I have a number of personal aims:
* Showcase the open source apps for collaborative learning.
* Showcase the value of open source communities.
* Be ready with a solution if Groove falls in a heap.
* Educate school staff about FOSS in general and why FOSS is important for the future of IT around the world.

The local school part is mostly wait and see, but in the interim I'm getting up to speed and trying to contribute to related efforts.

----- Original Message ----

From: Peter Ruwoldt <ruwoldtp@xxxxxxxxx>

To: schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Saturday, 16 February, 2008 8:31:36 AM

Subject: Re: [school-discuss] FOSS Professional development courses for teachers

Hi Richard

This is exciting.  I'm situated just across the border in South Australia, Mount Gambier.

I have a lot of experience with Moodle and suggest that the starting point for people is to explore the range of activities within it.

http://moodle-tutorials.blogspot.com/

http://moodle.koolskoolonline.com/course/view.php?id=28

One of the key mistakes I made when starting to put my learning resources etc online was to engineer the course so that the students where interacting with a machine.  It is important to design activities to facilitate interaction and so good use of tools like forums is important.  ie create opportunities for interaction with peers and teachers.

Schools have become more complex with students taking on courses where they are in a workplace or have part time work and so it is often rare that all students are in class.  The great thing about asynchronous discussion is that students can pickup easily when they return.  There are also students who are reluctant to engage in discussion.  Mentoring them in a F2F discussion is almost impossible but with asynchronous discussion you can sit with them and coach them about their involvement.

My experience is that generally boys come onboard with online learning quicker than girls.  They invariably say very early in their experience that they really like it because they can work at their pace.  From a teacher perspective, 'pacing' the course is a challenge.  The Moodle logs indicate that their are some students accessing my moodle site at all hours of the day and night.  I have a few students submitting work when they are home sick, and at odd times like late on Friday night etc.

I guess I am saying that exposing teachers to Moodle's tools is one aspect of the training.  It is useful to embed this within an understanding of good elearning practice and theory.

As far as wiki space is concerned I make a lot of use of Wikispaces.  It is free, the UI is very easy and if, when you create your space you indicate that it is for K-12 education you get it advertisement free.  I think there is a limit of 2gig.  I have tried to use MediaWiki with teachers and the UI has been an obstacle for too many.

Peter

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