MOODLE - We have several teachers in our school using this right now. They are primarily English teachers, although there are a few others thrown in. I've seen some great discussions about classroom readings on Moodle. Kids can be remarkable in their insight when you remove some of their peer pressures. Moodle helps make an even playing field for discussions. I can see myself using it to generate discussions about the bigger, over-arching concepts that accompany a lot of Social Studies lessons.
BLOGS - Realistically, I think it would be hard to use blogs at a middle level because of the lack of control. What is to stop kids from ranting inappropriately? I guess you would have to create a very trusting climate, and have clear understanding of the rules and expectations for the tool My teaching neighbor and I had an idea (when we used to teach English) to create a blog where we would accumulate book reviews over the years. Student X reads The Giver, and writes a review on the blog, and then it is available for students to use in that and subsequent years. It never really got off the ground though.
VOICETHREAD & SKYPE - These are terrific resources, but not necessarily in one classroom. Now if you wanted to communicate between a few classes on a common lesson (integration?), Skype and VoiceThread would be great. Or, maybe when my kids are learning about Brazil, we could Skype with a Brazilian classroom? Skype saves me tons of money on long distance calls every year, so it will always be good in my book.
GOOGLE DOCS - I think this is really a terrific tool, especially for collaborative work. I had a professor last fall, who would give us time in class to work on a task, type it up in google docs, and share it with the class. It was tremendously interactive, and it moved class along in a good way. I can see a limitation in that if the instructor or the student did not understand the capabilities of the program, they really would not get as much out of it, but I think that is the case with any technology. As the teacher, I also like that you can check the "history" of the Doc and see who has worked on it and when. It helps with student accountability.
I must need to work more with Google docs because I found the format confusing and I liked the moodle forums better - and Blackboard is even clearer.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of communicating with other classes with Skype or Voicethread- I guess Voicethread would be very handy working with a school in another time zone.
I'm in complete agreement with you when it comes to blogging. I see a lot of risks as far as cyber-bullying and potential cheating. I have a blog through edublogs that can allow students to make posts, but it has to be approved by the teacher first. Perhaps this is a way for students to have a blogging experience in a safe way? Just a thought.
ReplyDelete