Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Live reporting - Moodle Facilitated Courses

2. Guests/Presentations
Moodle Facilitated Courses
Pandora Carlucci
Eileen Belastock
Adam Wawrow
10 courses now available online

Pandora witnessed the collaboration and learning between Adam and Eileen in working to bring the Moodle system to life for Franklin.

http://cms.franklin.k12.ma.us/

Moodle - "modular object oriented learning environment"
Open source software, 27 million users

Switched from Blackboard to Moodle to save money
only the in-house server and in-house expertise is required to support it

Eileen - did use Blackboard, wasn't very flexible, went to a conference and heard about it
a virtual high school accredited by the State of Florida is operational

Attended summit at Olin College, people were impressed with what Franklin has already accomplished with Moodle

Eileen did a training session with 8 teachers today
It takes a lot of work for teachers to do, all on their own time

Forensic science class being set up
provides the required text, uses blogs for communication back and forth

Internet sites are pre-cleared by the teacher before set up for the students to link out to within Moodle

Schedule posted in advance for Forensic science to provide some flexibility for the students to complete their work

Up to 30 expected to be able to handle the course with this teacher, did have 10 last year

Moodle does a lot of the work electronically
feedback to the students automated by the system

A couple of students did take a course from Las Vegas last year.
Only issue was with working the timing for when work is due to accommodate multiple time zones

Students need the opportunity to experience on-line learning before they go to college

Principal Light - course on transcript, no weighting for College or Honors scoring yet, on honors pre-calc course counts for the grade point average

"We may not have a Smartboard in every classroom but we are doing so much more" Eileen

Life Long Learning has been providing the start up costs, as the courses really get rolling, then it would come into the full and normal school program. Teachers in the future may divide their time between classroom face-time and classroom online-time.

Forensics uses "Forensics for Dummies" is used as the text, available for about $18 from various on-line booksellers. The course is built to extend the material prepared in the text.

Tim Raposa points out the collaboration on technology between the town and school.

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