My Classroom 2.0

So each class has had a few blog posts assigned now.  The results have generally been positive.  I posted a rubric that I am following in grading the blog posts, which I view as pretty open ended and flexible.  Students have generally done well. 

In my American Government classes I have given them assignments that have really sparked their interests.  Their first post was to take the Glassbooth.org Presidential Preference survey and blog about who the survey indicated their views are most aligned with and what areas were most alike and most different.  While some posts were short and minimalist, some students wrote long detailed posts and indicated real surprise over the choice.  My favorite quote of the survey:

Ralph Nader?!? this can’t be right…

The other blog assignments have been on the minimum wage and critiquing a video on the Fifth Amendment entitled Don’t Talk to the Police.  On both of these assignments generally students answered thoughtfully and with great detail.  These blog entries have been a great success.  I have entered the blog rubric into the rubric plug-in of my Moodle install so I am able to communicate about their posts directly with the students.

My experience with the US History class has been less successful so far. The first blog assignment was on the Dawes Act and how it effected the Native American tribes long term. The students responded to this on a very basic level, as if it was a short answer question on an exam, listing the most basic of facts.  On the next assignment, I used one of the deeper thinking questions from the text.  It was an assignment on how to use data to make inferences and used the race to develop powered flight between Langley and the Wrights as its touchstone.  This was by far the least successful of any of the blog posts this year.  I was reaching for an assignment and their responses were also reaching.  The most successful of the blog posts for the history class was the last one. I told the students we were going a little more free-form on the assignment and they would have more freedom to explore in their own direction.  They were to compare and contrast a scandal from theera of railroad expansion in the last half of the nineteenth century to a modern scandal.  I suggested Enron, Halliburton overcharges in Iraq and Martha Stewart insider trading as scandals but told them that they could choose any modern scandal they wanted.  These were much more successful across the board than any other blog post for the US History Classes, with longer and more thoughtful posts.

Problems:

One student does not have a home computer.  He generally can access a machine here at school and get an assignment in, but I was forced to tell him that he can turn in a hard copy, which will kill some of the collaborative work down the road.

I have another student with an IEP that states she has issues with organizing her thoughts in a written form.  This is going to push me to encourage student podcasting.  It is probably time to look at Elgg again.

The schedule is finalized.  I have two different schedules that alternate day to day.  During the first day I have an American Government/Economics class of approximately 25 students, a U.S. History since 1877 class of 15 students and a fifteen student Computer Applications class.  The alternating day schedule is a 20 student Government/Economics class, a 6(!) student U.S History class and an 8(!!) student U.S. History Class.

Web apps are ready to go and customize from here.  I have set up a classroom portal that is running on Drupal at http://www.colemanspace.info. I plan to do student blogs and forums here along with host any podcasts, presentations and files there.  I have grown enamoured of the embedding Google Doc presentations and embedding my Google Calendar and it is seeming to work very well.  I have a new Moodle install up and running and it seems to be working fairly well, thought there are some bugs with the theme transitioning to 1.9.  I have a MediaWiki install ready to go also.  I decided against using Elgg for now.  I can’t find a compelling reason at this time.  Maybe when 1.0 comes out in a couple of weeks I will reevaluate.

I have been showing the students the Common Craft videos on Web 2.0 and social media tools (embedded on my site here) and talking about the collaborative powers of these tools.  They seem to understand we are going to be doing some interesting things.

Students don’t have logins to the computers here at school yet, and I have two students who have told me that they do not have consistent access to a computer with internet access at home so I am loathe to get started just yet.  I recorded my history lectures (sort of an intro chapter, the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of the Civil War) with a couple of different mic placements that will determine the best placement.  I am still trying to figure out some standard procedures for the recordings.  I think an ID of period, date and lecture title or activity will simplify things in the editing and posting phase.

As any teacher knows, the last few weeks of school are apocalyptic in tone. There is a drop dead date that the school is rushing towards, and little can get accomplished. Plus I had the other issue of changing classrooms to do before I left for the summer. I have not cleaned up my other office yet, but I at least got most of the stuff moved.

It looks like I will have seven computers in the class for student use. Then I can also go to labs as I need. This should be enough to get started with my ideas. My schedule is not finalized as of yet, but I will be teaching US History after 1870 for 11th grade and Government/Economics for 12th grade. If numbers are crazy I may also be saddled with a 9th grade World Geography class or a Computer Applications class also. We are using a truly insane schedule next year. We have traditionally been on block schedules, four classes of approximately an hour and forty minutes each semester. This year there is a focus on AP because of a grant the system received. There was a question about AP students who took the class first semester having five months between the class and the test. So instead of making AP classes all year long, administration on the school and district level decided in their infinite wisdom to have first semester classes one day and second semester the next, upsetting the apple cart for everyone so an extra thirty kids will hopefully do better on the AP exam. The infinite wisdom of bureaucracy. I guess scheduling is a decision way beyond my pay grade.

If you remember, I had a Joomla site that I was going to base http://www.colemanspace.info around. After playing with Joomla a bit, I feel it is a great CMS, but not what I was looking for. Setting up a learning community on it seemed a little klugey. So I backed it up (just in case) and installed Drupal 6. Once again, a bit of a learning curve. But it is going well and I think I can bend it to my whim.

Wikis however seem sort of a kluge under Drupal, especially under 6. I have looked around and found a couple of plugins to integrate user authentication between Drupal and Mediawiki. This may be the solution. Another issue is deciding if I want a different wiki for each class. I think to do that I would set up a Media Wiki install in a subdirectory (/class1, /class2, etc) and tie user authentication back into the Drupal user base. Anyone having any suggestions on how to run wikis over multiple classes, please drop me a line.

I backed up all of the classes in last year’s Moodle install and wiped it out. I reinstalled from the ground up with 1.9 and I am good to go. I plan to require user authentication this year. After a test, I found that Gaggle can receive emails from my web apps (and Google apps registration too!) so I am going to first make sure they all have a functioning Gaggle account and then they can register for the Moodle install.

I have moved the blog from the old address at Wordpress.com to this site, primarily so I can access it from school.  I was going to let it be a blog under whatever CMS I settled on, but that process is dragging out.  Since this particular blog is going to be a more “meta” discussion of the MyClass2.0 project, it is acceptable for it to be separate from the classroom CMS.

If you go to the root of this domain, you will see the beginning of a Joomla install.  The Joomla install went pretty seemless.  I first installed Joomla 1.0, which seems to be the more stable branch, with the most development of add-ons, modules, templates, extensions, etc.  However, I decided to take the install down and go with a 1.5 install.  I don’t want to be trapped next year as the world migrates to 1.5 and I am dependent on things that are massively redesigned for 1.5.  By starting with 1.5 I insure that I am moving with the CMS. 

I like the Joomla install and I have gotten a good feel for moving around within the Admin side of things.  I moved all of the posts for this blog to the Joomla install.  I just used the default blog layouts that come with the install of Joomla and I really didn’t like the way it was displaying.  I couldn’t find an easy way to generate a feed or enable comments either.  Their seemed to be a myriad of plugins for blogging, but it seemed the more advanced ones were for 1.0, so the decision to upgrade to 1.5 already has come back to bite me. 

Another reason I decided against integrating the blog into the CMS for the site is my ambivalence on Joomla.  Though I am digging Joomla as a CMS and probably will end up using it for other sites, I am looking for something that will allow more collaborative work.  A recent episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers dealt a good deal with the possibilities of DrupalEd.  Now that I believe I have a bit of a handle on the Joomla install process, I am going to rip it down and see if the community and collaborative features of DrupalEd will work with my vision of the collaborative classroom.

My Gaggle.net account is up and confirmed.  I have created a test account and it seems to work well.  The gentleman with Educational Technology for the School System says that they have tightened security of the School System’s Gaggle.net where it can only send and receive in-house.  That is all I really need (along with the admin address for my installed web tools, which can be whitelisted) but I am a little disappointed that I am stuck in the “walled garden.” But once I get this project rolling well, I will look to expand. It will make the whole process of giving students email accounts an easier sell to parents without total email access though. 

I am going to type up some info about Gaggle, its uses and security for parents next year. I can’t be the first person out there doing this, but Google doesn’t give me much.  If you have handouts for parents and students on using Gaggle.net, please let me know.

I am exploring CMS and courseware options for the class next year. Elgg is a name that I see batted around as social network option for education, so I decided to install it and give it a go.

I tried to do an install on 2mhost where I host my Moodle install and a couple of XOOPS installs for different projects around the school. I really like the control panel and I have a nice chunk of disk space with a healthy dose of bandwidth. But when I install it it keeps giving me a globals_off error. For the uniformed, PHP (the software that accesses the database for all the entries for the website) used to have a setting called globals that was on by default. That was deemed insecure and now most things require a different setting. Elgg keeps coming up to an error that says “Elgg isn’t ready to run” and then gives a couple of suggestions to rectify the disparity. None seemed to work and after a little Googling I found that none of them would work. There were some ideas batted around on forums, including putting a php.ini file in ever subfolder and I had a brief interaction with my help desk. It still wasn’t working.

I tried to do an install on my personal space on 1and1. I don’t want to have a permanent install there, but it will do fine for testing. There were a couple of intructions to add to the .htaccess to make it work, but documentation on what to do was pretty easy to find online. Definitely not as smooth an install process as a Moodle install, but this is version 9.1. Version 1 is on the horizon according to a recently posted road map, so hopefully the install process will be a little smoother on the first full release.

Now that I have it up and running as a temporary install, it is time to experiment with it. What sort of things are possible with Elgg? Is it just a novelty or can some real collaborative work be accomplished with it? I plan to do some test projects with it as this semester winds down. Students blogs it seems will work well (Moodle’s blogs never felt really intuitive to me, but I need to investigate it further) and if I understand correctly students can upload an MP3 and the blog feed will work as a Podcast feed. It has a pretty standard Social Network feel to it, so the students should relate to it pretty easily, which is always a plus.

I want to make sure that the tools I am using for class just aren’t some gimmick and actually contribute to the learning process. I am not doing this to play with some neat toys, but to engage the class, to allow for facilitated cooperative learning. If Elgg seems like a gimmick to me, I will toss it and use something else. I am waiting for the confirmation of my Gaggle accounts (all outside emails are blocked at school except for Gaggle) and as soon as it comes through I am going to set up some test accounts to see how it works. If you want to help or see what Elgg is yourself, my test install is here.

I’ll start with a little background on my experience with web software. More of a confession. I am a hack with the web. I have worked with Wordpress numerous time in the past and over the last couple of years I have worked with XOOPS a lot. I also have installed Mediawiki and Joomla in test installs. I have installed and run a couple of different installations of Moodle. I believe I have the basics of installing and configuring PHP-based CMS software. My CSS and PHP editing is sloppy, basic and rather uninformed and ususally involves a lot of cutting and pasting code and a lot of trial and error. But installing the CMS, its plugins and themes with basic adjustments of each are well within my grasp.

I am facing a lot of options with the software for next year. I feel confident that Moodle will be a major component of the class, but I am looking for other options. I am trying to build a student community, so I think that the functionality I am going for is a little too complex for XOOPS. Also I really can’t stand the way the Wordpress for XOOPS stuff lags so far behind the standalone version. I have been looking at Joomla to manage the site, but if I am going to build an online community I have to look at Drupal and Elgg. The only problem with Drupal and Elgg is I am totally a babe in the woods with each of these software packages, so configuring them to fit my goals and objectives will be somewhat difficult. Then there are other, more oldschool perl-based entries to this space, Slash and Scoop, both of which have potential.

So far I know I am going to need Moodle. I may be content to use the Moodle blogs for blogging students, but may used the blogging features of other software, be it Joomla, Drupal or Elgg. Likewise I may use Mediawiki or wiki modules for some of the other CMS. I would love to use a Twitter clone, but I have yet to find an OSS version of Twitter software, though Commercial solutions are available (inexpensive but will still blow my budget). I really would love to get more resources to help make this decision. Please share your experiences and links.

One of the things I am definitely going to integrate into the class is a wiki.

More likely than not, I am going to be teaching American History to Reconstruction. When I took AP American History in my own high school, we read Chesapeake by Michener over the course of the year. I wanted to do that in my own American History class, but there are a couple of issues: 1) most students do not find Michener nearly as interesting as I do and 2) assigning a student to read a 60 page chapter in a book will nearly guarantee a percentage who do not do the reading.

Short quizzes over the individual chapters is how Mr. Reddig try to insure we were reading the chapters. This never seemed like too effective a method to me. One thing I believe we will do is read a prescribed amout of pages, preferably under a dozen, for each class. If the schedule is how they propose it to be next year (a blue/gold, every other day block schedule) I will see all of my students every other day, which is plenty of time to get a dozen pages read. But I think creating a Chesapeake Wiki will also keep them engaged.

First I will set up a wiki, either MediaWiki, through a free web service like PBWiki or a module for Joomla. Then with each chapter, students will be assigned to add material to the Wiki. I think for it to work well, students will have to be assigned subjects to wiki. These subjects can include characters, both major and minor, and events, trends, and day to day minutia that help anchor each chapter to its time. I will have to evaluate which terms should have more detailed answers and assign them accordingly, with potentially smaller entries assigned two at a time. As we use the book as a jumping off place for initial discussions, students will be required to explain their wiki entries and how they apply to the reading. I also think it will be important to require an edit (or more) of every student, allowing them full participation in the wiki process. I have to get the logistics down (rereading the book and creating the lists of topics, rubric for grading, material on proper wiki style and how to use wikis, etc) but I think this will be a first great step in my pursuit of integrating collaborative media into the class.