My Classroom 2.0

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.