My Classroom 2.0

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.