Exploring Content Management Systems for Teaching
As you consider the ways that you will want to organize your classroom, I hope that you consider blogs, wikis, and social networks as a part of your overall plan. We have seen how they work in ENG 315, and have potential to support you as individual and collaborative writers.
Also, you may want to consider the free and open source program Moodle as an alternative to Blackboard. Here is a recent EdWeek article that outlines the two programs.
If you choose to write a professional response on this, and connect it to our next topic of newer and multiple literacies, you could discuss the ways in which a management system such as Moodle can be used to support the goals of your writing workshop. How could it support key ideas from the workshop such as student choice and peer response?
Education Week: Market for K-12 Course-Management Systems Expands
Through Moodle, Ms. Tipton now posts reading passages and links to Web sites that are related to her lessons. She also has set up a popular online chat room for her students and posts homework assignments online, a feature that students as well as some parents have embraced. Moodle’s online capabilities, she said, are making her social studies classes a hybrid between traditional and online courses.Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)Ms. Tipton is part of a growing number of K-12 educators in regular classrooms who are using course-management systems to share assignments, homework, classroom assessments, and other information with students and their parents. A course-management system is a software program that allows controlled exchanges via the Internet of just about any kind of information related to a course, although the features of individual products differ.
