Week 2/3

For this week I decided to improve the Moodle course page I use for my spring semester VTC course, Junior High Career Exploration.  I wanted to make the main page "getting started point" more user friendly and less cluttered.

Some of the important files such as the VTC Protocols and the listing of VTC assistance telephone numbers had been links to word documents previously.  This meant that a student would have to download and open the document in order to view it.  In the spirit of immediacy, I changed these links by adding a page and then posting the content into the page.  Now when my students need to access these files, one click makes the page open in a pop up window.  I set up the size of the popup so that it will fully display the content right away. 

I also created an HTML block with a link to the class streaming video site.  Now my students can easily find streaming video if they missed a class.  The big red "play" button opens the streaming video in a separate popup window.

Week 1 discussion: LMS

This is the first week of Ed 565, and our discussion topic is:  "What is an LMS? What is the purpose of an LMS? Share examples of LMSs other than Moodle."

So first of all, LMS stands for Learning Management System.  These are electronic web-based platforms used as a medium for instruction, collaboration, giving, collecting, and grading assignments.  There are a lot of different ones now, as enterprising educators have put their expertise to a new focus, and of course some greedy companies have sought a new angle to cash in on education budgets.  That said, there are several good ones, and they serve a very important and increasing need in today's learning landscape.

For us in rural Alaska, the need is clear and obvious, as we have students spread far and wide.  In order to provide the breadth and depth of education that every person on this planet deserves, we need to step outside of brick and mortar schools.  This same type of need is experienced by others as well, such as:  homeschooled students, students at very small schools/districts, transient students, companies employee training programs, and of course correspondence students of distance post secondary education.

We use Moodle and it works great.  Other big names in LMSs that I have dealt with are Blackboard, Edmodo, Skyward, Alecks.  Right now I have a couple of students working on their NCCER Core Curriculum Certification, and that uses an e-learning site through Pearson.  It has an e-text, multimedia library, built in quizzes, interactive reviews, concept checks and trade term vocabulary development activities.  Now that myself and my students are becoming accustomed to it, it is working out.

It's not the most stylish format, but it is effective enough.

Thanks for reading :-)
-Brian