Moodle and more!

I am constantly discovering new benefits to this free opensource software!

My school is scheduled to go through its next accreditation in 2010. For all high school teachers who have gone through this process, you know it's not too early to start! I was recently made the chair of the steering committee, although an honor, I am fully aware of the great amount of responsibility and work this means.

This was my idea, I'd love some feedback and suggestions! In order to organize all of the committees involved; instruction, curriculum, assessment, leadership, resources and community, I thought I might use Moodle. I was thinking of using the online class option and putting all the committees that I set up on Moodle as a class. The chair would be the teacher of the class and could create assignments and discussions for their members. I would set deadlines for all of the classes. For example, I might require the assessment committee to have examples of formative assessment practices from all subject areas by this June. The chair or teacher would then present the format and requirements to the members and assign them each a subject to research and report back. The chair could use the blogging on Moodle to have discussions with all the members about their progress, I could also visit these to give support and guidance. By the end, not only do I have evidence of the final product, but I have a record of the process and growth.

I confess that I have an ulterior motive here. One of the goals I believe the faculty at my school need to improve on is communication and collaboration. We seldom work together on things for our school or our students. Although people will tell me its because of time constraints, I also feel it is because of a lack of training and experience in collaboration. It is so important that we teach our students to communicate and collaborate with each other and those around the world, yet how can we teach it if we don't know it ourselves? So, my hope in this process, is that the teachers will grow in three ways, one they will value the process of accreditation, second they will experience the benefits of communicating and collaboration and third they will become well experienced in the use of Moodle and blogs that they might transfer that to their own classrooms.