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.

Topic of Choice - Moodle

With the state wide intiative to implement eportfolios into all schools in New Hampshire, I have begun to look at Moodle, http://moodle.com. After researching a number of software solutions for eportfolios I came to the conclusion that although there are many products we could spend our money on, and many that may offer more options for our school, we needed to pilot the free open source option first. So this year I will be working with students from grade 6-8 to create their eportfolios using the Mo0folio option on Moodle developed by the Seacoast Technology Center. Moodle has a lot to offer, like most software is has more than most people would use. I have used it to create an online course for my students and am now working to set it up for eportfolios. Has anyone used it for this purpose?

The benefits I have found so far is the ability to easily add artifacts and both student and teacher reflection. It also allows a teacher to lock an artifact from being edited after completion. We will host it all on one server, link it to our school website for easy access. Students will be able to get to their eportfolios using their regular school log in. The software is easily downloaded and managed for the entire school population. Photos, video, voice, powerpoint etc. can be loaded as artifacts.

Some of the downfalls are its lack of pizzaz as the students might say. There is an option for new themes including color, but they are very limited. No backgrounds or photographs will appear when opening the eportfolio as it is not created to do so. This may take away from the motivation of the students. However, because it is open source coding, we can work to make the improvements we'd like to see, and will benefit from the improvements that others make.

I'm curious about the progress others in the state have made with their student eportfolios, please share!