Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment

One has to respect a technology that can survive such a cumbersome name, particularly one that is so valuable and still free.

Like Google Apps, my previous post, Moodle can be used at the classroom, building, or even at the district level to change the paradigm of education. Moodle is an open-source, free version of a Learning Management System (LMS) - alternatively Course Management System (CMS) – that provides a viable alternative to offerings such as Blackboard and the Sakai Project, which are often too expensive for a K-12 school district.

Those who have taken a Blackboard-based college or graduate course will find Moodle very similar, giving K-12 teachers with online course experience an inherent understanding of how the tool can be successfully employed for his or her students. Teachers can control the site by allowing access to “guests” or requiring that users must be registered students with a provided username and password to access the site, which allows teachers to take advantage of laws that allow certain “for classroom use only” duplication rights.

Teachers are able to use this product to do something as simple as create a basic web portal students can access to view assignments or pick up notes from the day’s classes to something as involved as creating fully online course offerings. Since Moodle is developed based on common web technologies, it is feasible for even small districts with limited technology resources to install and support this technology, although many districts are opting for paying a minimal annual fee for a hosted solution that is maintained by a Moodle-focused team.

The Moodle interface is well designed to allow easy access to tools such as participant lists, recent activity report, a class calendar, and a forum search tool. The instructor can easily add downloadable files such as course notes, reference and study guides, practice quizzes and tests, and other documents, as well as hyperlinks to Internet resources of value to the course participants. While a novice Moodle-using teacher can begin with a very basic site and still provide a notable benefit to his or her students, as experience with the resource expands teachers are able to provide a paradigm-shifting educational change. Some districts are using Moodle and other free or “for cost” online tools to address tutoring and credit recovery needs for at-risk students, and experience a level of success that is leading some progressive states to consider changes to “seat time” and other rules that might provide a barrier to the further creative implementation of these tools to address student learning.

Moodle Logo courtesy of http://demo.moodle.org. Creative Commons 3.0 Licensed for Sharing and Remix with Attribution.

Moodle class image used with the permission of it's creator, Jack Kruse.

Google Apps - an Important Free Resource

Google Apps, a new service from web giant Google, is changing paradigms from the boardroom to the classroom. This collaboration suite is attracting a huge number of K-20 users because it meets a critical decision-making criterion (it's free), but it is also winning over even some corporate environments because it provides most of the key benefits of tools like Microsoft's SharePoint Server product without the need to dedicate a lot of time and hardware resources from the IT department to support it.


With the expanding focus on Web 2.0 tools for student collaboration and production, the rapid adoption of Google Apps is not surprising. This suite combines Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Mail, and GMail (Google's e-mail offering), into one straightforward package that simplifies training and the technical management of users and services.

For many districts, Google Sites is the initial draw as it offers a simple but robust tool for the creation of student and teacher web sites and wikis. To achieve the greatest benefit, the district's technology department must first establish a Google Apps account with Google for the entire district and set the basic parameters for what will be permitted through that district account, but after this basic setup teachers are able to administer their own areas so they have the flexibility to immediately meet changing classroom needs without a dependency on technology department staff support. The fact that this flexibility does not require the teacher, or the district, to sacrifice control of the site's content, is a great advantage over some of the earlier forays into student website production for classrooms using other free website services. This control is especially valuable in determining who is allowed to view the district's sites, as a teacher is able to create a teacher portal area that allows "the world" to see his or her classroom notes, assignments, test schedule, and more, yet have a separate area only accessible to the students to help avoid possible copyright infringements.

Google Docs and Google Calendars are also very powerful tools, allowing for the collaborative creation and editing of student research documents, projects, and calendars ranging from student project meeting times to scheduling a multimedia cart through the building's media center for their classroom presentation. Controls are available to the teacher, or to the student project leader should the teacher decide to delegate these controls, that allow only specific students to access designated resources. Students can even collaboratively work on audio and video projects, if that capability is enabled by the district's technology staff.

Communication is futher enhanced through the availability of GMail and Google Talk, an Instant Messaging (IM) tool. Some K-12 schools, colleges, and universities are moving from school provided and maintained e-mail accounts to GMail accounts for students, and sometimes even staff, to reduce the workload on their own IT departments so they are able to attend to other more critical tasks. Instant messaging has always been a problem for district technology staffs due to the potential for abuse, and despite the fact that although IM does offer educational value when used properly, the only way to control the negatives has been to "turn it off" at the firewall level which makes it unavailable for all users. As with the other Google Apps resources, control of both the e-mail and IM accounts is still retained by the school, allowing individual accounts to be disabled or deleted in response to inappropriate use. This increased level of control is allowing some districts to feel more comfortable in exploring the educational opportunities offered by IM use. These communication tools are enhanced by the offering of an audio and video chat option for GMail, opening the doors for a vast range of rigorous and relevant learning experiences.



Image Source: www.flickr.com/photos/adriarichards/3285777403/ Creative Commons licensed.

Students 2.0

“At the core of everything else, all the technology usage, it’s all about creating learners, not just students who are able to interpret these facts that the teachers just preach to them in the classroom. There are 300, 400 teachers in my school district maybe only a handful - I can probably count on one hand - who actually read blogs let alone write them.”

This quote is from Kevin, a 17 year old student from the Chicago area, one of three student participants in the Students 2.0 project interviewed by Steve Hargidan on his EdTech Live podcast. Kevin, along with Lindsea, a 16 year old from Hawaii, and Sean, also 16, from Scotland, provided a student perspective of technology and it’s importance in education. Lindsea believes that the expansion of Web 2.0 technology use is one of the most important trends in education, despite the fact that she has only been using the Internet for only about a year herself. Sean echoed that importance, and also stressed his excitement about the 1:1 initiatives that put a laptop in the hands of each student.

The most vocal advocate of technology’s value, which he contends is almost entirely untapped, was Kevin, the student who provided the quote at the top of this post. Kevin contends that the Web is helping drive a shift in educational methodologies from traditional delivery methods to more technology-based, or technology-enhanced, tools.

While these students all identified technology as a strong value-add in education, they were careful to note that they were not geeks, although Kevin admitted that he does “programming and IT stuff outside of the school day.” They felt that they were “normal” students who happened to recognize the potential of technology and are advocating the expansion of it’s transformational value for education.

The limited current use of this tool is evidenced by comments throughout the podcast. Lindsay reported that, “I know one of my teachers blogs.” Although Sean’s experience shows slightly more integration as he related that when his English teacher introduced WIKIs in a language class, other teachers who saw the value started similar WIKI projects in their math classes, the technology use was still presented as more of the aberration than the norm.

“I think the fact that Sean and Lindsey only have one real example each kind of speaks for itself,” noted Kevin. There may not be much penetration of technology in his school yet, but with the early adopter teachers leading the charge, the revolution has begun.

Sean believes that the learning that is occurring in class is more geared toward passing tests and helping him attain certain qualifications, but what he is doing at home via the web is what he expects to actually be relevant to his future. Kevin agreed, saying that, “There is a huge disconnect between the information we are given in school and the learning that we do on our own. We’re learning on our own. It’s an interesting model, the way school continues to operate as opposed to … the infinitely greater learning we can do outside of the classroom. We’re being given all of these things (in school) so that we can fill in the bubbles on our exams.”

Three Prominent People in Educational Technology

Other life commitments have kept me from my blog for a while, but I'm now back from my hiatus. For the John Belushi fans out there, I feel like his character Ernie Souchak when he returns from the Rockies and announces to his newspaper readership, "I'm Back!" Not that the readership of this blog is anything like that of the Chicago Sun-Times, but I like to believe I was missed by both of my loyal readers ;-)


When considering people with im-
portant roles in educational technology, one realizes how much cross-pollination of fields, ideas, and personalities has occurred to make the field what it is today. Significant contributors include scientists who investigated electricity and developed components from capacitors, hard drives, memory chips, and CRTs; technicians who engineered ways to merge these components into computers and other technologies; visionaries who recognized the value these new opportunities offered to education; curriculum experts who developed effective educational structures that integrated these technologies, and the teachers who inspire and motivate their students through the application of these tools.

In Ohio, Ohio SchoolNet (now ETech Ohio) provided the vision and funding that truly launched the major technology focus of modern education in our state, and this initiative was sourced primarily in the desire to capitalize on the value of an amazing resource: the Internet. With that fact in mind, the first name that comes to mind for me is Tim Berners-Lee who, during his tenure at CERN in the 1980s, developed a little program called Enquire that provided the seed from which the World Wide Web developed. Berners-Lee later returned to this program as he was attempting to develop a tool to improve communication and collaboration, and eventually a new technology that completely changed the paradigm of everything from academic research to booking a weekend vacation.

Of course, no matter how impressive a technology is, it takes a visionary educator to recognize it's value and identify methodologies for integrating it into his or her curriculum. One such notable visionary is Alan November, one of the more well-known proponents of what have come to be called Web 2.0 technologies and author of popular articles and books such as Empowering Students with Technology. He is also popular on the speaking circuit, and has been a keynote presenter at eTech Ohio's State Technology Conference.

While Tim Berners-Lee produced a revolution with worldwide impact, and Alan November envisioned ways to use technology to enhance educational opportuni- ties for students that subsequently impacted entire learning systems, my third notable person originally achieved his prominence for a more niche product which had it’s impact in a subgroup population. Researcher, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil achieved fame by taking technology into new areas with the visually impaired. Kurzweil’s pioneering Optical Character Recognition (OCR) research of the early 1970s resulted in him looking for important applications for that technology, and his vision led him to apply it to the development of the Kurzweil Reading Machine. Through the combination of flatbed scanning technology and text-to-speech technologies, as well as the OCR that was capable of recognizing a large range of fonts (and, therefore, applicable to a large range of original print materials), Kurzweil’s company developed a machine that opened a world of print materials to the blind. As you would expect, the original was bulky and expensive so availability was very limited, over time components and manufacturing processes improved, prices dropped, and these systems became affordable for wider distribution.

Ultimately, however, it may actually be the thousands of lesser-known and and therefore less-heralded visionaries, such as Central Ohio’s own Roy Gordon who identified a very niche need and used a simple tool, FileMaker Pro, to develop a database that facilitated the creation of Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs) for special needs students, that have the greatest cumulative impact on educational technology. Or, perhaps, the classroom teacher down the hall that uses technology in creative ways to stimulate and engage students so that they stay in school to learn, graduate, and go on to college and/or productive, creative careers so that they make their own contributions to the world.