1:1 and Moodle

Well, I finally got the time to sit down and actually do a little student/staff development. Moodle is finally off the ground in this district, though small at this point. I have always been bothered by the way teachers use and view the laptops in this school district seeing the machines as nothing more than expensive spiral notebooks. I even had a discussion with the principal about how students want to use their machines and that we need to begin to rethink our policies to reflect the technology of the time.

Moodle, at this point, is being used as the medium to develop our reading response skills of the students. It is a narrow focus, but we are starting small. Our ISAT scores were in the high 80s in meets and exceeds, but our reading response scores were all over the place. Seems students cannot translate writing across the curriculum. They did create with responding to a prompt, but not reflection.

The goal of this pilot is to help students develop their response skills to a reading. Since they are a part of a 1:1, I figured what better way to start than to have them read David Pogue's article in the NYT about the OLPC XO. They then will post to a forum a one paragraph response. Tomorrow, we will make sure that the posts are up there and then we will begin commenting on the responses.

I did make it very clear to the students that even though they might not have Internet access with their laptops at home, or should their laptops completely conk out, they can use any Internet connected computer to post their responses.

Also, I set the time limit students can post to the forum, so they have until 8AM tomorrow to post.

Will report back and see how things went.