Recent Thoughts on Moodle

In my school district, we have been using Moodle in an effort to encourage writing across the curriculum and student collaboration, meaning we want students to work together, peer edit, do their pre-writing in a raw open forum where grammar isn't so much a concern, but ultimately pull their ideas together in a cohesive paper, no matter what the subject area.

Here are some early findings.

1. I was saddened when a student came to me the other day to ask me if they could message another student in the Moodle environment, and the shock that came over his face when I said "Yes."
   
   "You really mean that Mr. O?"
   
   "Yes, message away."
   
   Unsure this student walked away perplexed. I did tell him that everything EVERYTHING was logged should their be a problem, but it was still like he didn't believe me. It was so sad.
   
   
2. Why have multiple periods when you can pull the brain power of several periods into one large online class? One of the teachers I am working with wondered this in one of our meetings and it was brilliant. You can group different classes together, but this was how she wanted to create things from the start. We are a small school district, so your cap on how many students a teacher feels is too much to manage might differ. We have only 80 students in any one grade, but this teacher feels this was manageable. Imagine honors and general ed students all in the same online course collaborating!
   
   
3. I am crafting how to get our more reluctant teachers to want to use Moodle. Too often, we as education technology folk preach to the choir. We read each other's blogs, and sometimes disagree, but how do we get teachers who ALWAYS disagree with technology initiatives to buy-in. Consider too that if we use Moodle, or any technology, only as a patch for something this reluctant teacher does now in their class room (a symbolic change), then ultimately, you have not changed anything. You have only slapped a high tech new coat of paint on the class. We need to use initiative like this to make a systemic change. And the only way to make this systemic change we HAVE to have the reluctant teachers on board. If they are not on board, we get no where as they pull against us.

Just some early morning, post turkey thoughts.