Need Moodle feedback please
November 10, 2006
Ok so I need some help. Now that I have been working with Moodle for a bit, I have been thinking a lot. Here are my areas of concern and desires for feedback.
If you want to look at it (not much to see) the moodle is here… http://moodle.thinkingaboutteaching.com
It runs as a subdomain of my new blog site.
First some back story. As it stands right now the Moodle is a walled garden. There are no account creation abilities and guests are only allowed access with an enrollment key. I intend this for parents who want to be able to check in. Presumably they could ask the student for login info, but it’s a nice fix for me not to have to look anything up. So there is no outward-facing site. This is part of my problem. We went from blogging, podcasting, and wiki-ing to a walled garden of just us. I am not sure I like that. Moodle has a blog engine built in that can be set to allow the world to read the postings, but I like that Drupal allowed me to show everyone’s posting on the front page and they all funnel down to one sole RSS feed which made for easy keeping-track.
Inside Moodle there is a chat feature. I can see the benefit of this for college students that may be taking a class and need to collaborate from dorm rooms, Starbucks, or parent’s basement. Do my kids need it? Now to be sure, they LOVE it. But is it worth the risk? I looked at all the chat logs from the two days chat was available and I didn’t like the looks of what I saw. There was nothing dirty, so to speak, but the way kids speak to each other these days is a bit harsh. If I permit them to speak to each other in a manner less than respectfully, am I opening myself up to liability? Especially considering no one around me has done this before so there is no precedent. Would I be better off not allowing chat? I would hate that, because that is this site’s biggest draw for my kids, that they can complete work online, take practice quizzes online, and ask for help in real time. Not to mention we are planning a live Skype Videoconference on December 4 and I would love for my kids to be able to chat with the kids in Peru with whom we are going to conference. All the major chat servers are blocked from school, except Google Talk and that of course requires a Google account. Not an issue for me, but imagine all these kids in Peru that I can grant guest access to with an enrollment key, compared with trying to explain how to obtain a Google account…
So is there room for a separate blogging solution? Do I let them chat?
This is harder than I thought.
Truth is, I want to open the Moodle up to the entire world because I think I have created an entirely online Spanish class. I am using Slideshare, and soon will be posting recordings of my mini-lectures so kids can watch. It’s like Spanish in a box! I also want there to be interaction with the outside world, not just each other. I want feedback from people, not just other kids.
What do you think? What do I do??
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content rss
November 11th, 2006 at 1:12 am
My district is running Moodle as the “walled garden” you descibed with our junior high students and it works fairly well. Reading their messages back and forth and be somewhat shocking, but I try to remember that is is really no worse than what I hear on the play ground. The students know that I regularly read the message logs and I think that limits them somewhat. I primarily use the chat feature the night before a test. I will open a chat room for students to enter at a certain time to ask questions of each other while I am monitoring it. Opening Moodle up to the outside world is a great idea in an ideal world. Unfortunately it isn’t. Have you thought of having a separate blog which your students can access from inside of Moodle but still get feedback from outside members of the world? Like using an Edublog? That is what I recently started doing.
November 11th, 2006 at 3:49 am
These are tough questions, especially when working with minors. I don’t know enough about the law to know exactly where you stand. But if I were running this with my students I would let them chat for a few reasons:
1. It’s going to increase their engagement with the content. (As you note.)
2. They’re going to IM or MySpace anyway and talk to each other how ever they want anyway.
3. You should tell them that you have logs of the chats, so if anything happens they know they are responsible for what they said. This gives you the benefit of being able to keep an eye on them not only for language and behavior, but also to see what their points of confusion are about the material being learned.
November 12th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Chris,
We have applied a patch that permits students to IM with teachers only. If we have teachers who want their satudents to be able to IM with each other, we will think about reverting to the old behavior.
We simply found that the students’ IMing (is that a word?) was often inappropriate for a school site and was mostly unrelated to instruction.
Where I live and teach, we take the view, “Better safe than sorry.” We really have to operate this way. This may not be true of your school district, of course.
November 12th, 2006 at 9:22 am
POatOops, patch is here - http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=55934
November 12th, 2006 at 9:40 am
I think that people who work with under 18’s (and I did, for 11 years; now I work at the University level) have some special considerations. In fact, even though I work with 18-20s now, I still worry about the same things!
I prefer the “walled garden” for a lot of things. What I *like* is to have it both ways. So what is the possibility of only having the chat room open at times that YOU control? Is it important to have it open 24/7? Can you have a moderator for times you can’t supervise on-line yourself? However you proceed, you will need to do some training! What is and is not acceptable, and also what to do if you get involved in something that is not acceptable. I am wondering why they want to do all this on your server! In my experience, they were fairly content to use the school software for academic work and used the social networking software for the social stuff. MOSTLY because a) Big Brother (me) was watching and b) all their friends were not on the school system, so they went elsewhere. Of course I was as a small school (60-80 per grade level). That surely made a difference.
November 12th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
What does your district AUP say about open access to student work? That may decide thing for you. Student privacy should trump open access.