Moodle

Virginia DeBolt — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 07:43:09 -0600

I remain surprised that more college and university level institutions don't adopt the open source Moodle instead of WebCT or Blackboard. Have you seen any mention of that as a favorite tool among teachers?

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

Tech tools for teachers

Leslie Madsen Brooks — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 21:36:10 -0600

What tools are today's tech-savvy teachers using? Recently, many edubloggers have filled us in on their favorite tools.

Vicki Davis recommends, among other tools, Creative Commons search, the Show Me Widget (you can see a sample in the left-hand column of her blog), Netvibes (which she calls her "Teacher Dashboard"), and for free screen capture The Jing Project.

For kids ages 6 to 14, Betty recommends Fact Monster, an online almanac created by Information Please/Pearson Education.

Nbosch has recently recommended Floor Planner and the quirky (if not terribly pedagogical) Sing a Song.

Dana Huff recommends the Understanding by Design curriculum development wiki. She also explains why K-12 teachers need laptops.

The Ardent Student blog draws our attention to The World Almanac of Educational Technologies, where we can catch up on the latest edtech developments in, for example, Turkey or Kenya.

Susan Brooks-Young takes another look at AirSet. She writes,

I first began using AirSet a little over two years ago. This free tool offers a place to create and manage private (invitation only) and public groups--a great resource for ongoing professional development and other educational uses. At that time, the site provided a calendar, contacts, to do lists, a blog, and a place to post links.

It's really grown since then. Now you can post files, photo albums, playlists, and...they've just added the capability to create a wiki and a group web page. If you haven't checked out this site, now's the time.

Dan Cohen writes about "the strange dynamics of technology adoption and promotion in academia." He writes about

the resistance that free and open source projects like Zotero meet when they encounter the institutional buying patterns and tech evangelism that is all too common in academia. The problem here seems to be that the people doing the purchasing of software are not the end users (often the libraries at colleges and universities for reference managers like EndNote or Refworks and the IT departments for course management systems) nor do they have the proper incentives to choose free alternatives.

Of course, some tech tools are not so useful in the classroom. For example, Ms. Cornelius has a good reason to forbid text messaging in her classroom. Go read her post to learn of one heartless use of the tool between parent and child.

What tools have you seen used well in the classroom--or used poorly?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.

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Moodle

Tech tools for teachers