Presentation 1: Options for Building Your Teacher Website
Presentation 2: Moogpal in Action
The first presentation I viewed, Options for Building Your Teacher Website, was given by Cyndi Danner‑Kuhn. The presenter states that "Every educator needs to build and maintain his or her own teacher Website." She feels that websites will make teachers more efficient and save them time. Teachers' websites are also a great way to make resources available to students. She recognizes that it is necessary to make it easy for teachers to build, cheap (free), easy to maintain, and user-friendly for themselves and their students. She then describes a number of sites that provide tools and host websites for free. (See table below) She discusses the benefits of each.
| Websites that provide free website creation and hosting |
| education.weebly.com |
| www.wix.com |
| www.yola.com |
| www.webs.com |
| sites.google.com |
| kompozer.net |
Danner‑Kuhn certainly maintains a very impressive website of her own. She has links to her del.icio.us, diigo, Twitter, and Plurk accounts. She has videos, RSS feeds, links to her own blog, links to blogs she reads, a calendar, a link to an entire course she teaches, a link to students' websites,and much more. All of this available 24/7 for her students, parents, and other educators.
I have maintained a class website for several years although I have not utilized it to the extent that Ms. Danner‑Kuhn suggests. I have used it primarily to provide hyperlinks to my students for various projects. I have found that although I spend a lot of time creating the pages, it is a great resource and time-saver for students. Our school has recently started using Moodle hosted by GlobalClassroom. I have spent a lot of time working on my Moodle classroom which offers many additional built-in capabilities. It is difficult to decide where I should devote my energies. Currently I have a blog site, a wiki site, a Moodle site, and two websites. Somehow I need to decide how to best utilize my time for the benefit of both my students and myself.
The second presentation I viewed, Moogpal in Action, was given by Chris Walsh. This presentation provided a preview of the development work being done by the New Tech Network of high schools to integrate three programs Moodle, Google Apps, and Drupal. These are three free and open source tools that the New Tech Network plans to use in their nationwide network of high schools. New Tech is currently made up of 41 schools in nine states.
The New Tech Network needed a tool to personalized instruction, to foster collaborative learning, and to help build meaningful relationships among educators as well as among students. They also
wanted the tool to be free and open source so that it could be adapted to their specific needs. In evaluating different tools, it was determined that there was no one tool that met all of their needs. The three programs Moodle, Google Apps, and Drupal all had parts of what was needed. It was decided to integrate the three and hence the name Moogpal.Moodle has most of the learning management system features that were required. Also, it supports face-to-face instruction as well as virtual learning environments. It provides a secure environment because students must log into their account and can only access what is meant for them. Google Apps provides communication tools such as free email, messaging, and shared calendars. It enables collaboration by allowing students to create and share documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and sites. Drupal is a free software package that allows users to publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. It is very flexible and has many social modules that can be added.
Although each of the three programs Moodle, Google Apps, and Drupal can be used separately, there are several advantages to be gained by combining the tools. One advantage is that it provides for a single sign-on for students. Once they have logged on, students have the flexibility to use the best tools of each program. It provides a secure environment, or as the presenter said "a walled garden." The New Tech Network's Moogpal is a work in progress. The video presented a picture of what the final product might look like and how it would be used. It does not, however, give any technical information about how it is being done.
It was not clear to me whether the focus of this video was to encourage other school systems and educators to consider creating their own Moogpal or was simply a means of gaining some exposure for the New Tech Network. Although it looks like a Moogpal would be a great environment for schools to use, it would certainly take a lot more technical knowledge and time to create than most school systems would have. There was no suggestion that when the people at New Tech have completed their Moogpal it would be made available to other school systems. Even if they were willing to do so, it would probably need to be reconfigured and adapted to each school system individually.
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