Develop+the+solution

State your plans to make changes and provide opportunities that address the research.

The 6th grade is piloting the use of Moodle in the hopes that we will be allowed to not only use it with the 6th grade, but with even younger students.

Since we at the elementary level have not had any tools to use for student communication and collaboration, I put in a plea with the powers that be to allow me to pilot the use of Moodle at the 6th grade level. Luckily, the sixth grade is required to do a Service Learning Project this year. This is the first time that has been a requirement and the Curriculum Coordinator wanted technology to be used in the project, so I was given the go ahead. I work as a technology integrator in two elementary schools. Each of the schools has two classes of sixth grade students. One of the classes is a fifth/sixth grade combination class. I asked the four sixth grade teachers in those schools if they would be willing to try using the Moodle course management system, and they were all excited to do so.

My first task was to learn how to use Moodle. I had encountered Moodle as a student at Thomas College, but I was more familiar with Blackboard. First I attended a training session on using Moodle at Thomas, but that was geared for using it as a student.Then I used the moodle.org web site to gain a basic understanding of how Moodle is set up. I learned about the roles that can be assigned to members of the moodle and what permissions go with each role. I also learned about the different features that were available in Moodle.

My supervisor acted as the site administrator and set up the Moodle for me.She assigned me the role of teacher, added the list of people who were allowed to join, and gave me an enrollment key to use. I went over the list of possible features with my supervisor to see what I would be allowed to use. She and the network administrator didn’t think the kids should have the blogging feature. They tried to block it, but were not sucessful. The four teachers involved were added as students first and granted teacher status after learning a bit about Moodle. Eventually, I was given editing teacher status so that I could delete members as they moved away or were removed from the class.

The next thing I needed to learn was what a service learning project consists of. Most of the teachers didn’t really know how to go about doing one either. The kids had become involved in the Pennies for Peace project and were collecting pennies. Students at one school had read The Breadwinner, a story about the life of a young girl growing up in Pakistan. Teachers at the other school had read to their students the young adult version of Three Cups of Tea, the story of how Greg Mortenson became involved in building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I found a curriculum for the project at the National Service-Learning Clearing House site. We were all set to go until someone said, “Isn’t this supposed to be a local community project?” Some thought it had to be local and the rest didn’t know. We decided that the kids needed to have more input into the selection of the project in any case.

I don’t normally meet with the 6th grade classes, so I rearranged my classes and scheduled some time to introduce Moodle to the students and teachers. It took a week to see all four classes. The kids were extremely excited about using Moodle. I think they at first perceived it to be a social networking site like Facebook or My Space. Before we started we discussed the rules of using Moodle such as using respectful language and not overdoing the texting slang. The kids were also told not to login to Moodle without permission, and they were only going to be using it in class to begin with. After enrolling in the class using their school user names and passwords in combination with the enrollment key, we had the students set up their profiles. It was a great opportunity to discuss what was safe to post online. Students who were allowed by their parents to use social networking sites shared their rules for what information they were allowed to post. I told the kids that even though this was a closed system and the public would not have access to it, we would not be posting phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or anything other than Augusta as our home address. My supervisor was afraid that by posting pictures of themselves, it might result in bullying outside of school. We had the kids find a picture of something or someone to represent themselves and had them upload it and put it on their profiles. We practiced posting comments to a forum asking the kids about their first impressions of Moodle. It didn’t take long for one of our students in the behavioral program to post an inappropriate comment. The comment was deleted and the student was removed from the members list. It was decided that the student wasn’t likely to be successful in controlling his behavior, and he was removed from the class.

Our first real forum was an opportunity for students to post their ideas about what type of service learning project they would like to do do. Responses ranged from cleaning up the local park, to helping Haiti recover from the earthquake. Other ideas included building a warming shelter for the local homeless, helping out at the animal shelter, recycling at the schools, and planting trees. One of the teachers at Lincoln suggested helping Avian Haven, a local bird rescue center. The student were quite interested in that, so the the Lincoln students decided to take that on as a project.

At that point in the process, the teachers had just been assigned the role of teachers in the moodle. I asked them to post a forum question of their own. When I checked the Moodle, I found that two had posted their questions under an old forum. One had tried to post a question in a new forum, but she had forgotten to scroll down and click on save and display before exiting the page. Opps! I realized they needed a little more training.

To add resources for the kids to begin their study of birds downloaded a video on Birds from United Streaming. I had trouble uploading it in Moodle at first. I did learn that the size of files you can upload is limited to a maximum size of 16MB. That meant that I had to reduce the size of the movie before I could upload it. Since United Streaming divides their movies into downloadable segments I simply chose only the sections I was most interested in. I could have chosen to edit the movie using iMovie, it would have taken much more time. After successfully uploading the movie, I decided to create and post guide sheets on adding forums and resources for the teachers to use. My hope was to encourage the classroom teachers to get more involved in using the Moodle.