Conclusion

What are the results of your pilot and where will you go from here.

Does Moodle fufill our need to blog? Using Moodle between the two schools does open up the conversations to more than the one classroom, but it cannot bring in responses from students living in other parts of the world with different cultural outlooks. We also were not able to bring in outside experts for the students to interact with. The district has a strict policy against giving anyone from outside the district an account. As far as improving assignments, I really can’t see any evidence of that happening. I don’t think the teachers took ownership of the Moodle. Since there has been no real communication or opportunity to get together for collaboration between the four teachers who classes are using the Moodle, they have not really explored how to use it. Since it is a pilot program, I wonder if they are afraid to give the administration a reason to discard the idea. The teachers involved in the pilot have mentioned that some students who rarely participate in classroom discussion have joined in on posting more than the teacher had expected. Moodle does keep student and teacher work organized and archived as well as provide a framework for improving research, organization and synthesis of ideas. It's certainly better than not being able to communicate or collaborate electronically. One thing I would want to do before using any sort of blogging with another class is set up a clear set of rules and consequences and have students sign a contract to abide by those rules. We sort of made up the rules as we went along with this pilot. I would also want the parents to receive a copy as well. Although we have an AUP, I think laying out the expectations for use of the blog in a separate form will allow us to remove the child from the blog without taking away all use of the computers at school. As with any behavior management system there should be levels of response that allow for students to learn from their mistakes. In our opinion, the staff and students of Augusta School Department would benefit from changes in the way the district filters internet content. Barring the ability to differentiate levels of filtering between students and staff, teachers should at least be given a password to bypass the filters. Anyone abusing the priviledge should lose the use of the password. In addition, decisions about what needs to be filtered should be done by committee that includes representatives from the teaching staff.