It has been a long week!

We continue the move forward. As a school we have abandoned Quia as a teacher course site and will move the whole school, grades 4-12 to Moodle next year.

Why Moodle? Why use Moodle to enhance classroom learning? It’s a question that many asked. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. Enable greater communication and collaboration in the classroom, anytime/anywhere.
2. Enables safe modeling of social networking tools (e.g. blogs, wikis, online chat, RSS, audio/video podcasting).
3. Easy sharing of videos embedded in Moodle web pages.
4. Allows for online/offline assignments, individual and group work, online assessment that can be graded or ungraded
5. Central location parents, students, teachers and other can access.
6. Access can be controlled to safe-guard copyrighted items used under fair use
7. Calendar of classroom-related events
8. Paperless assessment via quizzes, uploaded student documents with option for teacher comments.
9. Modules that include questionnaire, photo galleries to collect and share information with constituents.
10. The Moodle environment includes a platform for several features including: assignments, participant profiles, chats, wikis, an interactive glossary, e-mail, lessons that the teacher can create, quizzes, surveys, and workshops. Chats, forums, wikis, and workshops enable students to work collaboratively.
11. Students forget their homework, are away sick, on holidays or traveling for sports and can’t get the course material? Material is always available online.
12. For those parents who want to be involved in their child’s education. (and we know that student success is dependent on parent involvement) Everything will be available to them online.
13. E-learning provides parents and students with flexibility, allowing students to work at their own pace.
14. Technology to support the creation and sharing of knowledge.

All material will be differentiated to meet the student’s individual learning needs and available online.

Wikis, forums, and chats serve as useful platforms for brainstorming, discussions, and debates.

On the teacher’s side of Moodle, there is a platform for creating and delivering lessons, which the students can access independently, or in groups. Teachers can also post resources, including text or links to web pages that the students can use to complete their assignments and for further independent learning. Feedback for any task can be given in plain text or HTML. If teachers wanted they now have the ability to go completely paperless.

The train has left the station… We are on the move!

At times a teacher feels as though the technology dictates how they must teach. Quite on the contrary, the teacher should be using technology to enhance curriculum. In an effort to allow teachers to have a leadership role in how technology is implemented at Rundle Academy we have formed two committees.

The first committee, aptly named the Technology Committee, met last week and has come up with a minimum software install for student and teacher machines. This will hopefully help with machine start-up times, reliability and potential distractions resulting from programs that are never used.

The second committee is the Technology Steering Committee. That committee is tasked with providing the best, most stable infrastructure we can. Our goal is, when students log in, they have uninterrupted access to all of the software they need to do work commensurate with there ability.

We have had two excellent meetings and are off to a very productive start.

Well, we have been back for almost a week now. It is good to be back and we have seen some significant improvements while we were away. Mr. Collins and Mr. Hande our IT staff have been hard at work replacing old wiring and two old servers. It was no easy job and they put in many long hours to get it all done before we returned.

Wire Rack in Server Room

New Servers and Storage

The work that Mr. Collins and Mr. Hande are doing is the foundation of speedy logins, reliable connections and fast file transfers. We should be seeing significant improvements over the aging servers and wires that were in place.

Fantastic job gentlemen!

Rundle Academy has made the commitment to being a leader in education technology. I welcome your feedback on ways we can improve our implementation. Parent participation is very important to us and your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

The High School is moving from Quia to Moodle as the method for putting courses online. If you are looking for the Rundle Academy online courses you can click on this link. Rundle Moodle.

Moodle is a free and open source e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment. It has a significant user base with 49,256 registered sites with 28,177,443 users in 2,571,855 courses (as of February, 2009)^[1].

Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that people can develop additional functionality. Development is undertaken by a globally diffused network of commercial and non-commercial users, streamlined by the Moodle company based in Perth, Western Australia.

“What is Moodle” explained with Lego (short version) from Tomaz Lasic.