iSean

i am teaching a graduate class to teachers who want to learn to teach their own online class(es) so i am planning on being a little more mainstream in the tools i use this semester. i have previously been pleased with Drupal even though it’s not technically made with an education focus. but, i want to use tools that can be easily modeled by the teachers i’ll teach. thus, i am shifting to Moodle this semester. i’ve previously only used it in a quick 2-week summer course that met every day, all day. that experience was too quick to really get into the ins and outs of using Moodle. this will be my first semester really using the tool.

i am not overly impressed with the discussion forum built into Moodle. i am thinking about using phpBB forums, which i’ve used for much of the past decade. but i’ve also heard good things about MyBB so i plan to install it tomorrow and start exploring whether it’ll work for the two classes i am teaching. with all of these internet hosting sites providing free installs with the Simple Scripts and/or Fantastico it’s been a while since i’ve installed a MySQL database and MyBB is going to require that i do it manually so that will be a nice refresher.

but i plan to venture into exploring many tools so that my students can experience a nice variety. i want to use a Wiki for teaching one week. i also asked all of my students to already request a Google Wave account so we’ll see if we can’t even incorporate it. fun times ahead.

i’ve been “Waving” for about a month or so now. i gave invites to my colleagues and 2 of us actually use Wave for a research project we’re doing together that involves evaluating 1-to-1 laptop programs in our area (see my presentation at the SITE Conference in late March/early April on this topic). we share files and interview questions and responses and all sorts of data. we develop thoughts together and we even try and go beyond the very basics of Wave. it’s nice to have everything in 1 place as i have trouble with filing things well on my computer. that being said, the 1 thing that i really didn’t like about Wave is that i don’t have enough other people using Wave to make it something that i remember to check. you have to physically log into Wave to see new messages (so, it’s behind email in this regard). and it’s pretty crummy to get an email telling me to check Wave as that sort of defeats the purpose. well, i use Firefox as my main browser and just came across an extension that solves my biggest issue with Wave (and i have many other issues). it’s the Google Wave add-on for Firefox. now, if Google can just increase the speed of the service and give me a lot more invites then i could consider using it more full time.