i am teaching 3 sections this fall of an online course for undergrads preparing to become teachers. i have been fiddling with tools all month trying to determine which will work the best and be easiest for my students to use. this past summer i used Moodle with some success and i am sure i could have improved its functionality next time around. however, i decided to go with Drupal and phpBB as my class staples again. these are the same tools i used last year. Drupal is a CMS and phpBB is an internet discussion forum and both tools are free and open source MySQL databases installed on my server. i am growing somewhat disillusioned with Twitter as an important ed tech tool, so i am scrapping my plans to have students sign up for that service — i’d largely just use it to pass along links, which i can do elsewhere on my class site. meh. i’ve dropped Ning as a potential teaching tool after much consideration, but i might have my students create a Ning site (i just wasn’t sure if Ning would work as well as Drupal for my needs). i am still entertaining the thought of using Diigo — i have an educator account and i’ve explored it a bit, but i also don’t want to use something that isn’t necessary just to be using something so i’d need to make it a meaningful part of my class. my university just switched all students to a gmail account, so i’ll continue using Google Docs and other services as the students are already all signed up, which is nice. should be a fun and action-packed semester.
P.S. i do have buddypress and wordpressMU installed on a server as well. i think it’ll be a last second decision on whether to use my tools or the easier blogger.com. thoughts?