Not much to report this week. I hope some of you in class got something out of my presentation on GIS - I know it is pretty technical and narrow in terms of what it might have to offer to most people. I have to say that I learned a lot researching GIS. As a kind of a science nerd, I find it fascinating and actually pretty cool in what it can do. I think that it definitely is an explanation for the power behind GoogleEarth and I appreciated Darren's presentation on that . . . cool stuff! For anyone interested, I do think that ESRI offers links to ArcVoyager workshops for teachers.
I understand now that we are expected to go through a mini-version of the instructional design process for our project. We are somewhat in a holding pattern now as our contact is away for the week. But we have all been doing some work. I have looked into Drupal and a little into eLGG as alternatives to Moodle, but I don't really have the technical knowledge to know which might be better for our purpose. They all seem to offer about the same thing in terms of free, open-source sharing sites. Our purpose is to create a site where young folks from various cities can share their creative writing in a protected environment with a person who would act as site administrator. The idea is not to solely have a blog, but to have forums for sharing. If anyone who reads this is familiar with anything other than Moodle for this purpose, please respond.
I feel that at the very least we will be able to get something started for 826 Valencia that will hopefully lead to something really powerful for them to complement their tutoring centers.
I am about to try and load that vlog from a few weeks ago, on behalf of Erica, Mary and I, so we shall see . . .
About Me
- Deb
- Hi all! I am a second semester ITEC student and working full time. I have a very sweet dog named Mickey.
4 comments:
Hello, Deb,
Drupal would be pretty ideal for your project -- we have put together a demo site over here -- this site is a pre-release version, and we are looking to make some minor revisions to the site and release a copy out within the next week or so -- this site will support the type of collaborative writing space you describe.
Cheers,
Bill
Hello, Deb -- sorry for the comment spam, but I woke up and noticed after posting my original comment that you are working with 826 Valencia -- I was Teacher of the Month there back in 2004 -- see here --
Hi Deb,
Your explorations are similar to what many are going through. However, there is one crucial difference between the applications you are looking at.
"They all seem to offer about the same thing in terms of free, open-source sharing sites."
Drupal is a powerful CMS but it is never going to be a replacement for Moodle in an educational context whereas Elgg is a social networking platform that is closer to the likes of Facebook and MySpace. In essence, it is going to come down to what your main goals and requirements are.
Cheers.
Hi Bill, I hope you see this.
I wanted to thank you so much for your feedback about Drupal. My group and I are going ahead with Moodle for the purposes of our SFSU project with 826 Valencia, but I am hoping that in the future I will be able to explore what you have and use it in another way. Thank you again.
Deb
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