Learning is Change

I can only say this about a few days in my life, like the day when my
daughter was born or the day that put together my first 25 page paper
(all in one day), but today I am more tired than when I teach.

This says something about both the way that I pack and the way that I
teach. While I am a lousy packer, I believe that if you aren’t
totally exhausted after a full day of teaching and thinking with
kids, you aren’t doing it right.

Anyway, we are moved. Not unpacked, but moved.

As I have written before, I am more and more convinced that the glue that is holding together all of the small pieces of online learning has to be as flexible and universal as Moodle. While I wasn’t convinced that it had to be Moodle vs. something else, I am becoming more and more convinced that this is the right direction for the many connected and authentic learning experiences I expect to have in the future.

Today’s reason is that Moodle has an incredibly easy to impliment solution for synchronous events. As many schools and districts are looking around for synchronous tools to buy like Elluminate, Adobe Connect, iLink, and others, the unassuming little open source solution called DimDim quietly integrated with an LMS so seamlessly that you do not even have to set up accounts.

I was able to get this solution to work in literally ten minutes (and most of that time was just transfering the DimDim files over to the moodle folders). If you are interested in experimenting with having live sessions within your own moodle classrooms and 20 seats is enough for your purposes, this is a free and easy way of doing it:

Step 1: Download the moodle/dimdim integration package here.

Step 2: Follow the instructions for uploading  and configuring the files on moodle here.

Step 3: Set up your own meeting in a classroom or on the front page of your moodle, by simply inserting a new activity and then putting in the configuration of the meeting you would like to have. (As you can see below, you have a lot of options to turn on or off.)

Once everything is set up, you get a link to your webmeeting that looks like this:

I can’t even believe how easy it was to provide a synchronous tool to anyone who wants it, all without having to create accounts or adjust permissions.

While, this isn’t the killer app that does it all and it doesn’t make large class sizes any easier, the simple ability for any teacher at any time to set up their own learning events that can be recorded for later use is just one more reason why we need to be gluing everything that we can to Moodle and making the community better in the process.

Although I am very excited about using Google Apps for Education for school communication and collaboration I can honestly say that I am not at all happy that I can’t just simply copy embed code over to a Google Document or paste it directly into Google Sites and expect to see results. Well, I think that I have figured out a pretty good work around for at least creating video tutorials. The reason why this is so important is because I have to convince a whole bunch of people to start collaborating very quickly. I’m not sure that I know a better way of doing that other than creating specific tutorials and then putting them into a collaborative space that begs for feedback (i.e., Google Sites).

So, here is what I did:

Step 1: Record your tutorial using ScreenToaster and then upload it directly to Screentoaster. Once this is completed, you will be taken to the video with the correct URL.

Step 2: Copy the video ID, which looks something like this:

Step 3: Head on over to your google site and edit a page you want to put the video into.

Step 4: Insert a Gadget (click on insert and then “more”)

Step 5: Search for the embed flash gadget, or simply use this URL to access it directly.

Step 6: Input the following information into the fields you are presented with:

(The URL of the flash is http://www.screentoaster.com/swf/STPlayer.swf and the Flash Vars is “video=paste_your_video_id_here” (without quotations))

Step 7: Click okay and save

This will allow you to create very quick tutorials on any subject and then embed them into your Google Site. I would say that this is much harder to do than simply copy and pasting some embed code, but I think that I will go through a little bit of greif in order to make sure that teachers and students can collaborate easily without having to worry about yet another login to access a wiki tool that allows for a simple embed.

Every night this week and last I have been packing. I have been
packing up my family to move us to someplace better, with more room
and more possibilities (and more than one bathroom). This move has
gotten me thinking a lot about what to keep and what to let go of.
Without extending a metaphor too far out, it has also gotten me
thinking about how to move an entire school or even a district from
digital learning systems that they currently use, to ones that have
more possibility and room to grow.
 
And, what can we leave behind in this move. When you move from an
email based system of communication to a feed and “friend” based
system of communication (twitter, facebook, or even project wikis),
what is no longer neccessary?
 
 
When you move from a server based architecture for storing learning
objects to a cloud based repository, what is gained and what is lost?
 
The specifics are becoming more and more clear to me as I pack things
up. As I pack up our assessments for the online school, getting them
ready to move again, we can leave behind proprietary formats. We need
to be able to plug them in anywhere and reuse them for many purposes.
 
As I pack up all of our content, I realize that we can leave all html
pages without an edit button on them.
 
And, as I try to put all of our tools and resources for collaborative
and connected learningn into their box to be ported over to a new LMS
or to new PD spaces, I am realizing that there is no box big enough to
hold all of them.
 
Every tool must be allowed to connect to others, just like every
person must be able to connect. If there are tools that do not
connect, they will be packed away permanantly and placed under the
stairs.
 
Well, I am off to pack some more, but I will continue to think about
what can and can’t be thrown out when we make big shifts in education.
I hope to return to this theme soon when I figure more out.

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

While this may not be an earth shattering to anyone else, I just figured out how to embed a login to moodle into any webpage. While, I believed that this was possible, I didn’t think it would be this easy. Here is the code that you can put on any webpage and have it login to moodle:

<form class="loginform" name="login" method="post" action="http://34.136.86.195.nip.io/moodle/login/index.php">
<p>Username :
<input size="10" name="username" />
</p>
<p>Password :
<input size="10" name="password" type="password" />
</p>
<p>
<input name="Submit" value="Login" type="submit" />
</p>
</form>

Here is what it looks like (if you want to test it out… User: guestuser Pass: access):

Now, why should anyone care about this?

Well, most school districts (and individual schools, for that matter) do not use Moodle as their landing page for information. They have either some other CMS, website system, or simply a string of dreamweaver html files. Whenever they want to put Moodle into their system, they will generally put a link to the moodle and then have people login there. This is an extra step that can now be avoided. Also, you can not only put this on one page, you can put this on many pages. This could be on a wiki, a blog, or any other page that is “district owned”. This means that you could constantly be encouraging people to start learning simply by logging in at their favorite place.

You don’t have to make people change their own workflow in order to log in to a LMS or Google Apps if you have tied the two together. You can give them the power to login from anywhere! Nice.

I was thinking some more about Sloodle and Second Life in general
today and a thought struck me: why don’t all conferences have a SL or
Open Sim component?

Why do we struggle to pull together people from all over the state,
country and world into 2d places like blogs, wikis and aggregator
pages when all we need is a decent SLurl to direct people to in order
to connect? Now, I know that the WebHeads in Action do Second Life
events all of the time, but as far as I know they do not have a
face-to-face component. As for the face to face conferences I have
been to, not one of them invited those watching the elluminate or
usteam feeds to join in on an SL roundtable.

Do conferences need to artificially separate those who can see one
another with those who cannot?

Why can’t we put the usteams into a SL environment? Why shouldn’t we
allow the hallway conversations to happen for virtual attendees?

In other words, I would like to do this soon. Anyone already tried it
successfully?

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

I have been looking at this project for quite some time, but I have only begun to explore the real potential here.

Over at Sloodle and a more recent project to port it over to Open Sim, they are marrying Moodle to a 3d virtual environment in which teachers can ask for students to create “real” learning objects and assess their learning through the use of avitars. So far, it really is only accesible to people who are already familiar with both administrating Moodle and playing with objects in Second Life. I think that the real potential will come when it is more available to the average teacher to set up classes and assignments.

I really do see a future where students can choose to create buildings to understand archetechture and math, create tutorials for writing that could walk through, and simulations to demonstrate a science concept. This isn’t too far off, and I think that the more people who experiment with it, the more likely it will be to happen soon.

As I am pursuing my theory of Moodle as the glue that can hold together all of the parts of authentic online learning, I have been looking for other metaphors that support it. Yesterday, I came across this one:

I really like how simple this makes Moodle and LMS work in general. By showing all of the “building blocks” of Moodle, it shows off just how unimportant the all-in-one approach is. If anything can be added, what is the use of trying to design something that can do everything. Rather than working on creating something to do everything, we should be working on creating something that can talk to everything.

We need more legos, not more finished buildings.

I want to make sure that I talk about this before I lose sight of the student’s faces when they started…

Today I had the distinct pleasure of meeting with many of the students in our online school for CSAP testing. It was the first time that I had seen them in a situation that required them to be a part of the school without their parents. While I really enjoy talking to the parents of our online schools students, I miss kids so much that I will take any chance to talk with them about how they are learning and enjoing their school experiences.

Today, I was able to pull the 8th graders aside and ask them if they would like a space to express themselves and collaborate together. Without hesitation, they said yes. They wanted to pilot the use of sites as a “facebook lite”, where they were able to create a page for themselves and receieve comments and attach photos, audio, and video.

Now, I am not asking them to pilot this use for my own purposes. I genuinely want students to be able to collaborate in a setting where they know (not hope) that only the people that are in the group can see it. I want to explore the possiblity of having a student generated portfolio where they are the ones that decide what is important enough to post.

So, as three students were using the computers after the CSAP test in order to create garageband tracks and then embedding them on the site, I was seeing the ways in which self-organizing collaboration is the future of online learning. I would like to see so much more of my students creating objects on their own and then creating spaces for those objects. All we have to do is give them the tools and model their academic use.

The goal is to show this space as an example for what is possible… I will definitely be checking in often with them and showing them how to continue to express themselves safely and collaboratively. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Earlier today I was talking with a colleague that I highly respect who was challenging the premise of my blog post from yesterday.
 
She was saying that if I truly wanted to recast education as a new character that I would need to define what it is that I can do with connected learning and technology that I can’t do otherwise.
 
This particular teacher (and tech integration specialist) has a wonderful way of pushing me to think about whether something like google docs is really any better than butcher paper and different colored markers. Whenever she asks questions like this, I really do take pause. So I put it to you. What is it that we can do now that isn’t just the logical extension of what has come before? What collaborative exercise is not just a gallery walk in disguise? (I have my ideas, but I would like to see if anyone wants to take the same bait that I was given.)
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous