I am especially interested in ideas that can used if not all students have home access to the internet.
I'd love to look at courses that already exist. Thanks
Hello,
Create the possibility for those students they can access the internet:
I reserved in the school library 4 computers for those students.
Hello Ann;
I teach 6-8th grade computer applications. About 7% of our students don't have access at home.
To help with this issue, I have open lab every morning for 30 minutes before school starts. In addtion, our local public library offers Internet access in 30 minute intervals, 6 days a week. We also have 2 portable laptop carts that our teachers can checkout.
As far as courses, you can see some of my courses at http://webclassroom.gis4u.com. Three demo courses are available when you login as a guest.
Let me know if there are any questions I can answer.
Marc
We're not actually up and running yet, but come September the plan is to use Moodle for homework in Years 5 and 6 mathematics, as well as providing lesson notes from the interactive whiteboards, lesson plans etc.
Access to computers is available in a supervised homework session form 16.10-17.00 each night, as well as less supervised access before school and at lunchtime, although we may have policy issues on using the latter for homework.
An avenue worth exploring is loaning old PCs to parents - as Moodle only needs a browser to run, a 3 or 5 year old computers could still provide access. I know there are charities finding users for unwanted business computers; there may be something available in your area. There are, of course, licensing issues here, but then there's always Linux, OpenOffice etc, etc.
Perhaps you'd like to get back in touch when we've got some courses in place.
Miles.
A combination charity/loan program might be a good idea, especially if you involved parents of students who already had computers. If only 7% of students don't have computers, chances are among the other 93% there are those that have old computers sitting around at home unused. If you encourage them to donate those old computers to the school and redistribute them on a loan basis to students that don't have any, you might achieve 100% coverage. But then you've also got the problem that the 7% may not be able to afford internet access either.
If you do have inequalities like this, you must make sure they don't affect the non-computer students negatively in terms of their grade-earning abilties. It might seem like it should go without saying but I will never forget a project my English teacher had us do back in high school in the late 80s. We were all working together to put together a book of our writings. She graded us simply on how much time we put into the project. However, this meant the two or three students who had Macintosh computers at home and who typed up our documents for inclusion in the book automatically had the ability to get better grades than the rest of us. Because for the rest of us there simply wasn't enough other work to do to make it equitable.
If you do have inequalities like this, you must make sure they don't affect the non-computer students negatively in terms of their grade-earning abilties. It might seem like it should go without saying but I will never forget a project my English teacher had us do back in high school in the late 80s. We were all working together to put together a book of our writings. She graded us simply on how much time we put into the project. However, this meant the two or three students who had Macintosh computers at home and who typed up our documents for inclusion in the book automatically had the ability to get better grades than the rest of us. Because for the rest of us there simply wasn't enough other work to do to make it equitable.