Lesson

As many students that do have email accounts, it has surprised me that many kids/students don't have email accounts (or that have accounts and don't check because they use facebook to 'email' friends).  This is true even given such close integration of technology with the younger generations of learners! In fact, I would argue that I think we might see a pattern of not having email possibly grow with increased cell phone and texting usage (email is soooo passe these days) and social networking where email and chat is integrated into the user experience!

And even those students that do have a personal email, there's no guarantee of them actually reading a "school" email for feedback or that they actually received the email or that they save the email for future reference like studying for finals.  Besides, I think that a lot of reliance on student independence with reading email feedback (especially in an 'at risk' population) goes against the constructivist and active learning and collaborative approach that moodle actually facilitates.

So for those kids with no email or no personal computer access, we give them the structure of using online tools and learning by using in class school computers and laptops, after school computer labs, and the school library, etc.   In our moodle site, we then simply default those student emails to be something like noemail@ourdomain.com.  And then we just administratively enroll students into classes.  We then give the students planned time to use the internet for their learning.

And certainly there is no arguing the differences between lesson and quiz and the reasons you would want to do each....  I just was hoping that it was in the plans to allow students some online feedback of lessons without relying on email.