Building open source learning communities in school settings

Building open source learning communities in school settings

by Vincent Trammel -
Number of replies: 3
I'm interested in developing an open source learning community to help facilitate collaboration between teachers in my school. Do you have any suggestions on getting stated?
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In reply to Vincent Trammel

Re: Building open source learning communities in school settings

by Anthony Borrow -
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Vincent - First, congratulations on your commitment and desire to encourage greater collaboration amongst teachers. I would start by creating some courses where the teachers can participate and interact with one another. Somewhere that they can share what they are doing, the tools they are using, and the response to those tools. Usually, the argument goes that they are too busy to learn something new. For that reason, it is important to help them discover how working together can help them to be more effective teachers. Typically I start with a divide and conquer mentality. If each teacher develops materials on a couple chapters and contributes it then the rest can critique and improve them. Ultimately they will wind up with a full book worth of good materials that everyone can use. So hopefully their work load goes down, quality goes up, stress goes down, a general sense of cooperation and good will increases. Best of luck and let us know how we can help you to encourage those teachers you are working with. Peace - Anthony
In reply to Anthony Borrow

Re: Building open source learning communities in school settings

by Vincent Trammel -

Anthony,

Thanks for your input. I am not experienced with developing courses using Moodle.  I believe that the majority of our staff is accustomed to using computers and searching the web but I anticipate that a few members will have a tough time visualizing what the discussion board and threads will look like as they appear on screen. I'm in the process of developing a power point and am hoping to add a visual to show what participants will see when they log in and move step by step through the process.  I've attempted to copy and paste stills from the website but have not been satisfied by the results. Any suggestions?

In reply to Vincent Trammel

Re: Building open source learning communities in school settings

by A. T. Wyatt -
Greetings, Vincent!

There are getting to be a lot of video tutorials for moodle on youtube and other video sites.

In the MoodleDocs, there is a growing collection:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Introductory_Tutorials_for_Teachers

There are a number of books out. (see front page of moodle.org)

I don't think you need to re-invent the wheel! If you only need a tutorial on discussion boards, you might be able to find that information here:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Forums

There is a book chapter at the bottom that you can print as a handout. I found this book very helpful when I first started learning Moodle!

WRT screen captures, if you don't have a real graphic editor (Photoshop or similar), and you don't want to spend a lot of money, I would recommend Snagit from Techsmith. It has some nice tools and a lot of options. For someone who has to make handouts/software tutorials, Snagit is hard to beat!

atw