New tools; new semester
well, my first spring/summer class begins tonight and it’s a Computer in Education course for undergraduates who hope to become teachers. in the past, i have used various tools to teach this course and i take great care to try and choose the best tools for my students each semester. when i last taught this course, i used Drupal for all course content and student blogs and I used phpBB forums for my class discussions. this setup worked well for me.
i was content to try these tools again; however, i ran into some snags. first, my previous installation of Drupal somehow got corrupted when i was fiddling, so i couldn’t even get logged in to see all of the settings and modification i had made. my spring course is only 6 weeks long and i didn’t think it was fair to myself to start over using Drupal. i am going to get this straightened out for the fall semester and get back to using Drupal, which is also in version 5.x now — i used 4.x previously. Instead, i have reverted back to using Dreamweaver and CSS/HMTL for all course content. this is slightly disappointing, but i work very quickly using Dreamweaver and this was really the sensible choice for me for this course at this time.
since i no longer have easy to use student blogs like i would when i use Drupal, i received a recommendation from a teaching colleague who suggested wordpress.com. i checked it out and decided to give it a whirl. i like the thought of using wordpress even though it’s a bit more high end than blogger and drupal-based blogs. for students who are willing to put in extra effort, the wordpress blogs can pay off bunches.
and, my biggest change this semester also comes from a recommendation . . . this time from a former student. i have been using phpBB forums for all class discussions for about 5 - 6 years. i finally got around to checking out the competition and decided that i liked SMF forums better. i was actually excited about the upcoming phpBB version 3.0 forums, but these are currently in beta and i am not going to use a beta that hasn’t even reached a release candidate stage in my classes. i could use the current stable release — version 2.22 or something like that, but i honestly felt like the SMF forums were better. who knows if i’ll stick with SMF when phpBB 3.0 comes out, but that needs to happen before mid August or i’ll stick with SMF again. here’s a snapshot into how the forums look for my class (from the perspective of my account):
(click for a larger view)
when i add items to a news feed, they are constantly cycled on the front page of the forums. i like that my announcements are so prominent. previously, i had to request students to visit an announcements forum when there were new messages (announcements) therein.
so, i have made some big changes and reverted back to some old methods, but i hope the end results is a quality learning experience for my students. time will tell . . .
Technorati Tags: blogs, drupal, ed tech, phpBB, dreamweaver, students, teachers, SMF
May 14th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I like the new theme, Sean. Very Mac-ish.
Glad to read that you’re trying SMF. I always find that I’m learning more about it. I tried using blogs in one of my classes this year, and it was a pain (I set up about 30 WordPress blogs on my web site for my students). I think I’ve discovered an easier solution (allowing them all to register as members on our “class” blog), so we’ll see how that goes.
May 16th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
1. WordPress. As you read on my other blog, WordPress was a pain to learn: clunky, unintuitive (my first 16 years on computers was entirely Mac), and the help function unintelligible to general users. Nevertheless, having learned it, I’m amazed at how quickly I was able to set up the blog for your class. Perhaps it is a worthwhile tool.
2. Mac. My last continuous experience with a Mac was in 2001. It was version 8.6. Then my wife bought a nifty new PC which came with Office 2002. It was then that I discovered that Microsoft had reincorporated into Word all of the features that had been lost when Word for Mac 5.1 went to Word for Mac & PC 6.0. Between that and adding the Xp system the next year, I’ve been quite pleased with our PC. In fact, as much as I appreciated Macs vs PCs from 1986-2001, I find the current Mac system a pain. What pains me the most is how it has sought to emulate the Windows interface (ex: the three buttons in the upper left of a window to mimic MS’s on the upper right of a window). And the Mac mouse is an utter disappointment (though you pointed out that one can upgrade).
3. I’ve learned a lot already in your class (no, really; I’m not sucking up), and I haven’t even begun Week 2 (heavy history reading course Mondays and Wednesdays). For future classes, I strongly recommend keeping an eye out for the publication of a book by Alan Webb at WMU and Rob Rozema at GVSU. I’ve read chapter titles on Rob’s SecondaryWorlds.com and discovered that our ENG311 last winter was a test run for all of his.
Cheers
May 24th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Rob, that an interesting way to ease your management of the student blogs. so, if i understand correctly, your students are all contributing to one classroom blog and just making their own entries that appear on the same page as the other entries? hmmm. have you looked into WordpressMU — it’s a multiuser version of wordpress??? i downloaded it once, but i never got around to installing it as it was still a pre 1.0 version. i have no clue where the development is right now, but they are now up to version 1.2.1, so i imagine it’s a decent tool:
http://mu.wordpress.org/