The Life That Chose Me

Amidst the death march known as IEP season and the end of the school year, I took time out to to attend a workshop on eLearn, otherwise known as Moodle.  I like using the term Moodle better than eLearn, but that’s just me.  Newton County has its own ideas.

I had a chance to see what others were doing from around the county on their eLearn sites.  We had elementary and middle school teachers represented with one other teacher representing another high school.   Most of the time was spent actually working on our Moodles, with basically everyone getting theirs better ready for a fall roll out.  Some of us have not been very active on our sites for a very long time.  In fact, according to our illustrious instructor, Beth, that would be most teachers.  I would be one of them, up until a couple of months or so ago when I decided to take on this new project where eLearn would play a prominent role.  Even then, it was a bit of time before I tackled putting together modules since I have to generate all of the content by myself.

Other teachers can use Google, PBS, United Streaming and various other sites to put their content together.  Mine is mostly self-generated although I am starting to see things appear on TeacherTube that might be useful that I can use.  If any readers are generating content and posting, let me know!  My stuff is available and out there for the taking/viewing/using and I have more stuff I’m getting ready to put up.

Back to eLearn/Moodle, I did manage to pick up most of the things I wanted out of the class so that I can [roceed to develop the site.  One think I quickly learned is that my site was looking visually impoverished as everyone else had all sorts of nifty graphics and animations on their sites.  I thought I was doing well on original content and even some interactivity, but still have a long way to go.

I plan on taking the advanced course this summer, so perhaps I’ll be blogging that, but no promises, especially since I have a backlog of posts that need to be rolled out.  But it was nice to be around another techno-nerd in the school system, as we seem to be relatively few and far between.  It would be neat to get self-identified propeller heads together for a one day convocation/conference/confab before school starts, sort of like a mini SXSW for teachers and teaching.  It could be done in conjunction with new teacher orientation.  Nothing too heavy, but just getting tips, tricks and contacts before school starts.

Who knows?  Maybe I could become a sort of Scoble for education.

D.