Having just completed my masters degree in a totally online distance education program has inspired me to think about how I could adapt and use e learning in my 6th grade classroom to push students to reach higher levels of learning. I began by checking out a variety of online learning management systems including Moodle, Udemy, and RCampus. Each of these are great, free tools to host online courses. Since I am working with sixth graders and facilitating an online course for the first time, I decided to try tools I am familiar with to start in the hopes of keeping it simple for myself and the students.
I ended up basically creating my own course management tool by using several other web 2.0 tools. The basic course is hosted on a Google Site. I used the site to post announcements and directions for students. As they complete each of the 5 lesson parts, there are links to the learning materials they need. I added to this, a discussion board where students are assigned to post comments on questions related to lesson topics. The discussion board is actually a blog on Blogger. I used ClassMarker to create an online graded quiz for each lesson. Finally I am trying out using Engrade to report scores to students.
The biggest dilemma in this adventure for me is making the online lessons easy to access and navigate through for students. I really would love to spend some more time with the course management programs to make things a bit more fluid and easily accessible for students and myself. So far things seem to be going well with how I have things set up.
You can check out my online learning site at: https://sites.google.com/site/rockstarsonline/
Once my students have finished the project, I will post my reflections and tips I learn through the process.
