[IAEP] Where should we put Lesson Plans? Currwiki?

[Maria Droujkova]

Caroline,

I am copying this to Peter Levy, the Curriki person you need for the
purpose of setting up partnerships. He's been very helpful in
answering my Curriki questions.

Peter,

This is a neat project. Beautiful things may happen when you connect.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
http://www.naturalmath.com

Make math your own, to make your own math.





On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> I think the right answer is to put our materials on both your system and
> Curriki for now and hopefully an automated interoperable system will emerge.
> I am very interested in collaborating with OLE and in making materials
> accessible to schools without internet access. Please talk more about how
> your system supports these environments.  I have not yet reached out to the
> Curriki people to try to create a partnership.  Are you in communication
> with them?
> For the Moodle advocates. I am a big Moodle fan. But I don't think its our
> right now solution for the work we are talking about doing.
>
> Our target, elementary school teachers are not currently using either Moodle
> or Sugar, adding both at once makes the learning curve even harder.
> We are focusing on lesson plans in the 1 hour and even 20-minute groupwork
> time frames.  Moodle is more focused on longer time frames.
> We are focusing on what the teacher will do and what the class will do both
> online and offline during the lesson as well as learning goals, standards,
> help for the teacher in differentiating the lesson etc.  Think the teachers
> guide for the text book. Moodle is more focused on what the student is doing
> online. Its not a very natural fit.
> Moodle has tremendous promise in terms of reducing teacher workload.  Here
> is an example of what I hope that in the future Moodle will be able to:
>
> Provide a link that students click and they open a Write document that is a
> template/scaffolding for a specific assignment, say writing a scientific
> argument.
> When the document is saved it is automatically turned in as Homework in
> Moodle allowing the teacher to review and comment on the document from
> anywhere, even on days when the class does not see the science teacher.
>
> however, these features aren't there yet. Once they are there will be a
> large payoff for teachers to learn Moodle.  However, I still see Moodle as
> just one format teachers will use. Other lessons and other teachers and
> other contexts may still want to print out a pdf.  Other times a teacher may
> just be browsing for a sample lesson to be used as inspiration to create a
> quite different lesson.
> Thanks,
> Caroline
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Chris Rowe <chris at ole.org> wrote:
>>
>> Caroline,
>>
>> We at Open Learning Exchange (OLE) have been working towards a solution
>> for this over the past 2 years and have a working prototype with the most
>> basic functionality we think is needed. You are welcome to try it out at
>> library.ole.org
>>
>> There are several sites on the web that are trying to create a place for
>> curriculum to be shared but none of them that I know of are addressing the
>> needs of developing countries. We have done a lot of work to address the
>> diverse needs of countries with limited internet access and feel we have a
>> solution that will be very powerful in the near future.
>>
>> We are working with our centers around the world to identify the key
>> success factors in making a Global Learning Library as well as several
>> partners like the Siyavula project in South Africa and Connexions at Rice
>> University to leverage existing work done in this area.
>>
>> In addition, we have begun talks with Sugarlabs to use our library as a
>> repository of educational materials that incorporate sugar activities. It
>> would be very helpful for us to get your feedback on what we have and to
>> work with you on integrating it with your work and the work of the Sugarlabs
>> community.
>>
>> Some of my thoughts on other solutions.
>>
>> Sugarlabs wiki: There is too much other content on the sugarlabs wiki that
>> is not relevant to teachers. Just like activities.sugarlabs.org is a place
>> to find and download activities I think we need a place designed
>> specifically for curriculum materials.
>>
>> Moodle: Moodle is a great tool for creating structured, interactive lesson
>> plans and for deploying them in classrooms but it is not designed as a
>> library or repository of materials. Our plan is to start by allowing people
>> to create Moodle courses and share them on our library for others to
>> download and use on their own Moodle servers. We are also working with a
>> developer to integrate work he has done on Moodle import/export into our
>> library in the future.
>>
>> Curriki: Curriki is the closest thing to what we think is needed but it
>> lacks the ability to be deployed on a country by country basis. We feel
>> strongly that a learning library needs to be customizable for each country,
>> each school and even each student.
>>
>> Curriculum alignment: There are many features that we we feel are an
>> integral part of making a library of curriculum materials successful that we
>> have not implemented in our library yet. Curriculum alignment is at the top
>> of that list. Because of the complexity of many of the worlds curriculum
>> standards we want to make sure we do not overload teachers with too much
>> information.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> Chris Rowe, CTO
>> Open Learning Exchange
>> +1 (512) 553-0852 | skype: eworsirhc
>> http://ole.org
>> Sent from Austin, TX, United States
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
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