Best Online Learning Management System for K-12

Hello everyone!

Next year, I am planning on creating an online learning classroom as an extension to my physical space. I am looking for a program which will allow blogging, podcasting, etc. that has password protection capabilities. The primary authors will be my fourth grade students.

Also, a place which allows you to upload attachments would also be great. What is the most fourth grade friendly program available?

Thanks!

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Sheri Glew on June 2, 2010 at 12:35pm

Hello!
You may want to check out inSky by Learning.com - from a teacher perspective it is very friendly yet powerful. I'm not sure about the student content loading abilities... but it's worth looking into.

Sheri

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matt D on June 2, 2010 at 8:28pm

Thanks Sheri, I will take a look!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Zach Vander Veen on June 3, 2010 at 6:54am

Two ideas (commonly mentioned):

Moodle - which gives you a full featured LMS. As it is open source (not - IMO - a bad thing...I work with all kinds of LMSs and it is the best). It also works really well with the younger kids (it's really taken off in my district this year with the elementary students).

Wordpress - which is technically a blogging platform but has the capabilities you mentioned. Again, open source and excellent. Fairly simple to use.

If you need to get it up and running, you can ask if your district has server space. Or check out super cheap hosting like lunarpages.com (which, come to think of it, offer free hosting for educators).

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Mark Allen on June 3, 2010 at 8:17am

In my school (ages 4-11), we've moved away from any of the commercial licensed learning platforms and developed our own using Google Apps for Educators and a mix of web services (Edmodo, Posterous, Voicethread and others) to allow the students and staff to create, consume and organize content. We use the same child-friendly usernames/passwords wherever possible so we get as close as we can to single sign-on. Have a look at the attached screenshot for an idea of what you can do - it's less work than you might think! The image shown is the Student menu - we have different menus for Teachers, Parents, Admin and Guest.

If you're looking for a single program, Posterous is unbeatable for simple public-facing blogging (and we run our radio station using it, too!) while Edmodo has the advantage of being private - posts are only visible to group members and the teacher controls group membership. Nothing I've mentioned has any local storage or server requirement.

Attachments: