New Thing

Mid-January this year I left my position as an elementary principal to become a technology instructional coach for the district. At first I had to go through a bit of culture shock, not dealing with angry parents, not dealing with angry teachers, not seeing angry students, not dealing with angry central office administrators, etc. to working in a very small department on the backside of the district. My e-mails went from 100 a day to less than 10 and my face to face traffic was even less. I was given two projects when I came. The first was to assist in crafting the district's three year comprehensive technology plan and the second was to investigate something called Moodle. The plan was already begun and my job was mainly to word smith and format the document. Moodle was a much bigger task. I downloaded a version for my iBook and began to mess with it. I was really impressed. Fast forward three months, this week we went on-line with our Moodle project and I've trained 18 teachers and instructional coaches in our pilot project. Next year we hope to get a lot more teachers on-line. Everyday I'm learning new things about the on-line teaching environment, like Wikis and Blogs etc. I've joined Classroom 2.0 now in hopes of networking with others who are working to change the way we do school.

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Comment by Steve Hargadon on April 13, 2007 at 4:57pm: I'm very interested in your experiences with Moodle. How are the students responding to it?

Comment by Clifton Dancy on April 16, 2007 at 7:56am: Actually it is only 1 week on-line. We're in a pilot process. I've trained 17 people to use it, only one is aggressive enough to open it up to her students this week.
on another note, I read your blog entry on Puppy Linux. I'm taking an old computer that I had in my basement and trying this out. I'm really interested in getting computers into the hands of families in our district who can't afford them.

Comment by Hans Feldmeier on April 16, 2007 at 8:21am: Working with platforms is similar the same. I use fronter.com in my school. It´s not free, it´s a norwegan platform, but of course CMS platform.
Try out to get in touch with e-journals like MagazineFactory from Finland or Schooljournals.net.
There is much fun and work on producing webquests and mindmaps.