Final Project

Thank you, Eric for your vision and all members of this class for their invaluable contributions. This has been a very resourceful class. Other courses provide useful content and tools, but this one built a new road to teaching through the personal learning network and Web 2.0 tools. This project is bittersweet as it is my last MSSE assignment.

My goal for this course was to find a web application to extend the two hours per week I have with home educated students. That goal was met and more. The virtual possibilities expand daily as the growth of online education expands exponentially.

Here is the project plan:

All my courses (see PJ Biology, PJ Chemistry, and Patti’s Sandbox) have a Moodle thanks to Tammy Moore at the Virtual Homeschool Support Group. Currently, this group is hosting the sites until I have a server. The Moodle route was chosen because it is password protected which serves two needs: 1) It is the only way my parents will accept their students putting their work online; 2) It is the only way the publisher of the textbook allows graphics and course materials to be available via the web.

Within the Moodle, a wiki will be used to display group projects such as a watershed study for biology and the results of inquiry labs for chemistry. The forum function (aka blog) will be used to discuss a question of the week, lab results, science articles and hot topics. Currently, I’m writing a grading rubric for both applications. A podcast will be uploaded for each weekly lecture so absent students may hear what they missed or for students who need to reinforce learning. Screencast will be used for additional support material I could not get to during class time. Voicethread will be used as a formative assessment and probe tool.

An area that I have not defined is what to use for an online discussion/open office hours virtual classroom. Elluminate is far and away the favorite yet pricey for my needs while DimDim has fewer features but is an open source.

My PLN includes following what is happening at Classroom 2.0, Teacher’s First, Sloan Consortium, International Association for K-12 Online Learning, and following many blogs with Google Reader. All this Web2.0 experience/content will be organized on Diigo. I plan to develop a blog for science teachers of homeschool students. This will require starting a blog, writing quality content, and networking through the many blogs this group of teachers might frequent.

These are my plans for now. It's a good start, but I know it may look different in time as my skills develop and I learn from my students.