Mark's Blog

Alrighty, that was an experience.  This was our pre-thesis?  I felt like I just returned from a land of anxiety, papers, questions, doubt, and more anxiety.  As always, I feel like I must thank my peers whose early submissions helped me immensely–both to somewhat validate my experience in constructing this and help with formatting of this procedure.  Heidi, your pre-thesis helped me immensely in formatting.  Barbara, your divisioning in your literature review section was quite helpful to spark where I want to go with mine.  Chris, your early submission was a great first read to help me wrap my head around want I had to do this week. Kenny, your pre-thesis was also of tremendous help–sorry, I jumped the gun on commenting while you were still editing .  Your activity logs are also great–I keep wondering if I should do one.  Now, I’m not sure if you are done or not Kristina, but the fact that you actually used the Word document to do your pre-thesis caused me to start there too; unfortunately, after writing the introduction I stopped and started writing directly into WordPress as the preliminary literature review section didn’t seem to work in the template as it screamed for the full literature review.  Matt, I’m with you on the stressing out part.   Noemi, like Kenny’s, I love the activity log. Rebecca, well, I just feel far, far behind you.  Scott, while I didn’t find your pre-thesis until I was actively working on mine, yours looks great!  Why do I feel like I’m giving a laundry list of thank yous at an award show?  I think I’m just mentally projecting myself in a year from now when this is all completed and I get to wear my Harry Potter robe in a ceremony.  At least I hope I get to.  I really do appreciate seeing everyone else’s progress though as it helps me to keep on pushing myself through this.

Oh yeah, my pre-thesis, which is crude and accentuates the meaning of pre, can be reached by the link on the top of this blog or by click here.

Okay, I think my waffling between thesis ideas has ended.  Our school is going through a strange time as a new high school is opening next year.  As such, approximately half of the teachers at our current site are moving to the new high school.  While this division has caused some strange feelings among our staff, it is also infusing a sense of reinvention for the staff remaining behind–such as myself.  Our department wants to utilize more technology in the classroom, but without a clear focus, we seem to be piecemealing this technology with that technology.  This in of itself is not bad; on the contrary, one size doesn’t seem to fit all.  However, I would like to see an open platform be utilized that can hopefully tie in some of these various technologies together.

The Problem

Currently, our Learning Management System is Edline.  We, as a district, are pretty tied into this system.  Edline is okay, and for the most part, the students and teachers know how to use it.  This LMS offers students and parents the ability to see grades, which are uploaded from our EasyGradePro software directly to Edline, check homework assignments, and see important calendar events.  Edline even has a rudimentary discussion board feature.  However, the features of Edline are fairly inflexible and don’t allow for the proactive teacher to embrace and try new technologies, such as Wikis or blogs, within this existing framework.  Many teachers are already using other supplemental technologies/websites to augment Edline’s limited feature set.  Unfortunately, this has lead to a massive amount of various sites and logins for the students and teachers to remember.

Thesis Proposal

In order to help my department’s desire to utilize new technologies, I want to introduce, and train how to use, a LMS called Moodle.  I’ve been using Moodle off and on for over two years and have found it to be a robust online platform to engage my students in forums, wikis, and a one-stop place to post important documents and deadlines.  I realize I will probably not be able to replace Edline any time soon; moreover, I don’t see a reason to replace it.  I want Moodle to be used as a supplement to Edline–a place for our students to go above and beyond looking up grades.  Moodle seems like a good solution for a couple of reasons.  One, Moodle itself is free and open source.  The advantages to free is obvious amongst our tightning budget concerns, and the advantages of open source is that we won’t be locked into a proprietary solution such as we are with EasyGrade Pro and Edline.  Now, while Moodle is free, the hosting of it is not.  This is another area of concern that I don’t think I will be addressing in my thesis as I merely want to try a pilot test of Moodle with two to three teachers.  As such, I am planning to host it myself.  If this pilot program works, I will probably be looking at the possibilities of hosting it onsite or through a company such as MoodleRooms.  However, for this thesis project, I merely want to design and develop a training program for teachers on how to use and setup their class in Moodle.  We are also looking at trying to use Google Docs as an alternative solution for students for the submission of work.  An added benefit of this Moodle test pilot program might be a single login for teachers and students to be able to access their Google Docs directly from within Moodle.

Where to Go From Here

My first plan of action is to recruit two to three teachers to actively try Moodle at the beginning of next school year.  I am hoping this week to run this idea by my department head to see if I have her blessing to continue this project.  If so, I will start developing my training program this summer, as outlined in my timeline, and show my alpha training programs to my teacher participants by June 14.  Of course, even before all of this is to occur, I need to complete my pre-thesis, literature review, project proposal, etecetera.  Whew, that sounds like so much–but I think I have at least a good design project.

Literature Review Focus Areas

• Web based learning–benefits for students
  • synchronous and asynchronous learning
• Constructivism/Socio-Cultural learning and online tools like discussion forums–benefits for the subject (Language Arts)
• Open Source Technologies in Education–benefits for the teachers

On a side note, has everyone seen the amount of work Rebecca has done on her blog?  Wow.  I know Kenny made a comment about it over on his blog, but seeing it is quite humbling.  Nice job Rebecca!

Okay, thanks to the sample timeline and Kristina’s Timeline, I have completed my timeline.  That was a lot of timelines.  I tried to put a lot of ending dates on Sundays, like Kristina, as that is usually when I can get a lot of work done due to work-school.  I’m not sure about filing my grad check or this “Register at Webcomm for Spring Commencement Ceremony” bit, but I just kind of followed Kristina on this part.  Hopefully, Dr. Newberry will help me out on this part.

Okay, I finally am having the opportunity to write my first post.  It’s easy for me to get lost in tinkering with the behind-the-scenes stuff with technology.  For example, after going to the EdTech conference and seeing the keynote by Dr. Ahn, I really wanted to include a RECaptcha on my site.  Consequently, you will see it being used for my comments section–unless you register at my site or use the OpenID login.  Although, I’m still investigating this OpenID system and have no idea if it even works yet.  This getting lost in the details, like going through the CSS file in my theme to darken the border around the comments box, can be a problem for me.  I’m not really being facetious here.  This thesis project makes me nervous because I don’t want to get so lost in the details that I have trouble seeing the big picture.  Kenny’s blog, and specfically the comments back, really helped with some clarification on the literature review.

It’s good to “see” so many familiar faces in this class, and I look forward to getting to know the people with whom I haven’t met before.  As Dr. Newberry knows, I’ve been a tad ambigous with my thesis concept because I really want a design product that will be beneficial to my school site and, frankly, look good in my portfolio.  This step in finding the perfect thesis has been tough as I don’t want to be overly ambitous but I also don’t want to be too narrow in scope as well.  It’s strange as this class is really cementing the notion in my mind that the end is near.