Technology In Education Online

If I were to climb inside the Way-Back machine (think Peabody and Sherman), I would see classroom days of sitting in class feeling extremely restless and not being a very good passive receptor of information or knowledge. In those days there wasn't much interaction among students. If I journey back to present day, I see some of the same things happening. In some classrooms, students are sitting with that glazed over look in their eyes as they are spoon-fed information that they "need" to know for the next test or to prepare for some state-wide standardized test.

But behold, there is a bright light shinning on the horizon. It is the light of the sign saying, "Classroom open 24/7!" How can this be? Aren't teachers overworked already? Now you expect them to be in school every day of the week and all hours? Relax and take a deep breath. What I'm talking about here is a great resource that is catching on world-wide. What is it? It is creating a Moodle. As the March issue of Technology & Education, The Case for Open Source suggests, a moodle is a free open-source curriculum management system (CMS). As a doctoral student at the University of Delaware, the focus of my studies has been on two issues: technology integration into the curriculum and professional development. As I pondered how to make technology as commonplace as students using paper and pencil, I came across this great tool available for free. I was made aware of Moodle by one of my fellow students at University of Delaware. I had a mild interest in it at the time, largely due to running my own website off of a hosted Windows server. My incorrect understanding at the time was that you needed to run Moodle on a Linux server.

 

When I attended the NECC conference in San Diego last summer, the big buzz was on open-source software. Again this "Moodle thing" was a topic of conversation. I began to look further into the potential of this open-source software. As a part of my doctoral work, I was planning on establishing a collaborative plan with several teachers in my school district as a way of providing professional development and integrating technology into the curriculum. All of a sudden the light bulb came on and the idea of utilizing a Moodle came to light.

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