Here are my goals for a district eLearning platform to be in place within 2 years: To have a complete ecosystem that allows for learning (moodle), community building/blogging/resume building/personal learning artifacts for students (mahara), and web communications and presentation archiving (dimdim). This is also a great toolset for web 2.0 technologies.

The web 2.0 classroom toolset:

1. Moodle 1.9 (November 2007) www.moodle.org
2. Mahara 1.0 (ePortfolio/community building/ November or December 2007) www.mahara.org
3. DimDim 1.0 (Desktop Sharing/Conference/Presentation / Early 2008) www.dimdim.org
4.Joomla (frontpage and possible “glue” to tie these all together so that you go to one website and then get access to all aspects of the ecosystem. Otherwise you can get access from within each website.
5. PHP Motion 1.0(Video Sharing)
6. Wordpress MU (Teacher website/blogging)
7. Liferay (widget based portal/custom homepage)

ALL of these products are fully integrated meaning if you login to one, you can click on a link within the website and you will automatically be logged in to the other website allowing for a seamless integration. Dimdim is an activity within Moodle and Mahara takes advantage of the networking feature of moodle that allows you to go from one site to another and not have to login again.

I believe these tools are going to give our students and teachers unprecedented opportunities for professional development, collaboration, sharing, and learning. The ePortfolio system will help students gather and save work needed when applying for college and give them a tech savvy way to present their educational work.

All dates given above are subject to the release of the programs in the open source community.

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What would be an ideal online learning portal for students?  Is there one program out there that can handle ePortfolios, tests and quizzes, online learning, web publishing, social interactions, and group forming?

We have some tools in place already which include Moodle and iBlog.  These tools are for teacher use and not necessarily for students other than being participants in a course or reading a blog.

My goal this year is to develop 3 things:

1. Create an online learning community where people can interact, store files, communicate, form groups, and learn together.  I believe this can occur with the addition of another web application that ties into our Moodle software.
2. Create a means by which we can conduct live video conferences and do “just in time” training.  This live video component will most definitely reside inside iLearn/Moodle.  It could be used by teachers or by students to collaborate on projects as well.
3.  Provide a means for students, teachers, parents, and community to create their own learning space or personal homepage that would be geared towards information, news, and resources related to Dearborn Public Schools (And other websites as well, but it will come preloaded with DPS information).  Kinda like http://netvibes.com .  I kinda believe that personal homepages will be one of the next big tools on the web. Imagine being able to customize the Dearborn Schools Website to your liking.

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I will be providing training for web technologies this friday. Hope to see you there. I am thinking we will be exploring some of the new web technologies, working on blogging, and talking about iLearn. Depending on what you want to learn, the main focus will either be iLearn or iBlog.

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Now in it’s 2nd year, iBlog has outgrown it’s server. I was getting complaints about how slow pages would load. We re purposed another server which was more powerful and installed Linux on it. I have been very happy with the new server and installing Apache, PHP, and Mysql could not have been easier.

Moving to the new server did not happen without incident. We moved files from a Mac Server to a Linux Server and there were all kinds of File Permission issues as well as MySql Database issues because the new server was operating with version 5 while the old server had version 4. After 6 days of working on it, the new server runs flawlessly and has dramatically improved performance in the classrooms where teachers were using blogs.

I look forward to getting more teachers using iBlog for classroom websites.

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