Hi all!
I am in Cohort #2, so I’ll be applying what we did last semester to a class and helping out everyone along the way!
My application will consist of using a Wordpress blog with my History 103 class at San Elijo. I was one of the several MCC instructors who loved Ning, and that’s where I ran my 104 class last spring (I think you can still see it here http://104sec.ning.com/ -- maybe not after Sept 6).
I do not like paying for online services. I am a public employee at a public institition, and feel that companies should give back to the people by offering learning products freely to public school teachers, including myself. I also don’t want my sites to have ads on them.
Though I explored a number of options, none gelled this summer. I am still trying to archive my Ning using grou.ps, which was my first choice alternative. After weeks, that archive is still not complete -- I lost my Groups (kind of ironic, huh?) and could not reconstruct their activities (which upset me because I wanted to show them for my Peer Review evaluation this semester).
So this summer I set up my own Wordpress blog on a rented server, and immediately ran into trouble. Allowing my pedagogy to lead, I wanted what I had in Ning: areas for groups to work, places for students to post their homework thesis, the ability for student groups to post images. I ended up having to find a good theme (Atahualpa) that had things that looked like tabs for posting theses, and plug-ins so they could add images and see a toolbar (even though, in this case, the toolbar is in Russian!).
The site is here: http://lisahistory.net/wphist103/ . The students have already successfully logged in (almost everyone) and posted (most of them) -- I have the post prompts for each week’s homework set to appear a few days before they’re supposed to post. I have also tied in one blog page to Engrade, where I keep the gradebook, so it’s my own little course management system. I tend to try new things with an on-site class first, so that when things go wrong we can talk about it in class. So far so good.
Lisa
Lisa:
I appreciate your courageous determination to transcend course management systems. I always learn invaluable ideas about what is out there. Your adaptation of a blog to make it feel ningish is pretty impressive and I will be following closely this semester to see if it offers me a good alterantive, too. So thanks for being such a smart, creative, and implacably determined guinea pig :)
By the way, have you bookmarked this blog site to our POT Diigo?
Posted by: Jim Sullivan | 09/04/2010 at 08:45 AM
Hi Lisa,
I like what you did with the 104sec.ning site! I've bookmarked it to study it again later.
Thanks.
Michele
Posted by: mbrewster | 09/05/2010 at 09:50 PM
Jim, I haven't bookmarked my class blog because it really is an experiment at this point.
Michele, unfortunately, it will be disappearing soon, possibly as early as today.
Posted by: Llane | 09/08/2010 at 12:35 PM