Friday 22 June 2007

Moodle or weblog?

A couple of days ago I wrote about the difficulty of choosing the most appropriate tool for international school projects. Having only experience of Moodle, I’ve been wondering whether weblogs or wikis would actually be more suitable. I found some good ideas from Aaron Campbell:
In my opinion, if teachers are going to replicate the traditional classroom
model of command and control online, they should do it in a private space
with a
discussion forum or LMS, like
Moodle
or
Blackboard. If however, teachers
want to
explore a more open, constructivist approach to online communication
and
learning, one that encourages self direction in the learner, then
weblogs are
more suitable.

Maybe I should keep persevering with Moodle for the international projects, spiced with an occasional wiki here and there to enchance student collaboration. The weblogs would probably be a good way to open up my English classes to the world, as they would give students an audience (hopefully?) and purpose for their writing. Normally, you see, our students’ writing is just geared towards the teacher, something they have to do for course credit, or for the other Finnish students in their group with whom conversing in English doesn’t often come naturally.
Great, this gives me a lot to think about and plan for the next school year.

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