Managing Learners: Tools for organizing your class
/Of the many ways ITC has changed (and is changing) education, none seem more obvious than e-mail and learning management systems. It seems students these days expect ubiquitous, continuous access to course content and their teachers. How do I know this? Well, for one, I commonly get e-mails from students in the middle of the night. I am no longer surprised when I wake up in the morning to e-mails from students, most of them sent well past midnight. I do not think they expect an immediate response, but it reveals a student's mindset when you see he has sent a message in the middle of the night the instant he had a question about an assignment or grade. Second, my students are quick to let me know if they cannot access a course document or cannot see their grade. If the gradebook in my LMS were a section of the Oregon Trail, it would look like this.
The course syllabus? It probably looks more like this.
I am digressing. Anyway, teachers these days must anticipate the "right here, right now," mindset of many students and parents. Over time, report cards were augmented by weekly take-home folders, then daily homework planners, and now the LMS has crept into K-12 schools. Some schools have adopted an LMS that every teacher is expected to use. This was the case at the private school where I worked a few years back. Teachers at this school were expected to post grades, assignment details, worksheets, and other announcements each week. In other cases, a teacher may choose, independent of the rest of the school, to use an LMS in this way with students and parents.
This past week in my class, we explored various options available to teachers who want to use an LMS for managing learners and organizing content for their class. Before we looked at any platforms, we discussed the features one would expect to see in a LMS, and we listed them on a shared Google Doc, which the students filled out as they explored. Here are the results of our exploration.
| Features | Edmodo | Chalkup | Homeroom |
| Upload course materials | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Upload materials in a variety of media (e.g., post a video for students to watch) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Discussion tool | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Message tool | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Announcement tool | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Dashboard with upcoming assignments | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Submit assignments | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Submit using a variety of tools | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Quiz tool | ✓ | It may be there, but we couldn't find it | ✓ |
| Embed content from other sources | ✓ | Only from pre-selected sources | |
| Features of this tool that may be particularly appealing. | Links to Google Drive, Archives class data, calendar linked to assignments for multiple classes. | Teacher can annotate papers, messaging feature, flashcards | Interfaces with Apollo (the BYOD presentation tool). Quizzes can be tracked in realtime using a simple dashboard. |
There are some obvious omissions on this list: Schoology and Google Classroom. This is mainly because we only had 2 hours and 40 minutes, so I had to make some choices about what to analyze. We already had someone demonstrating Edmodo, and I felt like Schoology was similar enough to skip past it. Some of the students actually mentioned it as we discussed Edmodo, and they were able to identify the similarities and differences themselves. I would have LOVED to show the class Google Classroom. I would love to see Classroom for myself, for crying out loud! Yes, most of their tools and features are available and free to everyone, but there are some that are not. This is especially true of GAFE, where if you are not in the club, you are WAY out of the club. So, this class exercise was not exhaustive, but I believe it gave the students an in-depth look at different ways to design an interface, features to include and leave out, and how easy different tools are to use.