Saturday, January 14, 2012

Worldwide online class

I am pleased with the registration of my first public online class: Intro to K-12 ePortfolios. The participants are primarily from North America, although I have students from Europe (The Netherlands, Germany, Italy) and Asia (Hong Kong, Japan). In the U.S., I have several groups of 3, 4 and 10 from school districts! The majority have signed up as "singletons" so I will be developing some groups for collaboration. Any group of four or more will qualify for a private one-hour live teleconference via Skype or GoToMeeting. Deadline for registration in this cohort is January 16, so I will have the final number next week. The next cohort begins in April.

This online class has many new elements for me: using Edmodo instead of threaded discussion in a course management system like Blackboard or Moodle; posting the course content online in Google Sites; doing live conversations in Google+ Hangouts. I team-taught an online course last fall using Edmodo for student discussions, and I have been using Google Sites for years. I picked Edmodo because it was a social network that can be used in schools, and has some features that make it more user friendly than a CMS. Maybe in the future I will use Google+ Circles for asynchronous conversations in the class. However, using Google+ Hangouts is new for me. I have the option to use GoToWebinar, but that tool is very instructor-centered. I really want us to have more of a conversation.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Helen
Applogise for not being involved in the course so far (I joined very late). My name is Darren Beaty and I am currently implementing digital portfolios at Camberwell High School, Melbourne, Australia. I have been following your work for some time and it is great to be able to contact you directly.
We will be using the Google platform for our digital portfolios and I am currently developing a student template site which we will be distributing to all out students in year 7 to 9 at the start of the academic year (February 2012). Do you possibly have any examples of google site templates for student portfolios. If so I would love to have a look?
Yours
Darren Beaty
ba@camhigh.vic.edu.au

eportfolios said...

You might check your spam filter. I have been sending you emails for the last week to provide information about how to join our course Google Group and our course Edmodo discussion.