using IT in primary education


Help!

What Web2.0 tool should I use?

What Web2.0 tool would you use?

This year for my Year 7 maths class I want to have a learning management system – but without using commercial software ie no Moodle (takes too long to learn); no Sharepoint (need access to set up on servers) and no Blackboard (cost too much).

This is what I want to do with it:

  • set tasks and have students reply that they have completed them
  • put course materials online
  • have students ask questions online
  • have video lessons that I make available for each teaching moment
  • have parents see progress of their child and make comments
  • be accessible from home
  • have some assessment data viewable
  • have students use it to profile some of their work
  • and a few other things that I have probably forgotten to mention
  • have it semi-private so that students and their parents are the main (only) users

These are some the options:

  • Edmodo – can I do most of this in edumodo??
  • A blog
  • A Wiki
  • A ning
  • other suggestions?

So, what would you use? Which tool will make it fairly simple, keep it organised and not be too hard for parents to interact with?

Photo: source Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Side-note: Wasn’t sure what to expect when I typed “help” into the Flickr Creative Commons search engine but there were an interesting range of images.

This could be an interesting task for students to do: with a digital camera take an image that depicts ‘help’, add it to VoiceThread (or blog page), describe your thoughts and invite others to respond.