Recently, a teacher asked me to comment on what tool I’d recommend for sharing resources among a group of teachers. Her idea was to use the forums in Moodle, but she wanted some other options to consider as she made this decision with colleagues. My e-mail below:
You can get Moodle to do what you’re talking about. I think the beauty of using Moodle for what you’re trying to accomplish would be that you could create a forum post for each resource you’d like to share and attach the resource to your post, which gives some description of how you’d use it and allows others to reply with praise, suggestions, etc.
The other option would be to set up a wiki either through Wikispaces or Google Sites, but you’d be limited on space and your attachments would be separate from the discussion. If you’d prefer to separate the two, I’d probably go with a wiki over Moodle, as general resource sharing can get kind of messy in Moodle. Wikis will allow you to create pages and post resources within them, which makes things a bit cleaner, but they move discussion to either a new tab (wikispaces) or to the bottom of each page (Google Sites) and discussion posts can’t have files attached. I use both products, but for different purposes. Here are a couple examples: Wikispaces - http://edtechuniversity.wikispaces.com ; Google Sites – http://www.bit.ly/Notebook2
If you want resource sharing only, you might want to check out creating a http://www.dropbox.com account and sharing through that.
I think this idea of sharing is a puzzlement to people in general. How do I get what I want to share into the hands of others, especially in a way that keeps important bits of context intact? In the district, this type of cross-district sharing only happens through a gatekeeper (the curriculum coordinator), and for good reason – we only have so much space on our district drives. But it seems that people need something a bit more flexible and immediate.
Any solutions that have occurred to you or your colleagues? What has worked well for you?
I like your response and your questions. We have used a variety of different sites (everything from wiggio, wikis, to blackboard and more). The most effective from the teachers’ perspective seems to be the Dropbox solution. It’s very powerful and efficient, easy to use but does provide some security risks. Dropbox is great for small group or paired sharing, but probably not so good for district wide programs.
In Kentucky, every student and teacher now also have access to Microsoft’s Live@Edu, which includes virtual storage space (25GB), as well as online collaboration version of MS Office products. It will be interesting to observe how teachers will take advantage of these opportunities. Personally, I’m most excited about the real-time editing of MS Notebook documents and will look for some collaboration opportunities in that.
Thanks sharing what’s going on in KY, Thomas! I’ll be interested to hear how Live@Edu goes for you. We haven’t decided on a district-wide collaborative solution yet, but are moving to Office 2010 sometime soon.
A couple of our foreign language teachers have incorporated the collaborative features of Google Docs into class activities and into work with one another, both in Spanish and Latin. I’d be interested to hear how the real-time editing you mention works into the Live@Edu environment, and how that makes it into projects students complete together.
Good to hear from you!