21st Century Education & Learning Environments 28 Feb 2009 11:05 am
To LMS or not to LMS – That is the question!
Six weeks into my new role and I haven’t had a chance till now to blog about some of the exciting things we are doing. In fact this week was such an interesting insight into the world of my students I wanted to just share this one experience from the week.
At present our school is going through the process of working through different Learning Management Systems, attempting to find the best solution for our school. At present our staff are being trained and doing PD in 2 different platforms, learning the basic skills of an online management system. Our students are not included in this just yet but will be pushed toward an LMS shortly.
My interesting observation this week came from 2 of my media students who decided to create a facebook group for our class. The group is closed to just the 16 class members and myself. These students started inviting class mates to join and participate in the group. Inside the group facebook page they have placed handouts from class and started to post some videos explaining different aspects of the class. All this created by students in their world. Personally I can’t stand how disorganised things get within facebook groups, however, the students are using it and starting to use this social medium also as a learning medium.
So after this week my question is – Why do we as a school need to spend 1000’s of dollars on an LMS that is not a part of our student’s world already? I know there are still reasons to have an LMS and I am keen to see something that is student and teacher friendly, however, for the cost is it really worth it? Especially when you have students taking innovative like this.
I would really appreciate some thoughts and feedback.
on 05 Mar 2009 at 4:32 pm 1.Gary Overliese said …
Hey Brett!
I know my colleagues have tried to set up a similar based system of having an open forum availble to the class. I don’t know how it works with school aged children but it was a flop here in university. At least for the classes tested (Multimedia).
However we have had it work with a custom student generated content system within the I.T. school where they basically created the system (much like a group on facebook).
At Bond we use the “Blackboard” LMS and it is pretty good. I’ve used it now for a year and find students find it easy to get the materials they need for the classes supplied by the teacher, also has support for polls and forums.
However with the development of social networking tools such as Facebook. Just as a social aspect I think it’s an awesome tool for the student to collaberate with eachother and share notes and talk to eachother without the overbearing schools eye seeing what goes on. However it would still be good if it was moderated a little, if at all possible.
Just a little thought while I sit in my classroom with 1 student who descided to stay and do work…
G