School starts in Prince William County next week. Even though I’m not teaching at Woodbridge High this year, I’ll still be helping my former colleagues with their online needs, which means I’ve been spending time thinking about what the students will need this year in their courses and how best to meet those needs. What follows is an overview of the online solutions my colleagues will be using.¹

We’ll be relying on three main tools to meet our technology needs:

1. a Google account (to take advantage of some of their “Google for Educators” offerings)
2. a Wikispaces page
3. a CMS portal running on a Joomla platform²

Google Account
We’ll use this mainly for Google Docs and Google Reader, and the iGoogle home page. Creative writing students will be required to use Google Docs for their drafts and writing workshops, and other students will be encouraged to use it as a helpful backup.³ English students will be asked to read a vareity of blogs relevant to class work and their research projects, and all students will be encouraged to use iGoogle as a personal portal to their online work.

WikiSpaces Page
We’ll be using the wiki page as a presentation platform: students will post individual or collaborative products to the wiki–products that usually have their origin in earlier work in the blog, forum, or Google Docs.

CMS Portal
We’ll continue to use the Joomla-backed WSHSBeyond site as the “home base” for the students’ online work. Through this site, students will have an extensive profile system (where they can connect with one another and plan projects), an individual blog, and a forum. All of this will be available only to site members, creating a walled garden to allow students to develop their work safely and to appease the concerns of the administration. Final products will be posted to the wiki.

I spent most of last week updating Joomla to the latest version and installing / configuring some new components. Our soltuion relies mainly on the Joomla release, Community Builder profile system, Azrul’s MyBlog and JomComment, and Fireboard’s forum.

If you’d like a more complete overview of the Joomla site, I’ve created and published a Google Doc with screenshots and notes called “WSHSBeyond Overview.”

Research
We hope students will learn to approach research as an ongoing process of reading (texts, articles, blogs, etc.), note-taking (bookmarking, collecting notes, and creating annotated bibliographies), and reflecting (writing). We’ll also introduce online tools that help this process: reading using RSS feeds (blog readers and mashups); note-taking with Google Notebook, del.icio.us, Diigo, and Carmun; and reflecting with blog-writing and draft creation (shared with project members through Google Docs).

Volunteering
So that’s our current tech plan for the new school year. What will be very different, and potentially very interesting, is that I won’t actually be teaching this year but will instead be serving as a “volunteer ed-tech” consultant. I’m curious to see how the other teachers will use these tools, and I’m looking forward to the chance to work with some of the students in a distance learning / online teacher capacity.⁴ I’ll be going into the school during the second week to introduce the students to the various tools, and may visit occasionally after that, but most of my interaction will be online this year. I’m sure I’ll be writing about what this different approach is like as the school year progresses.

1. Though many other edubloggers have been writing about the technology plans, no one that I’ve been reading has been as thorough as Clarence Fisher, and his posts helped me to clarify my thinking. Thanks, Clarence! [back]
2. I considered OpenAcademic’sDrupalEd carefully, but decided that it was more than we need. Woodbridge High already offers online grade reports through EduLink, and last year the school purchased an account through SchoolFusion, which supplies individual teacher pages, integrated calendars, club and sports pages, etc. What we didn’t have through either service was any sort of true community, which meant very little interactive, Web 2.0-ish tools. Our solution, then, supplements the school’s current solutions, whereas DrupalEd seeks to be a fairly complete solution. [back]
3. Creative writing students will be required to upload/save their current drafts in Google Docs and share it with instructor every two weeks. When we have workshops, students will be required to share their current draft with other students at least two days before the workshop date so that other students can read and prepare comments for the workshop. We hope this will solve a long-standing problem of overwhelming paper piles and missed copying deadlines. [back]
4. For example, I know, and have taught, many of the students in the creative writing program, and I’m looking forward to seeing their writing this year and providing critiques when they request them. [back]

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