Currently my students are using Moodle as a Learning management system for a blended curriculum. This is the first year that we have tried using Moodle in the classroom and the first year for blended. My students have taken to the program fairly well but still struggle on occasion with some of the “ins and outs” of it. Moodle has helped enhance my lessons by offering more ways to differentiate my instruction, give my students access to more content resources and to allow my students to explore content based topics. I would like to do more collaborative group work assignments with my students in the future, potentially using Wikis and Google Docs. Recently I introduced my Chemistry kids to Google docs and they have responded well to it, though the learning curve has been there, the transition has been easy for the more focused and self motivated students. The students that do not fall into that category have needed a bit more guidance using the program but seem to like the idea of it.
My district is next looking to go live with Gaggle in the next few weeks and I would like to use this to incorporate more collaborative opportunities into my lessons. But, I am still learning about Gaggle myself and feel that integrating it into my lessons could be difficult due to time constraints and students having difficulty with the new program.
The technologies that could be harder to use with my students right now would be podcasting. This is mostly due to the lack of technology available currently for them to record a podcast (right now we are struggling to make headphones, let alone quality microphones for the students). I do feel that my students would respond well to a project with podcasts right now the technology isn’t there.
I feel that now that my students have been exposed to what learning in the digital age could be like I think they will be able to pick up new digital learning tools more quickly the more they become acclimated to learning in this manner.
