I’ve written before about the Horizon Reports. Those currently available are, as always, rich sources for considering what the near future (0-5 years) seems to hold for educators. You’ll need to create a free account to download them.
For higher education, there are three documents. I’d suggest reading at least the executive summary of the full Higher Ed report which goes into detail about 2 trends forecast to be important in each in three time ranges – one year or less, two to three years, four to five years. Supplement it with the Shortlist, which discusses 4 trends in each of those time ranges.
For K-12 educators, there’s the 2011 Horizon K-12 Report. Again, I’d suggest at least the executive summary. I found the Challenge Based Learning Report, which discusses experience with implementation projects, quite interesting as well.
There are links to past years’ reports and ones that cover other arenas – non-US regions, for museums, and more.
A Google search on “using wordpress help students” I came across an article titled “WordPress as a Learning Management System – Move Over, Blackboard” – from which, the intro and excerpts follow.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Kyle Jones, a Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian who is one of the pioneers in bringing a new social aspect to online course management. His unique and innovative use of WPMU and BuddyPress in combination for learning services got us interested and we decided to see if he’d give us a peek into the world of WordPress as a Learning Management System (LMS).
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During my graduate work and still to this day I develop WordPress MU course sites for Dr. Michael Stephens of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University. We began just hosting blogs but were blown away by the BuddyPress suite of plugins even when they were introduced in a very buggy beta stage. We monitored the development and then pulled the trigger in the fall of 2009 by creating a core installation of WordPress MU with BuddyPress at classes.tametheweb.com.
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Due to the evolving nature of library and information science (LIS) and Michael’s philosophy of teaching, his classes place a high emphasis on exploring and understanding online environments … as a way to comprehend, use, and remix information.
- Educause presentation: Creative Collaboration
The link associated above with “Michael’s philosophy of teaching” leads to a 45-minute presentation, much of which had me enthralled. Highly recommended.
I since ran across a post elsewhere titled “A WordPress as LMS Mockup” that’s about some prototyping steps towards using BuddyPress and WordPress to build a Learning Management System. Following the site’s tag “WordPress as LMS” takes you to more posts on similar topics.
This site, one for students,and Mrs. Maire’s 2009 site are hosted on WordPress’ servers, hence the URL ending with wordpress.com.
We used the wildwaldenites.us domain as a base for multiple WordPress installations for the 2009-10 school year. We are letting the domain name lapse. Students in grades 5-8, and probably 3-4 as well, will be introduced to the Web Tool in the Google toolbox (Fall 2010) as an alternative to WordPress’ tools.
This site is being set up so that staff at Walden School can have a platform for trying out WordPress. This one is on wordpress.com, as is Mrs. Maire’s class web page. The school had multiple WordPress sites the 2009-2010 year. The 2010-2011 year we are beginning to use Google Apps, and plan to use them to build a “walled community” of student and staff-produced web pages safe from prowlers.
