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Leading Learning Conference :: Forum
| From | LL2007 - Giving all students board-provided email/conferencing accounts |
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Jeff Catania Apr 30, 07 |
I'd be interested in hearing about the experiences of anyone else trying this ... or especially from those encountering any 'political' resistance to the concept. Here are some screen snaps (names blurred intentionally) to give a feel for some of the forums. Jeff Catania (eLearning Coordinator) |
Suzanne Riverin Apr 30, 07 | Hi Jeff I will be very interested in this as we have been discussing this possibility. Excellent! Suzanne Riverin E-learning consultant TLDSB
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Jeff Catania May 02, 07 | That's great to hear Suzanne, what kind of system does TLDSB use for group collaboration right now? Do you envision having students on the same system or a separate one? (... can you guess which approach I recommend! :-) |
Quentin D'Souza May 04, 07 | Hi Jeff, I know that FirstClass some external web page features. At least, I remember there being some when I used it at York University. I am wondering if you have turned that feature on or off for your students for different purposes? This is such a fantastic idea, but there is so much resistance to it in our current system. |
Tim Hawes May 04, 07 | I just realized our sessions are at the same time, so I won't get to ask in person, but I'd be interested in how you budgeted this option to give 45000 students accoutns like this. Even if it were just $1 a student per year it seems like an extremely cost prohibitive option. How did you carve out the resources to get it done? |
Jeff Catania May 04, 07 | > FirstClass has some external web page features ... have turned that on or off for students? We have it turned on for students, but they don't see their home page by default on their desktop (they have to open it). Many teachers have used this feature with their classes to get them to publish presentations or other projects for parents to see, as well as simply teaching the basics of web publishing. In the two years so far I have not yet heard of or dealt with a single incident of an inappropriate web site being published by a student. I do handle most incidents of student misbehaviour so this reassures me that because we know student's identities they are very good about what they publish. Perhaps more importantly, we have this feature turned on for TEACHERS as well--I am amazed that many school districts still do not give their teachers this functionality. > there is so much resistance to it in our current system. This is very common Quentin (as you know!) and I will be addressing this as part of my presentation ... getting past the politics. |
Tim Hawes May 04, 07 | I agree (about investing in software that has dirct impact on students). I was just curious how the costs associated with this stack up against providing other tools like a learning management system. |
Jeff Catania May 04, 07 | The "LMS" question has always been an interesting one for me. The idea of whether to even have a separate LMS (aside from the usual email/conferencing/etc. groupware that school boards use) is worth considering. The costs for a separate LMS (which we investigated) were typically on par with (or more than) the cost of just extending email accounts to all our students. With Ontario licensing D2L that changes, but the biggest factor for us (me particularly) was the synergy and convergence of having a single system. In Halton's case, we use First Class, and our eLearning Steering Team concluded that it had sufficient feature set to allow us to do asynchronous online learning (e.g., mail, conferencing, ) along with some synchronous chat. It does lack some features like grading (which we've done a nice workaround), mark tracking (we didn't care as we use Markbook anyway) and automated testing (we felt we could give that up) but overall it was adequate and it's worked well for years. FC is additionally very good at augmenting f2f learning since all the main features are there for that and teachers already use it anyway for their daily online 'work' so interacting with students is a natural next step. Perhaps most importantly, we know each additional system that requires users to log in represents an additional barrier (cost, support, learning, etc.), and ever worse, additional divisions in content, communication and collaboration. We felt overall that having staff and students on the same system is the purest way to integrate, share and learn together effectively. This is not to say having a separate LMS isn't effective, on the contrary there are some great uses out there I have seen. But I know that our rate and depth of adoption has been boosted by having one common system. Remember I'm talking about full online credits (<1% of online activity) but the augmentation stuff is 99%+. This dialogue is great, really helping me refine my presentation for next week! - Jeff |
I'm giving a presentation at the conference outlining our second year of experiences having all of our students from grades 1-12 using board-provided First Class accounts. 
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> interested in how you budgeted this option to give 45000 students accoutns like this. Even if it were just $1 a student per year it seems like an extremely cost-prohibitive option.
The amount we pay (and you are not far off!) is peanuts compared to what we spend to maintain software and licenses for financial, HR, student admin., and other applications throughout the system. None of these 'other' systems have a direct impact on student learning, so given that student learning is our #1 aim, it makes sense that we should find the $ to give students this opportunity ... doesn't it? :-)