---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeff Elkner <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:01 PM Subject: CanDo Goals ( and getting ready for Fall and Summer)... To: David Welsh <[email protected]>, Jason Straw <[email protected]>, Henry Grover <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], Kris Martini <[email protected]>, Phyllis Gandy <[email protected]>, [email protected], "Dr. Ann Kennedy" <[email protected]>, Tom Hoffman <[email protected]>, Kevin Reed <[email protected]>, Mike Lee <[email protected]>, Luke Faraone <[email protected]>
Hi Dave, Jason, and Henry! I'm sitting in the Portland Maine airport having just left the FOSSED conference. It was an *incredible* experience! While I could go on and on, let me focus on the most important point: Each of the pieces we talked about in our orginal "let's dream" discussions five years ago at the beginning of CanDo now exist, and the work to integrate them is actively underway. For the benefit of those who weren't there, we saw three main benefits to student learning from the CanDo system: Curricular transparancy through explicit presentation of course competency goals. On-line curriculum links to encourage students to engage in self learning. On-line ePortfolios explicitly linked to course competencies as evidence of skills mastery. We have been focusing on the first goal, and we had assumed we would have to write software for goals 2 and 3 into the system. I attended two workshops over the past two days that address both these problems: Mahara (http://mahara.org) is an ePortfolio platform that could provide an excellent solution to goal 3. LAMS (http://www.lamsinternational.com) is a Learning Activity Management System (I hadn't even heard of this one until the conference, but it blew me away when I saw it in action!), which could provide a great solution to goal 2. One of the highlights of the conference was meeting Caroline Meeks. Caroline wears two hats, both of which make her a natural partner to our program: 1. she is one of the driving forces behind Sugar Labs (http://sugarlabs.org) and 2. She is the owner of SolutionGrove (http://www.solutiongrove.com), a company which delivers free software solutions for eEducation, including Moodle and LAMS. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dave, when can we set up a meeting with you, Jason, Henry, Josh, and I to talk about the computing infrastructure for next Fall. My thinking is that we will want to run the following remotely accessible services (in order of importance): 1. SchoolTool / CanDo 2. LAMS 3. Mahara 4. Moodle I'm not sure about moodle. Caroline says she thinks there is an important role for moodle as your on-line syllabus, and if we can only expose that part of it then it could be useful, but I would want to deliver on-line activities with LAMS, store grades and competencies in SchoolTool, and have students keep ePortfolios using Mahara. Inside the classroom, we will want to run: 1. LTSP (done) 2. SchoolServer Since I'm teaching Summer enrichment classes using Sugar, it would be great if I could get the SchoolServer running in time to use it with the Summer students. Thanks! jeff _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
