How are people defining classrooms? Are you making a group for each class or are you using taxonomy? Have you got the dashboard working showing all of a student's assignments? Is gradebook working right? Please share what you've learned about the best way to organize classrooms in organic groups.
Here's what I'm doing: I am using OA (Beta 8) as a classroom tool for schools; the promise of team-based projects is the attraction. Having an easy, and also slick, way to do this is great.
But I am struggling with how to organize the groups.
I started by making a single group for each k-12 homeroom (grade 1, grade 2, grade 3, etc.) and then using taxonomy (actually, gradebook, itself, which uses taxonomy) to differentiate between courses (English, Mathematics, Science, etc.). The great thing is its simplicity: students can see a nice overview of all of their courses from their dashboards. (I'm using calendar events as the assignment-content-type and blogs as the response or "coursework" content-type.) Unfortunately, teachers of the same level must trust each other not to tamper with each other's classes which is possible, especially at the lower levels, but not ideal at the older/higher levels. I have also not yet figured out the best way to use the gradebook +og gradebook modules, but they seem to permit flexibility so far. This is my preferred direction if I can get gradebooks to work, I'll live with the politics of asking teachers to share; if they insist, I'll make them their own groups (say high school chemistry class), and their students will have to check that course's assignments directly.
Making a group for absolutely every class or course works, too, and it makes gradebook's use clearer; however, the students can no longer see their assignments on a single dashboard. The Latest activity block works, so I am trying to copy this.
So, have you got something working? If so, how have you been able to show a particular user/student's posts on the dashboard? Have you gotten gradebook work? If so, I'd love to know how you did it.
Comments
Another idea...
I run a small nonprofit in Vermont and we are going slightly against the grain. We don't think we can compete with the Open Atriums, Edu2.0, moodles of the world. What we're seeing is schools that are really rushing for learning "mangement" systems which involves grades, tracking whether kids have done assignments, etc. Some models have grading, management, portfolios and blogs. But the important part is that they are focused on the teacher and on classroom management.
And here's where we're going against the grain.
We're focused on writing; we build digital spaces for kids and train teachers on how to use them. The aim is to have teachers do some of their traditional school work in the sites, "exercises," explore the digital world and encourage kids to share additional work, give and receive feedback, upload media, collaborate, and revise, revise, revise. Tracking is easy. But it is not directly tied to the other software being pushed in the schools. That's a drawback. And not. This is a kids-oriented area. They know how to use it. They love it. The teachers ride along and are much more in the role of participants and guides.
So what we do is have a Drupal multisite configuration on an outside server -- we take care of that for the schools -- and no personal info is kept on the sites; all users have firstnamel(ast initial). Works grand. And so we can bypass the school's intranet. Each school gets a site and using OG, each teacher has as many classrooms as they'd like. All are private, meaning kids see only what's in their classrooms. Except when work is made public and published out front for the community to see. It's worked very well. We can alter the permissions of the group to open up spaces for others to see or, even, the public to see. We can do set ups where students can do exchanges with the rest of their school or, even, a school somewhere else in the world. We can create subgroups for study groups or special groupings of kids on special projects. Private messaging is only allowed between teacher and student which prevents untoward chatting between kids; emails are bogus and unnecessary; revisioning, modules grants and diff modules permit a very impressive revisioning system to add writing; easy podcasting and image uploading through cck, mp3player and imagecache allow for easy integration of sound and image. We are using the kaltura module for videos and slideshows, though we are headed to a VIMEO and scribd solution... fckeditor works great and permits easy spell checking. Nothing is moderated, so kids are told they are trusted; commenting can be threaded, kids can view work by group or individual. Because kids canNOT delete anything inappropriate posts and comments have been nil -- and we're talking about thousands upon thousands of posts involving thousands of kids. (And frankly that's the biggest worry school leadership has -- what if something BAD happens, and that colors much of their decision making about how IT is set up.)
A short summary, but I guess my point in responding to you is that I want to encourage folks to begin to think about digital classrooms in schools in a different way; if educators continue to focus on classroom management tools, kids will continue to be left in the corner. Kids are far, far ahead of adults on how they learn in digital spaces and on the Internet. We need to watch them, learn from them and provide spaces in school where we can help guide them in terms of civility, determining the validity of the information and basic skills of reading, writing, math and science and yes how to use multimedia. Kids are spending 7 hours at school, often bored witless, and then they go home and consume hours surfing the Web, exchanging information and learning from each other in digital environments. Why not in school?
Please don't misunderstand. Your purpose was to gain info about how to set up Open Atrium. I'm not familiar with that. But I am suggesting that if you can create school sites for kids it can be done easily and powerfully with Drupal, OG and a few modules that both enhance the teachers' ability to track, mentor and guide and engage the kids to express themselves, build civil communities and learn.
cheerio
g
ggevalt
www.youngwritersproject.org
Very interesting: similar goals
Fascinating argument (and evidence) for not giving kids permission to delete comments. Actually, our goals are very similar. And don't get me wrong: I agree that simple is good. I keep getting pushes to add more features, but what users like most is the ease of complementing, not replacing, the classroom and giving students a space that persists level to level, year to year, independent of a particular course. I, too, by the way, am a writing teacher and like what you're doing. However, after investigating a lot at the prodding of the posts here about using features, context and spaces, I tried them (over several months) and found they had a great deal to offer that users liked and which I couldn't produce without following their lead. I don't think what you're doing is against the grain of features, etc., at all. Granted, right now, they require a heck of a learning curve, but perhaps that will change. The added "glue" to steal from eduglu's name, I suppose, that these new tools supply gives Drupal a seriously professional shine. Groups just work better than I have seen them work in any other standard Drupal configuration. (The new incarnation of Groups will, of course, hopefully make this observation obsolete.) Underneath, however, the goal can be just as close to students' real needs as yours. In other words, I didn't choose to go with this new trend because I wanted a more teacher-centric system. I chose it because it accomplishes goals similar to yours more in an impressively reliable, flexible and user-friendly way that I couldn't have done without building on the work of others. I'm not claiming I have the answer, but I'm going to try this. I'll let you know how it goes.
By the way, my question still stands. Right now, I'm going with using gradebook to provide new terms that represent courses rather than creating new groups. But this may not be a robust-enough model for heavy-use. If I'm making a big mistake, and it is, for some reason, essential to have groups for every single class, I'd be grateful to have it pointed out.
http://FlossEd.org - Free & Open Source Schools -- Free & Open Minds
Thanks for the response...
I appreciate your perspective and, to put it more succinctly, we are trying to change the impetus of these digital classrooms -- to have administrators and teachers thinking FIRST about what will get the kids more engaged and active... rather than thinking about classroom "management."
So to respond to your direct question, I am not familiar with gradebook. HOWEVER, I do wonder about the complexity of having taxonomy determine the organization of a "course." Here's why -- while OG could do with a major overhaul -- it allows for some very handy features, such as a separate set of views that can be related, ie OG members, OG recent comments, OG vocabulary, etc. that can help organize the overall concept of the course. So blocks can be set to only be seen in that group context. This is easier to do than by taxonomy. Also, I'd say that taxonomy can be really important in organization of the content of a course... so if someone has to have multiple taxonomy choices in order to maintain groupings, there is a good chance that things are hard to find.... I'm not sure I'm explaining it well, but here's how we make use of OG and some related modules...
So a teacher has a single course... she/he can create an "assignment" content type (we actually call them "exercises"), choose the "class" to which this is being posted to, establish a new "tag" for that exercise (through OG vocab and a js widget we created) and save. The student can then view the exercise in several different ways (which would require some heavy work in views and taxonomy if you didn't use OG) and the student then posts a blog, choosing the correct tag and saving. Then, in the classroom, all the responses to the exercise can be seen via the tag... Now I can see how you can do this via taxonomy hiearchy, etc, but if I were to name ONE thing that most confuses teachers it would be the concept of tagging.... It's been a bear. So if you are having to get into taxonomy for the course, hiearchal tags for sections, assignments and sub assignments, it's going to get pretty complex.
The other thing is that it's harder to alter access via taxonomy than via OG.... so if you have 20 students in English 2 and you don't want them in English 3 and, in addition, you want to make sure all your custom views are calling up only the work in English 2 for the English 2 students, and only English 3 work for English 3, it's harder to accomplish via taxonomy than OG, which, in essence, does that for you. That's the purpose of the module -- to segment according to membership.
Hope that helps
g
ggevalt
www.youngwritersproject.org
Another approach...
This is really an interesting discussion. I wonder if as a possible alternative to Open Atrium, that Open Scholar might prove to be useful as a starting point. I think it's academic background, even though its focus is on higher ed, might provide a better starting point. You might be able to add modules and tailor it to suit your needs. You wouldn't need to deal with creating features in Open Atrium that way. I'm in an IT department at a west coast university. We've been exploring Open Atrium but are finding the current limits within Case tracker to be a challenge. In Drupal 5.x the case tracker module and it's related modules were more robust.
Late reply
Open Scholar makes Web sites for users. It's very cool, but not an intranet.
http://FlossEd.org - Free & Open Source Schools -- Free & Open Minds