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Steve Alexander-Jones

WK 12 Activity 22 AN OPEN EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY

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Edited by Steve Alexander-Jones, Thursday, 28 Apr 2016, 09:27

Write a short blog post suggesting one additional technology that is important for open education, either from the role of a learner or a provider. The technology can be one that has been significant, or one that you feel is going to become increasingly relevant. What you include as a technology can be quite broad: for instance, it can be a general category (such as social networks), a specific service or a particular standard.

In your post briefly explain what the technology is, and then why you think it is important for open education. The emphasis should be on open education in particular, and not just education in general.

A technology that I feel is vital to the success of a school or at least one that takes a school to new heights in academic achievement for its students is a school/community wide planning and resource tool such as moodle (https://moodle.org/). This is an open source learning platform than supports planning and is accessible by students, teachers, parents and obviously management. It can be used to record students work, develop and run online classes, provide a central hub for links to OERs, and instigate flipped classroom activities, formative and summative assessment tasks and chatrooms.

This system allows for transparency of planning and evaluation methods as well as assessment results, reporting is qualitative and quantitative and is visible at all times, if required. It is specially useful for student tracking by parents and staff for low achieving students. Using this system as a central hub learners can be guided in their learning within the "open education" world and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that many make and thus create a quality PLN.


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