Case Study (Learning Management): Dennis Daniels | |
I've been using Tiki for managing my high school English class here in California... http://www.dennisgdaniels.com/tiki-index_raw.php. I'm grateful and encouraged by all of the people who have been contacting me about Tiki in the classroom. Please feel free to leave me a message here or on my site. I try to update this page weekly to share my impressions of how Tiki does and does not meet my needs as an educator faced with the real world problems of: |
assignment management | |
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test management | |
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feedback management | |
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learning management | |
There are few who can appreciate the demands of a teacher but imagine if you can, managing and grading 140+ individual documents across five groups of ~30 people daily. Tiki has all of the components needed to manage this huge amount of input and output but, as yet, there are critical elements missing to make it a real solution for full time use in the classroom. There are a number of features that make Tiki an almost ideal solution for many of the day to day issues teachers face. Instant editing, sharing of content easily with other teachers, parents and students. Entire department curricula could easily be built and shared using Tiki as it is now. But, teachers are overworked and do not want to use yet another tool that doesn't integrate assignment submission tracking, grading and reporting. There are literally hundreds of tools that meet parts of what a teacher 'really' needs. I don't claim full connaissance of all the issues all teachers face. But, I do have years of experience at the corporate and public school education level and the issues are the same. I use Tiki as a classroom document support system. I'm encouraging other teachers to share their work using my site, to develop a dynamic curriculum management and distribtion system. However, I would very much like to move Tiki to a full blown assignment work place and submittal interface. Why Tiki? Well, it's a CMS and a wiki. Each document wiki page has a history, supports comments, attachments and a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship with authors. As an English teacher, I need to see that students are revising and rethinking their work. The smileys you see in the edit window could easily be modified to be grammatical correction marks... The spellcheck is built in and of course the templates... I could easily assign students a page with a template so that all content can look the same to facilitate grading... But, Wiki's are not designed to be controlled in the way I've just described therefore, the first problem with using a wiki as an education tool: one student to one page i.e. permission control.
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Permission problems | |
siridhar: Is it possible to give edit permisson to only those tracker items that a registered user created? Siridhar is asking the very nugget of the question that is now plaguing me as a teacher trying to implement Tiki in the classroom. I'd really like to have each student do the same bit of work using tiki so that I can see who has done what but also be able to keep that homework private until after the assignment time has closed and passed... i.e. no one should be able to see a page created by anyone else until after the paper has been graded... Grading should be done by scores and rubrics... much like the voting system.. the voting needs to be tracked to the assignment and the student. The grading could easily be handled with Tiki's built in voting system, a kind of rubric, or a scoring system, but it is not there yet. - |
The community mod | |
Mose has put together a Community workflow in preparation. Each member of the tikiwiki community that the page http://tikiwiki.org/whois is only reachable with proper rights (for the curious, it's an apache rewrite-rule that goes to /tiki-g-run_activity.php?activityId=33). This little piece of genius might be the fixt I've been looking for in terms of restricting some Tiki content to specific groups.
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Extranet 'hack' and wiki pages | |
A conversation I had with Murphy Mc murphy: Would you want students posting any public Wiki pages?
I wouldn't call it a hack necessarily but Murphy ))McCauley(( has put together some code that makes the extranet idea a reality. Here it is, paste it into tiki-index_raw right above the "// Let creator set permissions" line. Same should be done for the other two index pages. This bit of code sets particularly for individuals in a group.
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it's not configurable in anyway. On the up-side, it doesn't require any changes to the database at all. And will work with existing users. Just throw students in the students group, teachers into the teachers group. Create a group 'students' and then assign my students to that group then assign myself and my TeacherAssistants to group 'teacher'. Two groups. The groups are 'students' and 'teachers', one teacher I've tested the above code on Murphy's site and it worked... |
Articles as a way of tracking student homework assignments?=- | |
I was originally looking at using the articles as the submission interface because it has a rudimentary permissions system but there was no way for the person who submitted the article to edit the article to review the article without setting each article's permission individually... Imagine that kind of work with 140+ students times five every week. Impossible. Now imagine a school of 1,200 or 2,400 or larger.
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article and tracker | |
So, Siridhar's suggestion makes more sense in a way, so I can track the assignment number (critical!) and the person who submitted the tracker because the tracker essentially becomes the drop point... and the homework tracker. Trackers are becoming the real way to handled all of the issues I'm having as a teacher trying to manage homework assignments... but at this time the CVS tiki is not really robust enogh to handle the demands of 140 users submitting documents daily... I've been testing Microsoft Classroom Server and I'm here to tell you... there's nothing in that app that Tiki doesn't already do... it's just that tiki doesn't use all of the tools in an integrated fashion.
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Submitting files is a bad way to handle homework | |
If for no other reason that file uploads is busted in cvs 1.8 though I need to test the file storage instead of db storage.But, also because there is no direct linkage to the person who submitted the homework... it requires a lot more clicking, setting of app and browser preferences, funky file types etc. Don't use file uploads as a homework catcher in Tikiwiki! I thought submitting files was the way to go...but that turned into a nightmare because if I replied to a student's .doc or .html I would have to open another application... type in their email etc... that was a bad way to go and since stopped taking files as .doc or .html... so, bringing us back to using tiki for homework drop... All it really needs is a way to make sure that the person who creates an article or page or tracker is the only person who can view it until the admin clears it as open... This is a major major item... Maybe going with trackers might solve it... All I know is that the students like Tiki, the parents like it, the teachers and administration like it, everyone likes it but me(no, I like tiki), the teacher, because the most basic functionality of a secured place to create a document is not available in tiki. |
File upload minimum criteria | |
At minimum to make file upload usable in a classroom:
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file attachment | |
When a new file is attached to a page it needs to show up as a page modified. The file upload format extension needs to be controlled so as to prevent students from uploading undesired formats.
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Still searching for a secure but flexible homework interface | |
I need a place to send the students in tiki that can be tracked and secured from other students eyes until I've had a chance to grade it... I'd like to have a tracking number group... All students do assignment 37 so I'll need to track all of the students who have completed assigment 37 in the tracker... Ideally the tracker is the assignment interface... that would make it much easier in some ways...
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TikiMessage | |
TikiMessage is the only way I can use Tikiwiki and still maintain security over plagiarizing students and is perhaps the worst way to approach this problem. Yes, the humble email interface was my prime way of handling homework... there's nothing about the tikimessaging that makes my job as a teacher using Tiki any easier to handle homework... but it's the only secure interface where I know students cannot read other works and blatantly steal homework from one another...And often, students and teachers do not have access to POP accounts on school sites. Since moving to a more secure environment where only the teacher and the student can see the work the amount of cheating i.e. copying other's work has gone down significantly. Tiki messaging needs the following things to make it a workable choice for accepting homework:
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Directories | |
Tiki directories for a teacher needs:
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mindmeld | |
MindmeldDev would be a great tool to integrate into integrate into tiki.
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This is all old hat | |
Many of the issues identified below have already been identified here: http://tikiwiki.org/TikiUsability |
Back to the perms problem | |
The number one thing that is really lacking right now is a good permissions system. I cannot assign electronic worksheets/forms to students because I've no way of making sure that only person, me!, can view it. Without strong permissions, any student can view and copy the work of another student. The wiki pages make it very nice to view who has edited what, but without a tracking system I can't see who has been looking at what... only registered users should be able to view some documents... tracking who looks at what deters the obvious cheaters. Students are often very clever about cheating... so clever one wonders why they don't apply that cleverness to doing the homework. The interest in using Tiki is high among my peers. The next biggest thing is the testing/ quizzes and surveys tools... there is a lot there that could be improved upon which would increase buy-in from other schools
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setting up accounts for students | |
Don't use students full names... use their first name and then the initial of their last name... Build a cvs import file too so that you can take the whole bunch and load them into the right groups by classes.
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perms | |
Perms are tricky... you want students to add materials but you don't want them vandalizing... Furthermore, the biggest issue is getting students to submit stuff but not making that available to anyone but the admin and a maybe a teacher assistant... naturally this begs a question of gradebooks... see below for that.
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Gradebook | |
Use the tracker
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Use the spelling database | |
The spelling feature has been dead for some time
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quizzes | |
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remote loading of quiz data | |
It's not perfect but it offers teachers a way of sharing quizzes across the internet. The bummer though is that keduca has not been ported to Winblows. It'll only work with *nix or OSX installs.
Perhaps a keduca import formula for integration?
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surveys | |
Surveys could be a great way to get homework done digitally but currently the surverys don't support tracking who did what...
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Forums | |
I've discovered recently that forums can be very useful in getting students/users up to speed very quickly. Forums though need help. Anything that allows admin to rate / vote / grade a document without having to 'open' the doc. the better.
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calendars | |
Calendar For classroom applications, the Calendar needs a major upgrade. How could this feature (or a new, separate Calendar-like feature) best serve educational needs? Big big issue... I need to get the calendar for the entire year as well down to the minute in the classroom. The students, the teachers, the parents and the admin need up to minute stuff. The trick with calendars, a schedule might last one 55 minute section or across a week. And each of those days should contain links to the
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tracking and grading | |
Now, I've been using trackers almost exclusively for managing of the homework drops. Big issues though around the trackers, even though they are super cool! |
Pros | |
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Cons | |
The tracker needs to have a date and an assignment number with the standard addressed.
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Gradebook? | |
Course management features are needed, but these should go beyond merely creating new database tables (and appropriate input/output pages) to record or display grades. What do educators need from this feature? How could grade input features be incorporated into workflow management?
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Permissions? | |
What changes or enhancements are needed to Tiki''s permissions model in order to facilitate classroom use? |
Trackers? How would Tiki's Trackers feature need to be enhanced in order to facilitate course management tasks, such as managing attendance records? | |
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Workflow? Much of what instructors do involves workflow: students submit work; instructors read this work, make comments, and determine a grade; the grade is recorded; and the work is returned to the student. How could Tiki's workflow features be adapted, customized, or enhanced to make workflow applications easily accessible and transparent to users? | |
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Network Learning | |
See the quizzes above too.
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benefits | |
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issues | |
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Tips and tricks if you're still interested | |
Don't do this:
If you've only got one prep then keep all instructions for the same day the same. Just update as needed.
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Sharing classes between separate installs | |
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