Well, the keeping of student work long term, and who keeps it and how it’s kept are all “in flux” topics. First of all, I know of no teachers in k-12 who keep students work for them in any format from year to year. We send the stuff home, and the family decides what to keep or not. I don’t see school districts doing this either. Honestly, it’s not their job to decide what is archivable and what isn’t, much less store it.

However, whatever a district decides to use as a media format, be it Word, Google docs, or some other free web-ware, we better be damned sure students have an option to save it to their “homes” via e-mail, downloading to personal websites, or just plain treecopy.

I see our district techs, like Bud, helping us to find the web-ware to use and how to move the student generated media around so that students can save it. Even if the info is out there in tutorials, teachers need quicker ways to see how this works. When I ran a tech lab at Lyons, I truly believed that I was being paid to read manuals and tutorials and then explain what I read to students and teachers. What is intuitive to literate tech users is Greek to those just starting out. I see schools, as always making student work available for parents to peruse ans save for their use, but not to store it.

As far as Karl’s concerns about Moodle, I see it as a PDF warehouse for teachers, and not much more. This is a good place for teachers to store their work and notes for their students and to encourage other students to do work, asses that work, even dialogue with students and set up calenders. I do not see this as a place to warehouse student work however. It’s up to parents to decide what to keep and what not to, and probably what to store in Bud’s basement as well.

What really bugs me is the media we use for long term storage. CD/DVD memory is chancy at best for decades long storage. I still have stuff I did in fifth grade, it was on treeware and is still with me. If it was on some other media there is no way I could open it, much less have something to open at all. Right now I have software on 5.5 and 3.5 disks that might as well be thrown away, it just can’t be accessed. What will be around in 30 years that we could store student media on today and still see it?

Dave Titles last blog post..Proctoring CSAP/ACT Tests

Hello, Bud,

What this, and many of the other comments in the earlier thread, seem to be getting at is true interoperability and data portability.

And it’s worth highlighting that interoperability and portability have only been accomplished if a non-technical user can make it happen with a few mouse clicks. Toward that end, the critiques of Moodle seem somewhat warranted, as Moodle’s export features, while they work, are most useful at going from Moodle to Moodle.

This is actually the focus of the work we are doing with portfolios using Drupal, and one of the reasons I still say (over and over and over again, I know ) that the use of Drupal within education is not fully understood by people in a position to benefit most from it.

Content within a Drupal site can be easily exported in a variety of open formats, from RSS to txt to csv to formatting pages in a print friendly format (which in turn can be saved as html, etc, etc).

Drupal is definitely not the solution for every situation, but it provides a stable solution for some of these issues.

Cheers,

Bill