Since my post in September of last year, the scope and purpose of this website has evolved. Where I had once envisioned this site to be a purely “blogging” site to be used to engage students in another way, I am finding that teachers are embracing Wordpress as a way to post pages with information related to their classes. In effect, this website is evolving into John Stark’s version of teacher web pages. When one teacher, a self-professed technophobe, asked for a new blog as a way for students to stay informed while her classes were experiencing high absentee rates due to H1N1, the intent of this site changed for me. Yes, teachers can still use this as a bi-directional communication tool with their classes, but I am seeing our Moodle site (http://moodle.jsrhs.net) becoming the tool of choice for intra-class communications.
As the Director of Technology, here is how I see our websites being used. This site, wordpress.jsrhs.net, is an open, public access site where information from teachers can be posted for consumption by John Stark students, parents and staff. Teachers can post information while allowing comments for feedback or the information can be unidirectional only.
Our Moodle site, moodle.jsrhs.net, is a password-protected course management system (CMS) that can be used by teachers and students for the secure and private exchange of information. Only users with assigned usernames and passwords may access the content on this site which includes lessons, assignments, wikis, forums, quizzes, tests and surveys.
We also host several internal websites (not accessible from outside our network). The primary internal website is our Cisco site which hoses our Cisco Networking Academy curriculum.
Thanks for visiting our blog site. If you have questions, feel free to email me at stephen.law@sau24.org.
