When planning and designing online, blended or hybrid learning it is important to explore the options which are available to individuals and organizations, especially in terms of content management systems. Despite this task requiring a critique and comparison of three separate systems, I have chosen to look at four. In my current employment our school is in the process of rolling out a staggered transfer to SIMS and with it the Frog VLE. For this reason I wanted to include Frog in my research; however as a paid system for which I am yet to have a user account, this had its downfalls for this project. I was unable to find all the answers to my questions and log on to experience the system first hand. Therefore this exploration of the features of Frog has become personal research to enable myself to begin considering its uses for the not so distant future. In addition to Frog I also explored Google Classroom, Schoolarly and Weebly.
As a music teacher it is important to me that the following criteria are fulfilled:
– Students must be able to upload multimedia projects easily to the site for marking
– Work must be stored within the system so it can be later accessed by student and teacher (and shared to external sites and users)
– Work must be easily accessible and organized
– Music and video files must be able to stream for purposes of assessment (marking a full year group of recordings which individually need to be downloaded before you can listen to them this becomes a major issue!)
In the past I have used Edmondo for assessments. Whilst there were many features I particularly liked with the system (its visual Facebook nature, ease of handing in and marking assessments, generated class lists, group discussions),I found the inability to share work externally, lack of ability to stream multimedia projects online and complicated nature of file storage in terms of file retrieval, frustrating. This, therefore, is at the forefront of my mind whilst critically reviewing the options available.
Weebly has become, in recent months, a go-to site for me to share resources and materials; however I have not used the site specifically for assessment. I personally like the ease of use and way the content can be customised as long as you have a basic knowledge of html. Importantly, multimedia files can be embedded and streamed within pages easily, however the need for an external storage site in which to host addition materials could become confusing for inexperienced users. Where the site is let down however is in its original design. Weebly is designed as a web designer, therefore it lacks the bells and whistles that dedicated CMS provide. For example: assessment modules, personnal internal assessment and feedback, gradebooks etc. Therefore in this instance Weebly falls short of meeting my required needs.
My tool of choice would have to fall to Google Classroom. I love the integration with google drive and apps, the ease of use, clean appearance and automatic changing of ownership rights of files. Whilst it currently has its pitfalls (integrated gradebook is the biggest for me- although this could be set up in google sheets manually), the level of integration outweighs this. I appreciate the level of flexibility in which Google gives me for sending feedback- short comments, quick fire grades, attached longer document type feedback and comments added into google docs, and love how it automatically keeps all files organised for both the teacher and student. This flexibility as a music teacher is necessary, that way I can use SoundCloud or EduCanon to embed feedback in specific places in videos and recordings and embed within google docs or shorter responses and gives me the freedom to provide feedback in the most appropriate way at the most appropriate time. Essentially what works for one project may not work for the next and therefore I appreciate the affordances that Google is able to give me. In addition, it is easy to share work externally as all documents are already stored in google drive, quizzes and surveys can be easily created in Google forms and integrated into class posts and class discussions can be instigated within the class stream by both students and staff. I am also hopeful that Google will continue to evolve their product and perhaps even look to address current pitfalls in future developments.
My critical assessment table can be found here.
B Jones 