This is the third post in a series of four looking at four questions from the book: “Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning” by E. A. City, R. F. Elmore, S. E. Fiarman and L. Teitel.
The first post looked at the question: How could use of Moodle integrated with a Khan Academy clone affect the level or content of math instruction in a classroom?
The second post looked at the question: How could use of Moodle integrated with a Khan Academy clone affect the role of the student in the instructional process?
This post examines the question: How could use of Moodle integrated with a Khan Academy clone affect teachers’ knowledge and skills?
One aspect of the answer is: what new information does the system give the teacher about the students interaction with the content? One of the allures of technology is the promise of data. The Khan Academy delivers on this promise with detailed and beautiful graphs. Teachers have data on student mastery of topics, time spent on videos and exercises, and even detailed information on exactly what answer each student entered for each problem and how many seconds this took. Here is an excellent video on reports for teachers.However, access to data is not the same as having a working knowledge of what each student is learning and struggling with, and in turn having that knowledge is not the same as having the skill to use that knowledge to help each student achieve more. Thus the goal of technology implementation must be developing these skills as individual teachers and as team.
To give teachers additional tools for creating meaning and taking action based on data, we have integrated some of the data from Khan Academy with the Moodle Gradebook. While nowhere near as beautiful as Khan Academy’s statistics, the Moodle gradebook is an amazingly versatile tool. Currently the gradebook has access to what percentage of a video a student has watched and whether or not the student has successfully mastered an exercise.
We look forward to working with teachers to refine the tools and support use of data in day to day instruction.