John Foyle, INTE 6930 – Internship

Curriculum Redesign from Traditional to Electronic Delivery

I work at Prairie Middle School, in the Cherry Creek School District (CCSD.) We are associated with the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Building and integrate STEAM into the curriculum. As a teacher, and in effort to foster life long learners, I am guiding my department through a curriculum redesign. Among the changes we are implementing is the integration of our activities into Web 2.0 tools, and making as much of our curriculum delivered electronically. To deliver the materials, and to give students the opportunity to have a meaningful learning experience, we need to utilize an Learning Management System (LMS) that will facilitate student learning, teacher feedback and optimize both the learning and teaching experience. Currently at the school we have access to both Schoology and Google Classroom. The purpose of this Internship Project is to determine which of the two LMSs is the best choice for our classroom, and how to deploy them effectively to make the students experience about the learning of the content, not the delivery system.

For the last 3 semesters I have been using the two LMS platforms and observing the student reactions, the level of training that I had to undertake and the quality of the education the students were able to articulate to me. Eliminating paper, almost completely, has been a tremendous benefit and huge time saver. In addition, the quality of the student responses and their ability to share their learning with me effectively has been greatly improved. Despite the initial expectation of determining which of the two would become our sole LMS, we have found that both have benefits and features that are unique and that they work together in tandem almost seamlessly. Keeping the delivery of the materials and instruction as simple as possible does not always mean having only one method of delivery. This report is the result of approximately 130 documented hours of development and evaluation of the two platforms.