LORE.com

Last term I explored using a brand new EdTech tool call Coursekit.com that was a free online alternative to Blackboard. I was teaching two sections of my Creativity in the Workplace class and I put both sections on it, after asking the students if they were game to test it out.  It went well.

It was brand new and still a little rough around the edges but the feedback from the students was that they liked it better than Blackboard, which they are all familiar with because it is heavily used at MRU. Coursekit is interesting because it is free to use, well supported and developed by university students. It was the last characteristic to attracted my attention the most. I was intrigued with how university students would design a better LMS.

This summer Coursekit was renamed to LORE.com and received a significant facelift.  It is very student and community centred. Not unlike Facebook. I found it the most useful to get the students to share with each other, which is not easy to do in Blackboard.

You need to check it out if you are looking for an alternative to your institutionally provided LMS.  What is great about LORE.com is that it is designed to be adopted at the instructor level so you don't have to try to talk your institution into adopting it.   And your students can use their Facebook logins to log in to LORE.com so they don't have to manage another login.

I don't think I will be using it this year because now that we have Google Apps for Education, I am going to be designing our course sites using Google Sites and Groups. These are more mobile device friendly, too.

If you have used LORE.com, post a comment about it.

Reviving this Blog

A while ago, I thought it would be a good idea to move my blogging activities over to a different blog system. I used the WordPress site at MRU for a while and then thought I would use Posterous after an inspiring conference workshop on how great it is.  But instead, I fell into the world of microblogging on Twitter and how much easier it is to post a short blog post than it is a longer in-depth one like this one. Long story short, I have been away from this blog for a long time, as you can see in the chronology of posts.

But, I am back. I have no idea if this blog will pick up any readers but then that what blogging is about. I am also back to Blogger, because Mount Royal University, the institution where I work, is just now adopting Google Apps for Education for all of its students this Fall, and Blogger is one of the apps that is now available to our community of students and faculty.  And Blogger has evolved since I was last on it so I will be blogging here again. I have come back.

From the explorations that I made on the other blogging tools, I still find Blogger to be the easiest blogging tool to use. That said, I haven't had a chance to try some of the newer ones but I do hope to try them and post reviews on them here.

Feel free to post comments on what blogging tool you find useful and why.

Rod Corbett

moving to rodcorbett.posterous.com

I have just moved my blog over to Posterous.com. I was able to move the archive of posts from before to this site. I have been posting to twitter for a few months now and will start blogging here again. 

I choose this tool because it makes it much easier to post to. I can use the Android apps and email to post to it allowing me to post more often. 

Rod

Blogging on Twitter

The reason I have not been posting anything new to this blog for some time is because I have started to post my news on Twitter.  I have found that it is much easier to share the things I shared here on Twitter.

If you are interested in seeing what I have been posting lately go to http://twitter.com/rbcorbett.

Rod

Using games in teaching Chemistry

I am making a presentation today on how to use games to teaching chemistry.  Go to http://goo.gl/epcK to access the hand out of links and resources.

Rod Corbett