My online course was developed to teach a science unit on animal adaptations to third grade students. Because third graders do not have much experience using computers and the internet, I wanted to make sure I kept the course very simple and user friendly. One of the ways I did this was by using a similar lay out on each page (or chapter) of the course; so each lesson starts out with a task of textbook pages to be read, then it has a video that goes along with the topic covered in the reading, followed by some sort of game or activity for the students to further develop what they have learned, and finally there is an assignment for the students to complete. Another way that I made my course easier for students to use was by adding screen casts to explain how to navigate through the more confusing parts of the course. I also added recordings of myself reading the text on the pages for the students who are struggling readers.
The most challenging part of developing this course was deciding which CMS to use. There are many excellent choices out there, so I found that the best way to choose the right one for you is to explore a bunch of the options and decide which one suits your needs. I ended up choosing Haiku LMS as my CMS because it was one of the most user friendly options and it had a lot of the functions I was looking to use in a site made for 3rd graders.
Once I had decided that I was using Haiku, I started to explore the CMS and get familiar with it. I found it to be very easy to use and because of this, I didn't encounter very many problems. One of the pitfalls that I did encounter was when I was trying to put pictures onto the site, some of the diagrams were very small and hard to read when they were embedded in the page. I was trying to stay away from having the students download anything but since the diagrams were so small, I ended up having to post a link to download them. Other than that, I thought Haiku LMS was very easy to use which made for a fun opportunity to learn and create something new for my students.
Click on the links below to see my online course and my developer notebook:
My Course
Developer Notebook
