The Learning Place/ LMS/ RSS

The learning place is engaging way for students to interact with different online learning objects or activities. The online learning place houses a range of activity or learning objects, these are suited to the different key learning areas. Although the online learning place is a useful tool for accessing activities for different learning areas easily, the online learning place itself is hard to access for those who are not teachers or in an actual school. Therefore I suggest that it is a useful tool for those that have access to school computers but not for parents, children or pre-service teachers that are not in a school.

Learning Management Systems
Learning Management Systems are those that are used for administration purposes (mainly in schools) such as blackboard, Moodle and Intelladon (which is used in some high schools). The LMS is a resourceful tool for teachers and students alike to share information about subjects or courses or assignments in my case. Every LMS is different to the rest. For instance, Moodle is significantly different to blackboard in the way that blackboard was organised by importance of overall subject i.e. Announcements, course information (course profile), study materials (study guide and topics), web links, resources etc. Moodle is organised as topics with generalised headings such as course profile and study guide on a side panel. LMS's are successful tools to help with student's online learning. When our university changed its LMS from blackboard to Moodle, I found it hard to adapt to and use the new LMS. Even today I still have trouble using Moodle as it is a vastly different LMS from blackboard.

RSS
I have not fully mastered the use of the RSS Feeder. Though I do believe I understand it a bit more this year. I found that the RSS Feeder is a kind of updates list for blogs and wiki's (kind of like the updates on facebook or myspace). Now that I have made the connection, it seems like a useful and relevant tool for teachers to use while seeing what updates their students have made. As well, students are able to see what their peers have updated. In conclusion, the RSS Feeder is an exceptional tool for teacher and student use.