Project #3: Open-Source Software

DESCRIPTION (PART I)
The open-source software is called Claroline. Though it is specifically designed for those teaching online courses, it can be helpful for essentially any teacher, and particularly English teachers. On the homepage of the Claroline information website it states that its aim is to help educators with the following: write a course description, publish documents in any format, administer private and public forums, develop learning paths, create groups of students, prepare online exercises, manage an agenda with tasks and deadlines, publish announcements, propose assignments to be handed in online, see the statistics of users activity, and use the wiki to write collaborative documents.

I see this software being especially beneficial to English teachers so they can give students access to readings (publishing documents), grammar or vocabulary exercises (preparing online exercises), allowing students access to paper prompts and to turn in long papers online instead of printing them out (proposing assignments to be handed in online), and to let classmates help each other in research for research-based papers (wikis). All of these can help to enhance English students learning whether they are taking an online or ground class. To look into and download Claroline go to: http://www.claroline.net/


TUTORIAL (PART II)

Following are some tutorials on (1) getting started, (2) creating an exercise, and (3) creating an assignment. Click on the URLs to watch the video or look at the picture for help. Enjoy!:
http://www.claroline.net/dlarea/docs/videos/en/create_user_account.htm



http://www.claroline.net/dlarea/docs/videos/en/Create%20_an_exercise.htm


http://www.claroline.net/dlarea/docs/videos/en/Create_an_assignment.htm

















REFLECTION (PART III)
In order to show how to use the tutorials, I searched for videos on how to use the software. Luckily, I found several separate tutorials that showed how to use specific tools within the more broad spectrum of Claroline tools. Because I will be teaching English, I tried to pick those most applicable to English teachers. You will notice that I also took screenshots as the tutorials were playing. Hopefully, the screenshots I took were in the best place possible to show how to start using the tools without having to watch the whole video. In general what I tried to do was: write a description of the software, give visual aids of the software being used (i.e. screenshots) and hyperlinks to the full Claroline tutorials themselves. I tried to give a variety of instruction on how to use the software. I honestly believe it is a good program for English teachers, and it is likely I will go back to this software as a professional teacher.