Digication campus- Leadership Tryouts

Today was our meeting for next year’s drum corps leadership candidates. I decided to try Digication Campus as a way to extend the learning and interaction beyond my classroom. Basically, I set up a course called “Leadership Seminar” and invited the leadership candidates via email to the course. The first task is to respond to a prompt on why they are seeking a leadership position.

The nice thing about digication campus is that you can set the preferences so that students can’t see other students’ replies. This is, in effect, a dropbox for assignments. Digication campus offers a comprehensive set of tools to communicate- forum-type posting, assignments, announcements (all forum style) but by clicking access checkboxes in the preferences, you can customize how those posts function and who can see/reply/access.

Another nice feature is the calendar- which allows all participants to be notified of upcoming events. There is an area to upload files (which are attached to posts) and a “links” area that is visible to all participants. Digication campus incorporates many of the features that make yahoo groups so versatile, but has given consideration to the special needs of teachers.

I have posted my first assignment and am awaiting student responses. Next, I plan to post several links related to leadership for my students to explore and reflect on. As a final project, I am going to have students create “spotlights” (another digication feature) that will be in effect their leadership portfolio. I will blog about the result of this “experiment” in future posts.