Haiku- Our LMS

Haiku is our Learning Management System (LMS) that was piloted in the 5th and 8th grade this year. You might be using Blackboard, Moodle or another LMS at your current school to post homework, share hyperlinks, share files (Word, PDFs, etc.), have online discussions, display videos, etc. A guiding principle for using a LMS is to extend the learning outside of the classroom. This form of learning is sometimes called "blended" in that the LMS and other online tools provide collaboration opportunities for students to continue learning outside of the regular school day. An example of a blended assignment is when you post question(s) to the forum tool in Haiku that students respond to directly and to each other's comments. A second example is when students have blogs where they journal reflectively either prompted by the teacher's assignments/prompts or on their own. A Web 2.0 tool like the concept-mapping tool of Mindmeister gives students the opportunity to share their maps with one another for collaboration in and out of school.

The ePorfolio module of Haiku is being piloted this year in the 5th grade. The ePortfolios will be a part of the student-led conferences taking place at the end of the school year. All of the Middle School will be using Haiku in 2012-13. Here is the draft of the ePortfolio template that we started working on this past spring. It will be adapted and revised to then become what the students see when they open their ePorfolios in Haiku.

Here are some sites to help familiarize you with Haiku:

• • What is Haiku? (Select the "what is Haiku? video link at the top left for an overview)

  • Collaboration Tools (This page provides info on several tools like forums, wikis, etc.)

  • Video tutorials on how to set up your pages

  • Tutorials provided by Haiku on a variety of tools

  • Video tutorial on adding content to Haiku pages