Noah's 565 e-portfolio

Oodles of Moodle

Meandering into Moodle and the virtual world of LMS’ was a fascinating experience. The more I work with Moodle the more I realize that it is not that different from planning regular units, lessons, or modules.  I do not know why I thought it would be different, but I did.

Here is why I found Moodle similar to regular course planning.  The first thing that I needed to do was select a topic. I chose reading and viewing from the English Language Arts curriculum for British Columbia.  With my topic selected I chose a few outcomes that I would like to follow.

Topic and outcomes in mind it was time to find resources and lesson inspirations.  I gathered a few odds and ends and began to set up a few lessons.

Here is where I made my first mistake, oops, had my first learning experience.  I started using Moodle immediately, before I had organized my lessons and activities.  I found that by doing this I spent more time setting up and organizing the a small amount of content, rather than generating it.  By not adding content to an LMS, but creating it within it, I found that I started to work on one thing leave it unfinished and the start on something else.

The jumping around left my units in patch work.  I feel that if I had created content off line it would have been easier to upload said content and then modify it to fit Moodle.  Instead I felt like I was trying to push them together in a less than organized fashion. It was almost like trying to teach a lesson while creating it.

I feel I should have made the lessons, activities, and assessment prior to sitting down with Moodle.  If one has preexisting content then they can work that content into Moodle.  By doing this the essence of the lessons and modules can be maintained while adding the benefits such as WIKI, BLOG, DISUSSSION, and MEDIA to the modules.  My start stop method reduced the flow.

But what about Moodle as a tool?

I like Moodle.  I like that I can upload content and have the students work together while they move through the units.  I like that I can introduce technology such as blogs, and wiki in a safe environment.  I like that students can have live chats and private group discussions.  I like that I can create links to extra readings and resources.  I like that I can have a variety of media in order to reach a wide variety of learners. I like that I have to pay attention to countless details in order to try and make the topics self-contained and easy to follow.  The percision makes the content that is included very relevant to the activities.

What would I do next time?

I now have the knowledge and experience to use Moodle more effectively.  I would create unit/lesson and assessment strategies offline.  I would input these into Moodle. Nothing fancy, only text.  I would then go about  creating a list of all the activities that I wanted to include chat, quiz, discussion etc.  I would then try and create a list of all the media needed. I would then work through my lessons as a students would and add media that fit within the lesson and add more information when clarity was needed.  I would add the activities where they fit and try not to overuse anything in particular.  I would then go through the lessons again and add hyperlinks and additional resources that may not have been essential but allow the learner to explore an interest beyond the walls of my Moodle…

I like Moodle because I am starting to use,understand, manipulate, appreciate, and know it….

The class roared….. No, these were not the complaints of a group of moody 15 and 16 years old.  Rather, these grumblings were coming from members of my bachelor of education cohort TACT (technology and critical thinking)…  Why you ask, well we were about to become one of the first groups of cohorts to have to create eportfolio’s to document our progress through the program.

For some people the task of learning how to blog was an extremely difficult and challenging activity.  For others, it was a way to transfer existing facebook skills to an educational setting.  I fell some where in between.  I found the us of a blog to be easier than the WYIWYG NVU program I had been using.  What took me a long time to figure out, still to this day working it out, is that a blog is not a web site… I know breath taking, but I still want to make pages, links, and updates in huge chunks not small pieces…

With my cohort we blogged, but we didn’t really… What we did was make webpages that were accessed through a blog format.  Why did this happen?  My best guess is that we didn’t know how to blog… We needed to be taught what a blog was but instead we were only shown what had to be on our blogs…  So is blogging a good educational activity, research and experience tells me yes, but we do need to teach bloggin as an activity if the multimedia capabilities are to be explored to their fullest.

Here are a few helpful links…

Top 100 educational blogs

WordPress.com

Is this a blog?

Here is a video that helped me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI[/youtube]

While I support the us, creation, editing, cooperation,  communication, expression, and contributions that are possible through the use of Wiki’s I do not find them to be a great platform to create discussion amongst peers.  As a social media, I find Wiki’s to be better suited for the creation of a document style/project/purpose built activities rather than one in which communication and ideas can be freely exchanged.

Here are a few of the challenges I found when comparing a wiki to a threaded Vista/Moodle discussion forum.  For one thing, through the use of our Vista discussion forum it could be argued that multiple threads could themselves become wiki pages.  A discussion forum, well, is more like a discussion.  It can change and morf as the ideas and interest of the participants change.  A wiki is very topic oriented and does that allow that freedom.  In some cases this is an advantage, but not when trying to create dialogue.  In terms of content and time with a threaded discussion it is easier to find a time line and to specify to whom and what you are reacting.  A threaded discussion also helps to focus time management as one can follow the specific interactions vs. reading all the content that may or may not be relevant to a specific subject of interest.

A few advantages…Nothing is hidden.  With a wiki you do not miss any thread that may be relevant as all discussion is present.   With a wiki I think that people may  feel more exposed and thus take the time and energy to make sure their contribution is relevant and insightful.  I really found the wiki to a be a useful tool for the final activity, setting up the 5 strategies/challenges to using social media.  This type of activity is well suited for a Wiki as one can add and change and reword the collective expression with having to worry that the thread is going to be over 100 long and exhaustive to read.  I think it was interesting to see how people started to vote with x’s beside the ones they felt were the most relevant.

So who wins?

I have to give the edge to the discussion forum for, well, the fact that it was designed for discussion.  But and yes there is always a but, I think that together they could be a very powerful tool.  A great activity for a section, or small groups, would be to at the end of the week to turn a discussion forum  into a wiki page.  Th creation of a wiki would allow for information synthesis and a way to keep a great e-portfolio artifact to highlight the important points brought up in discussion.  I think that this would provide the best of both media and be a great constructivist driven assessment tool….

Discussion forum = 1…………………..Wiki =  1……………………….. The Web = 2.0

Reflection and Rationale:

I found Wimba to a very impressive communication tool.  Not only can it incorporate all forms of media including audio, visual and text based. One can present screen casts record them and post them on youtube.  PowerPoint presentations can be screened while discussion is taking place and there can even be quizzes through the use of multiple-choice questions and essay questions.  Now that I know the capabilities of Wimba, I am surprised that it has not been used more often throughout the MET.  It will also change how I will plan and create lessons for the LMS.

For my activity I used a simple discussion forum because I did not want to rush in and use Wimba before I fully understood how to use it effectively.  I also remember that as an early participant in the MET program it took a while before I was comfortable posting period, little lone to a live forum.  There definitely is a comfort level that must be achieved, the accomplishment of certain tasks before one moves to a framework like Wimba.  As a result my activities are fairly simplistic but with the idea that they will be used to scaffold the learner into more complex forms synchronous communication as they complete and feel more comfortable engaging with an online community of practice.

Here is a  link to my communication page for the full analysis.

While working through the DVD creation activity the following line came to the for front.  It is in regard to importing existing clips.

“By preparing these in advance, producing the actual DVD should take a few minutes.”

While the above may be true, I think that it may simplify a complex process.  For a bit of background information, I work with  a Mac and thus I was using iDVD.

iDVD is the third step in the DVD production process when one is using their own materials.  To reach iDVD a creator would have already spent hours creating a lesson plan and editing time working in iMovie and creating those clips that can be easily transferred into iDVD. It is in the creation of the lesson plans and iMovies that the real labour time is accumulated.  I used iMovie so my example stems from that media genre, but I feel the results would be the same regardless of media as long as the media is authored by the user.  Depending on the quality that one is looking for this can be extremely time consuming and labour intensive.

The iDVD creation was very simple and not labour intensive.  I found it easy to use and the drag and drop function was quick and efficient.  However, I do not have a burner and thus to actually produce my DVD I would have to transfer it through a data stick to a computer with one, a second step but still another step.

iDVD is a very useful and professional mechanism that does allow the user to take their media productions to the next level.  I was surprised at how what I thought were finished products, took on a real production quality feel after using iDVD.  The ease at which it creates a finished product still astounds me.  A few complaints. I wish I was able to convert the iDVD into a transferable file and thus either post it to YouTube or another media sharing venues.  I also feel that the use of iDVD would eventually lose some of it’s impact on the students.  I.E. the same intro themes over and over again. And again, iDVD is really the final step in a much more complex process, a great step, but not the most time consuming in the chain of production.

Well, this activity certainly has added another pro to list of reasons why I should upgrade my home base technologies, sighhh.

The following links will provide you with either a link to my LMS page or to the Project Proposal in a word document.  The proposal is a based on my current teaching assignment and is the first step in the development of my Moodle course.

Please feel free to comment.

Project Proposal LMS page:

Project Proposal Word Document:project-proposal

After hesitating and reluctantly accepting that I may need to find out if my website sucked (you can to, here is the link Does my website suck) I went through the checklist with one eye closed and the other eye squinting.  Drum-role please….Yes it does suck….  It takes far to long for the images to load etc….  If you want, you can check it out,  Noah’s webpage that sucks

But do I suck because my website sucks?  No.

Prior to my creation of a school website, my school had basically no web presence.  The previous website was a series of dead links from 2004.  My involvement with the creation of the website was very labour intensive but a much needed and great learning process.

With no web authoring software I had to find an open source platform.  I had been introduced to NVU previously and decided that it would meet the basic requirements needed to complete a simple website.  After examining all the VSB school websites I began the creation process.  After weeks of frustration and trial and error I had a simple site ready to publish.  I found what I now know to be the storyboarding process fairly simple.  I had a basic plan in mind after visiting the other school websites.

Getting the site to look the way I wanted was far more complex.  This involved creating tables and experimenting with colours layout font size and all the basic requirements of a   including links and images.   I soon learned that for certain aspects, such as the links between each page, that using the HTML code was at times easier than the WYSIWYG approach.  Through cutting and pasting code I could create templates and consistency throughout the site.   I used trial and error as my primary strategy for creation.  As with all trial and error, it can be a lot of error for a little success.  A frustrating process for all applications, web design is no different.  But through trial and error I learned the parameters of the NVU software which now enables me to edit and change the site as a learn and experiment more and more. Furthermore, I was surprised at how the use of the source option and a familiarity of HTML would ultimately help me in other WYSIWYG applications such as blogs and wikis with which I know feel far more comfortable.

So yes, my website sucks but I don’t.  The site may not have past the checklist but at least my school has a site now.  The checklist is just the next step.  If I had used used the checklist, it may have created a standard that I would not have been able to meet.  Such a high standard would have created more frustrations.

The checklist is a great tool, but understanding how to create a web page and actually making it happen should be checklist i, a preface to checklist 1.

Off to de-suck my web page…..

Can Moodle be used as diversely as smurf? Moolderific?  Moodling?  Moodled?

My experience with moodle has been a slow but steady process of experimentation.  What I found interesting is the need for on going coordination between the administrator and the user.  Moodle was difficult for me to access at first because another user had the same log in name as I did, once that was organized I was submitted as a student and not a teacher thus limiting my ability to access and edit a course.   Upon reflection this made my first few attempts to use moodle very frustrating as I had to rely on other people extensively and began to feel somewhat discouraged by the undertaking.

After the initial setbacks, I found moodle to be very user friendly.  The tutorials and other resources reassured me that I would not be going at this alone.  The extensive tool bar offers more opportunities to experiment than the tool bars offered by wordpress or edublogs.  The access to tools and the ease of use I felt encouraged and made me want to explore the capabilities of the open software even further.

It was slow at the start but now with a nit of basic experience I am ready to explore even further.  I agree with Perkins, moodle would definitely aid classroom communication and the I did not get the assignment complaint.

Noah

Knowing a destination does not complete a journey.  However, when a destination is set, the journey begins to build meaning.  My flight path begins with an explanation of who I am as an educator.  Currently I am in my first year of teaching, working as a teacher on call as well as teaching intermediate French Immersion Physical Education.  That being said, my real interests lay in primary education specifically grades two and three.  Fingers, crossed I will be in primary classroom next year having done my time as a new employee to the district.

My experiences are somewhat eclectic in that they vary from schools with rich technological resources to those with minimal access.  I often draw upon experiences from my teaching practicum during which I was able to use a SmartBoard on a daily basis.  It was through the use of that particular technology that I became fascinated with the field of educational technology as a whole.

My goals are to further my experiences with a variety of technologies while exploring their educational applications.  I would like to discuss and explore these technologies with like minded people and have a platform where we can share ideas as to how these technologies can best meet our needs and as well as our students’ needs.   Specifically, my goal is to learn how I can further integrate technology into my teaching practice.  I want to explore ways in which technology can promote critical thinking skills, foster curiosity and a desire to explore question, promote parent involvement with student learning, and build an awareness of the world beyond the walls of the classroom.

Regarding specific technologies I want know how Learning Management Systems can be used in the primary grades.  I want to learn how I can combine LMS with my teaching style and with the resources that have at my disposal.  I want to understand some of their limitations and theoretical support in order to be able to make informed decisions and communicate these decisions to students, parents, and colleagues.  I want to learn how synchronous communication can be used to its fullest with students that may have limited written output, but extensive ideas.  I want to learn how technology can help me meet my goal of allowing students to present their learning in a variety of ways and formats.  I also want to learn how and what forms of social software provide a safe environment for my students to interact with others.   Lastly, I want to know how to use technology to make learning fun and make school a place where each student wants to come, everyday.

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