Working with Moodle in an open sandbox site was an extremely valuable activity. Personally I have used it to a limited extent in the past, however, having the option to play with course themes and work on creating a unit from the ground up was  a phenomenal experience.

Deciding on an introductory module was a somewhat difficult task. I wanted to both introduce myself to the class, indicate how they could easily get in contact with me as well as find a way to present the resources that they needed to become comfortable with the Moodle platform. Moodle has a number of introductory documents so I felt it pertinent to include those in the introduction.

However, I felt as if the best option would be to include an introductory video that they could open in a pop up window that would be accessible to them to watch while they attempted to navigate the site on their own.

Next I wanted to get the students to start communicating with each other so I found a video campaign that demonstrates a perfect example of an online campaign. The intended purpose to get them to see a finished product of a video pitch and start to evaluate it critically.

The Goodspread campaign one is good as it is somewhat of a neutral issue. I didn’t want to chose a campaign like Kony 2012 and potentially create rifts in the class before the learning even really started. Their video is well done and has a lot of components that they can learn from for their projects.

Choosing to put the introductory discussion on the news forum was intentional. The idea was they would hopefully get used to the format of news items and announcements and where they will be found. 

Once I had that setup I decided to look into all the options with the resources and activities and found that IMS content and SCORM packages were included. This led me to some further research on what these could offer when creating a unit for Moodle. I know the D2L and other Learning Managements Systems provide this option and feel as if there is a lot of value in tracking student interactions as they go through different learning activities.

Providing detailed feedback on each students interactions is extremely valuable for teachers when moving forward as a unit progresses. Nevertheless, creating these packages and content isn’t easy (especially if you are a Mac user). I looked into a number of different options for creating this content but couldn’t find a decent one that would work well on a Mac. In the end I had to abandon the inclusion of this, however, I will definitely investigate this further on my own time.

The next step was deciding how I wanted to present my unit. I have a series of videos around creating WordPress sites, but didn’t want to just embed static lectures. Therefore I felt it was pertinent to provide a problem that the students needed to solve on their own. This way the students could feel more invested the material and allow them to create their own learning goals, as well as forge their own learning goals for the unit.

The choice to get them to do an online campaign and allowed me to chose from numerous examples that currently exist online. Referencing the Kickstarter campaign by pebble, was a deliberate choice, as I felt it embodied the spirit of this unit.

Additionally I wanted to give them opportunities to engage with and create their own learning communities outside just the ones in their class. This was the impetus for the discussion thread on the integration of a twitter list.

Being able to house any HTML code from various sources on different moveable blocks was very useful and something I wanted to take advantage of. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to just send the students to twitter without any preparation, hence why I decided to use and create a twitter widget that referenced a list of predefined accounts I personally checked out.

However, the best aspect I found about using Moodle was the customizable features for any resource and activity that you added to a unit. Having the freedom to make an activity visible to different groups, creating grading scales, rubrics, completion criteria, and badges were almost overwhelming. Nevertheless, I truly feel if I  were to get more comfortable using Moodle I would start to integrate more of these into my practice.

I only created one badge that I added for the twitter activity, but felt that the process was relatively easy. This probably is the best way I would describe Moodle.  Powerful, and easy. Moodle is extremely popular and is being implemented in more and more classrooms across the world and I can definitely see why.

I really enjoyed this activity and had a lot of fun with the freedom to make a course from the ground up.