Category: Uncategorized

Pictures can change a boring text page to an exciting learning environment if the photos are chosen to suit the theme and there are not too many of them. When I first decided to add photos to my Moodle site, I was excited about the interesting photos I found online. Then the rules of copyright crept into the scene and I was left wondering which photos I could actually use. It shouldn’t have been a surprise since I’m a freelance writer and I’m very familiar with the copyright of my own work. In writing, we have all kinds of rights to worry about like first North American rights and second rights etc.

However, I find that I’m not comfortable with the copy rights of images even those that have creative commons licences. Therefore, I decided to use all my own images in my Moodle site. I got out my digital camera and took photos that would represent each module of my site. Then I uploaded the images to the Moodle site and tried to link them to my splash page.

That’s when the real fun began. I couldn’t get my images to display properly. Someone pointed out that my image files may be too large. I thought I had shrunk them in the Moodle window but I really needed to shrink the actual file sizes first. I realize this is an area where my knowledge is lacking. Therefore, I want to learn more about digital images and copyright. I would also like to learn Photoshop and Dreamweaver so that I can change files and code them to display properly. There’s so much more to learn!

Putting together my Moodle course was an interesting experience. I have created a course in Moodle so I felt comfortable moving around the site. Some of the activities were challenging but most were easy to figure out. For example, I struggled with creating my splash page because I couldn’t get the photos to upload properly. When I took web design courses, I learned to keep my website files in the same folder as my photos so they would upload properly. In Moodle, I had to upload the files to their site and then bring them into the splash page. When I was finished, another student pointed out that my photos didn’t display so she shrunk them for me and when I reattached them to the splash page they worked fine. What a wonderful learning community we have with students helping each other.

Other tools were easy to use but time consuming like the quiz. I was able to create a database of questions but it took time to write each one and then upload them to the quiz. I will definitely use Moodle again in the literacy classroom because it is free, easy to use and suits the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic needs of my learners.

I believe social software tools alone have changed the face of the Internet because people naturally like to develop communities. Social software programs like Facebook and Second Life are engaging and fun. I use Facebook to connect with friends and family here and overseas with a frequency that might not normally happen. I can see photos of people and keep up-to-date with what they are doing.

I tried to incorporate Facebook into my current job as a learning skills advisor but I couldn’t really figure out a way to add people in the way I wanted and I really don’t want students in my personal Facebook. I decided it might not be the right tool for my purpose but I will look into it further.

Last month, I took a Second Life workshop and created an avatar. What an interesting experience. I can understand why people like creating and connecting to others in new and interesting ways. It was a little intimidating since the instructor kept reminding us not to change our clothes while out in public. She was really worried that we would appear naked!

Educationally speaking, I think Facebook might be limited in my case but may work for other instructors if many students are already online. The problem I would face again would be allowing students into my private life. I think Second Life has its place in the classroom though. Teachers can use this program to create virtual worlds that students can explore. However, we had trouble at our school because the video cards were old and the computers too slow.

Overall, I look forward to trying new collaborative or social software because people like communicating together. I think it works very well in the classroom because new knowledge can be created by groups of students. Please read my post on weblogs and wikis to read about my experiences there.

I was first introduced to weblogs a few years ago when I was working as a freelance writer. At first they seemed like a novelty or just a different way to write for an audience. It soon became apparent though that there was something a bit different about blogging. The articles were short, current and constantly changing. Soon we began seeing blogging jobs popping up. People who owned online companies and websites were looking for people to write weekly blogs for them. The pay wasn’t great but the jobs were plenty.

When I started ETEC 565, I realized that there was more to blogs than I’d first realized. I hadn’t noticed the interactive nature of blogging. In fact, I’d never really been that interested in anyone commenting on my articles until I saw it happening through the blogs I was reading. Real conversations could begin and you could meet people with the same interests as you. Blogging seemed to have a life of its own with a natural growth of ideas. I believe it’s this potential for the growth of ideas that makes blogging a good tool to use in a classroom.

Educators can use blogs to promote writing, editing and publishing. Students can communicate and create with others through the publishing of their own ideas. In the classroom, I think blogs can be used to connect students in a school to each other but also to students in other schools. Connections lead to new ideas and new ideas lead to knowledge creation.

However, there are problems that need to be considered before using blogs in the classroom such as privacy and safety. I think instructors need to be fully aware of who has access to the blogs and how the information will be used. Instructors need to teach awareness and responsibility to students who may not be fully aware of the potential dangers online.

With safety measures in place, students can use blogs to communicate, create, collaborate, research and publish. Blogs can be tied together and content researched using RSS feeds and tags. After reading Alexander’s A new Wave of Innovation, I realize that blogs have many more uses than I originally fathomed. I will now consider the use of blogs in my own classroom in a new ways.

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning? EDUCAUSE Review, 41(2), 34-44. Accessed online July 2009. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0621.pdf

Just in case I missed something, I wandered back through the course Toolkit and sure enough I found something I wanted to add. I haven’t mentioned the importance of starting this blog and setting up my Moodle course.

Blogging
Yes, blogging is a requirement of this course but really it was the nudge I needed to get me started on something I’d planned on doing for ages. I’ve been freelance writing for several years and got caught up in the excitement of blogging from the beginning. I even get a weekly newsletter from http://weblogs.about.com/ but instead of setting up a blog, I put it off – waiting for the right topic or the right opportunity.

ETEC 565 gave me the topic I needed and the opportunity was thrust upon me. Now, I can’t imagine not writing a blog. Blogging gives me a chance to think about what I’m learning and then put my thoughts onto a page where other like minded individuals can find it.

Moodling
I’d been introduced to Moodle two months before I began MET and thought it was an interesting way to connect learners in my literacy field. I took a workshop where I learned the basics of using the program but I knew when I finished that I’d just skimmed the surface of possibilities.

In ETEC 565, I ran into Moodle again and it’s here that I’ve had the chance to really explore its potential. Our first task, setting up the ‘welcome page,’ was like a test for me. Would I remember enough from the workshop to get started? Well, I remembered a bit and the ETEC 565 Toolkit helped me the rest of the way.

Our second task, setting up a “discussion forum,” seemed more familiar. I think I was more comfortable with this task because I could appreciate its use in an online classroom. I’ve taken online courses that join participants and I’ve taken those that don’t. In the field of literacy, I can see the potential of this tool. Students can connect with one another while working at home. Getting to class can be a real barrier for literacy students so the potential is exciting. The only problem I can foresee is getting students with different literacy abilities to chat together online without feeling self-conscious. One solution might be to split the class into different groups according to ability.

Overall, I find blogging very useful to my own career and personal growth and I find Moodling very useful for my students. Together, I will be able to use these tools to create material for self reflection, networking and curriculum design. I’m very excited about the future of possibilities.

I enjoyed searching through the various communication tools available to instructors in Moodle because it gave me a good overview of what exists for instructor/student communication. It was interesting to match the tools I liked best with my instructional goals. The challenge was picking the right tools for the right reasons.

Although I like the idea of a wiki to connect students to each other and the instructor, it didn’t seem like the right tool for literacy learners because it invites the sharing of writing which may intimidate some students. Instead, I chose the discussion forum and the chat tools.

I wanted to start with something very basic so the students could connect easily without a lot of technical confusion. I worked in the literacy field for many years and found that students can easily become overwhelmed because of negative school experiences. Instead, I could use the forum to answer questions and help students along the way. Students could connect with others at their own literacy levels which promotes a sense of independence.

I could use the chat tool to personalize my class and connect with students immediately. Literacy classrooms are very learner centred and instructors try to develop a sense of community early on.

As an instructor, I found the forum tool very user friendly. It was easy to set up new discussions and I could see where the date could be set easily. This tool would give me a lot of flexibility while also allowing me to control when discussion topics would close. I think the discussion tool is a great way to keep the lines of communication open throughout the duration of the course.

The chat tool was equally easy to set up and I would use this in the beginning, middle and end of the course to stay connected to my students. The only thing I didn’t like was the time issue. I would have to find a time that suited most of my learners.

I think what surprised me the most was that I hadn’t considered the importance of keeping connected with my students online. In the classroom it was obvious. Recently, I created a writing course for literacy learners and now I want to go back and add in the chat tool and perhaps change my discussions. Overall, setting up these tools was a very enlightening experience that I think will benefit my students in the future.

Please see my communication tools page for more information about the forum and chat tools.

Everyone benefits from the synchronicity of communication “between an instructor, learners, and content” (Toolkit) because togetherness allows for the quick exchange of ideas. Of course there are problems like the students in one class being in several different time zones. Many students take online courses for the anytime anywhere features they can’t find when attending an actual classroom. It’s easy to see why synchronicity alone cannot create the kind of interactive classroom many instructors conceptualize.

So enter asynchronous communication tools. Instructors use these anytime anywhere tools to join all involved without the constraints of time or location. Users communicate freely and conveniently.

But can this ease of use backfire? With synchronous tools, communication is defined with a start time and an end time. Not so with asynchronous tools. In theory then, there is no end. Discussions can be endless and like anything that is endless, it can be overwhelming. How many messages should a student post or answer? Participation guides may say to answer a few regularly but when is few not enough?

In ETEC 565A, there are 1895 messages (as I write this) compared to ETEC 532 which has 729 messages. Does this mean one class is better than the other? If so, which one?

Of course, quality outweighs quantity but if students don’t read all the messages, they might miss something important. So in the end they may be left to wonder how these non-constraining asynchronous communication tools have managed to tie them to the discussion board with such unrelenting constraint!

After completing my LMS proposal, I reread the group rubrics we created. I wanted to know if I would see things differently after delving into the depths of writing a proposal.

Several things became apparent. I understood the purpose of the rubric in a new way. I saw it as a tool to convince someone to purchase what I was suggesting. In ETEC 520, we learned that tying your idea to the organization’s vision could make or break an idea.

Yes, the rubric was a tool to evaluate an LMS but it was also a measuring stick. Would my LMS achieve what I needed for the school? Would the faculty buy into the idea? Would it be easy for the students to use? How much would it cost?

By tying the LMS proposal to the rubric, I could see how they needed each other to complete the picture I was trying to sell. So what picture did we create?

I noticed a few buzz words appear across our work: cost, active learning, collaboration, communication, interactivity, assessment and feedback.

We also had some interesting points to make: Group 3 mentioned record management which would be important to the organization and the instructors. Group 5 mentioned considering teachers, students and organizations when choosing a LMS.

Group 1 reminded us of the importance of communicating with each other. Group 2 used a method of scoring that would encourage purchasers to pick the LMS with the best overall qualities. Group 4 used the categories content, interaction and management which encompass some of the details mentioned by all groups like cost and collaboration.

Overall, we created the categories needed to write a comprehensive proposal. Inadvertently, we used WebCT/Vista to do many of the things we claimed a good LMS should do: create, discuss, collaborate, communicate and learn. Kudos to us!

I was the first one at work to jump into Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. I figured why fight it. I was teaching computer literacy classes to senior citizens and they were throwing questions at me that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense: “How do we shut down the computer? How do we print?” It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard these questions before but they were coming from my advanced students who should know how to perform these simple tasks. I mean suddenly they can’t remember how to shut down the computer? Obviously something wasn’t right.

It took about one minute on my new Vista based laptop to discover that I didn’t know what I was doing either. Where was the start button? How do you print and where is the “File” toolbar anyway?

Suddenly, I was a newbie and I still had to go to work the next day. How would I face the students? After the initial panic subsided, I noticed the teeny tiny question mark symbol in the top right hand side of the screen. It was HELP!

I typed in “print” and found that the cute flowery symbol at the top left of the screen actually hid the secrets of file. Honestly, I would have sat there all day and it never would have occurred to me that the flowery thing ‘did’ anything.

Today, I’m very happy with my Vista operating system and all things Office 2007 related which can only mean one thing – they’re going to change it all aren’t they?

I like to think of fonts as the added decorative touch on an otherwise bland text-based page. You can do so much with fonts like change the size or the style. If you don’t like the colour, you can change that too.

What fonts don’t do well is translate from program to program or format to format. That means I can create a well-developed page with underlined headings and italicized key words but when I move it to a new location, the design may be lost in the transfer.

I found this out when I designed a course in Moodle. I forgot that Moodle was web-based and Word wasn’t – that means my stuff morphed when I cut it out of Word and pasted it into Moodle. Font changed itself and spaces between paragraphs disappeared. I cut, pasted and resaved but to no avail.

Since then, I’ve discovered a few useful pointers that I’d like to share. One, create your pages in a web-based program to avoid these problems altogether. Two, check your pages in more than one browser. Three, ask for help and search online for answers. There are many great Moodle sites online with people who will help you if they can.

Words can be a lot of fun once you understand how basic coding works. Once you’ve figured out the basics, let yourself have some fun with the pages and if you really want to play around with letters, try Wordle – a silly word program you can use for free at http://www.wordle.net/. Be patient and have fun!