E-Portfolio #3: LMS site
The LMS design project was certainly the hardest for me so far, but also the most rewarding. I found it really difficult to get started; partly because I procrastinated (don’t judge me… I’m on “summer holidays”!), but mainly because I didn’t have a good vision for how to use Moodle to its fullest. At the start, I mistakenly simply tried to take the content of my French Immersion 9 course and build it into Moodle, but very quickly I realized that I was missing a valuable opportunity in doing this.
Moodle has some unique affordances, and I tried to capitalize on some of them but, admittedly, I have a very long way to go. One affordance is the forum; where I can see a real advantage over classroom discussions. Often, my in-class discussions are limited to me talking and a few students (who are more confident with the language than the others) discussing while the others sit there and pray that I don’t ask them anything. The online forum gives every student a voice and a chance to participate and, in fact, they are obliged to participate. They aren’t verbal discussions, but discussions nonetheless and a valuable opportunity to practice using the language. As a bonus, because of the asynchronous nature of discussions, I can evaluate their posts later. I have incorporated two general discussions; one as a help forum on my main page and the other in the genetic modification activity.
I decided that the majority of the content of my site would be in webpages that I made using Dreamweaver and a free CSS template that I found. The pages can only be accessed using the icons in the splash page (which is really my course syllabus) and the icons in the modules. My method of selectively releasing a module is pretty ghetto, but I think it works and it is simple. To ‘deactivate’ the module “Ecriture”, I simply changed the name of the webpage file to “Ecriture1”, which invalidated it and anything that linked to it. There is no other way for students to access the webpages, meaning that they effectively disappear. To ‘reactivate’ is really easy and there is no need to learn any fancy tricks that I won’t remember in two weeks.
One thing that I did try to keep in mind while I created the site is that I am a full time teacher of a variety of subjects (as well as a Masters student and the father of a two year old and a now two week old {my son Adrian was born on the 20th – this may have distracted me from my LMS design a bit too}), and so I wanted to be realistic about what I could build and the time that I could commit. As such, I tried not to reinvent the wheel and used some tools to make my life easier. For example, I used a Wix page for my splash page. This was a pretty easy thing to do and I think that it looks pretty cool. As well, I shopped around for a CSS template rather than build my own, and then I modified it to suit my needs.
The site is by no means done, and there are definitely things that I would like to add as I find the time to do so. I didn’t spend too much time creating a bunch of activities because I do the activities in class and to have a bunch in Moodle could prove to be problematic. I do want to create practice quizzes for the various verbs that I teach and have a links section for students to find more information. I would like to set up a few online journal entries, but I haven’t exactly decided how to set them up yet. I really want to use the Nanogong applet so that my students can record themselves and I can assess their oral French more regularly. I will be talking to my school’s Moodle administrator about installing this into the framework. There are some other applets that I would really like to use to support student writing; like the Google maps applet. It would be cool to have my students tell me about their summer holidays and use the map to show me all of the places that they had been.
In summary, the LMS project was the mother of all constructivist projects for me. Having created webpages using HTML before, I had some confidence. I found that over time I learned more, but unfortunately, I was learning how little I knew at the beginning. This led to the inevitable problem of wanting to restart and try again with my newfound knowledge. Wanting to keep some forward momentum, I decided to persevere but in the end I have something that I am not totally satisfied with. As I have learned in other courses, it is the dissatisfaction that the learner experiences that drives new learning, so I am looking forward to moving my site onto my school’s sever and tinkering with it.