Completing my course in Moodle has been quite a journey for me.\u00a0 Before this class I never thought of myself as technologically savvy in the least.\u00a0 I had, in the past, figured out how to make a movie and upload it to youtube, how to create a blog, how to build a website (okay, it was one of those free sites that doesn’t require HTML knowledge).\u00a0 The point is, I was brave enough to experiment.<\/p>\n
This exercise taught me that I don’t give myself credit for my abilities.\u00a0 I do have good problem solving skills, and that helped me work through the various requirements for my Moodle course.\u00a0 The exercise helped build my confidence in my ability to learn how to use unfamiliar technologies.<\/p>\n
Throughout this course my concept of what a LMS is changed significantly.\u00a0 The two articles that we were assigned to read at the beginning of the course laid down a great foundation on which I would work.\u00a0 Throughout this project, I kept assessing whether my site was student-centered.\u00a0 Is this content reflecting my own knowledge, or is it allowing students space to build theirs<\/em>? I kept asking myself.\u00a0 It was a struggle for me to keep my overviews, for instance, short.\u00a0 I initially felt that I had to write everything that students needed to know about music in the Baroque era, for instance.\u00a0 However, I could write as much as I wanted, but students would retain very little, if any of the \u201cimportant\u201d information.\u00a0 It would be best if students learned the information by working though assignments.\u00a0 This would be best done in a community-centered learning environment.<\/p>\n To create such an event, I incorporated a wiki.\u00a0 I have only used wikis twice as a student, and never required it of my students, simply because I wasn\u2019t sure how to go about it, neither did I understand the pedagogical merits of such an assignment.\u00a0 Wikis, I learned in this class, are a wonderful way of supporting a community-centered environment because students would contribute to the pot of knowledge, and would have to negotiate with each other the ingredients that would be most relevant.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a great way of helping students clarifying their understanding of a topic or issue.<\/p>\n History has traditionally been taught as a solo discipline, although the reality of historical research is that it is a social practice!\u00a0 Students typically engage in private research, reading and writing about topics that interest them, rarely if ever, collaborating with their peers, or even soliciting ideas from them.\u00a0 This community- and student-centeredness challenges this traditional practice to one that is more in keeping with the practice of history.\u00a0 To that end I introduced social, collaborative research.\u00a0 Using diigo.com, a social bookmarking website, I required my students to contribute links that they\u2019d come across during their studies in Music history.\u00a0 Students are not required to merely post the links, however, they are to write brief descriptions of the site to help their peers quickly assess whether a site was relevant to their needs.\u00a0 I\u2019m looking forward to seeing the outcome of this assignment once my course goes live.<\/p>\n So how has my concept of a LMS evolved during these past 13 weeks?\u00a0 I have moved from a static, teacher-centered concept of a LMS, were the site serves as a repository, a place to park course materials, to an active, live, dynamic, collaborative learning space.<\/p>\n This course has really advanced my thinking about technology.\u00a0 The possibilities are endless because there are so many programs \u201cout there\u201d and there are new ones appearing almost daily.\u00a0 The next major software that\u2019s emerged is Google+.\u00a0 This course has gotten me very interested in exploring new software and given me the confidence, too.\u00a0 I have started exploring Google+.\u00a0 I like the feature that keeps track of websites that contains content that\u2019s interesting to me.\u00a0 I look forward to exploring and experiencing how this social software will transform education.<\/p>\n I learned that technology isn\u2019t all that scary.\u00a0 Sometimes it requires trial and error.\u00a0 One has to allow oneself time and space to do this work.\u00a0 I found that I couldn\u2019t do things in a hurry.\u00a0\u00a0 Many times I did stuff on the Moodle website that just didn\u2019t work, like embed videos in the discussion forums.\u00a0 The videos showed up in the edit view, but in student\/non-editing view they were not visible.\u00a0 Embedded videos showed up consistently in other pages, such as the webpage feature and the quizzes.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s one of Moodle\u2019s quirks.\u00a0 I never did overcome the challenge of uploading files from Nvu to Moodle.\u00a0 That is something I will further explore post ETEC 565.\u00a0 I will invest in Dreamweaver, however.<\/p>\n The module we did on assessment was particularly helpful to me.\u00a0 My flight path indicated that I wanted to explore ways assess students in ways consistent with 21st<\/sup>-century learning.\u00a0 I had grown quite dissatisfied with the traditional methods of assessing students\u2019 understanding of history.\u00a0 No wonder students hate history!<\/p>\n I learned during that module, that you didn\u2019t have to entirely throw away the traditional methods, but you don\u2019t have to rely on them, either.\u00a0 I utilized assessment criteria such as concept maps, wikis, discussions, and group projects.\u00a0 However, to ensure that students were actually reading their text book (a major issue at my college in all departments), and to help them learn the material, I found that Moodle\u2019s quiz function was quite helpful.\u00a0 I endeavored to create quizzes for each topic, a time-consuming task, but one I think will help advance learning.\u00a0 Not only does it provide \u201ctime on task\u201d as discussed in Chickering and Gamson (1987), but it provides students with much needed immediate feedback.<\/p>\n Working on the Moodle site was an engaging activity for me.\u00a0 I will continue working on the site after this class because I have two more modules to add.\u00a0 I will probably change some of the assignments around.\u00a0 I have in the first module, for instance, the wiki assignment.\u00a0 In hindsight that\u2019s probably not a good place for that assignment as none of my students would have had experience creating knowledge in such a public forum.\u00a0 Students at my college tend to be consumers rather than producers of knowledge.\u00a0 My course will certainly change that, but one has to lead the students gently through the process.\u00a0 Shoving them into the knowledge-building pool will only make them drown.<\/p>\n I look forward to completing designing this course and designing other courses, too.\u00a0 There is so much other software that I\u2019d like to explore.\u00a0 I have utilized quite a bit of different software in my Moodle course, and I suspect that I will remove some of these and substitute others from time to time.\u00a0 I would like, for instance, to add blogging.\u00a0 I would also like to encourage students to use programs that I\u2019m just learning to use, like Storify.com.\u00a0 The possibilities are endless, but one really must choose the technologies that they would like to use with great care.\u00a0 ETEC 565, I feel, has provided me with the tools to make reasonable choices for my students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Completing my course in Moodle has been quite a journey for me.\u00a0 Before this class I never thought of myself as technologically savvy in the least.\u00a0 I had, in the past, figured out how to make a movie and upload it to youtube, how to create a blog, how to build a website (okay, it 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