{"id":10,"date":"2010-01-17T19:18:42","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T03:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/?page_id=10"},"modified":"2010-04-19T08:57:49","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T16:57:49","slug":"course-site","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/course-site\/","title":{"rendered":"Course Site"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My Moodle Course, <a href=\"http:\/\/moodle.met.ubc.ca\/course\/view.php?id=108\">Conservation Education Resource Pages<\/a>, can be found here.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Overview:<\/strong> The course contains an overview page with information about the purpose and some background information about the program. My initial intention was to create a resource accessible to grade 2 thru 7, but this proved too difficult. I ended up with something I think is good for grades 5 &#8211; 7 (and younger with teacher or buddy support). I&#8217;ll continue to work on my html authoring skills to develop more and better content for younger students!<\/p>\n<p><strong>2 complete Modules \u221a<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Marine Invertebrates <\/strong>&#8211; the full module could be completed by grades 5 through 7 fairly independently. Primary students would be able to access this module for the multimedia and would also be able, with support, to create a glossary page &#8211; the glossary function in Moodle is quite simple to use. Primary students would require further support for the research component. I included some tutorials on research as I know this is an area all students require extra support and teaching.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Eelgrass Beds &#8211; the nursery of life in the intertidal zone &#8211; <\/strong>this module is more accessible to younger students due to the chunking of text (in the info pages i created using NVu) and the heavy use of multimedia (I made the eelgrass video). The storytelling activity will need further modification and simplification to be useful to primary aged children.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>GUI splash page &#8211; \u221a &#8211;<\/strong> I also used the images from the splash page as\u00a0 &#8216;return to home&#8217; page buttons on the internally linked pages (this is explained in navigation notes on each module home page). Further, in an attempt to simplify navigation for novice users, I &#8216;hid&#8217; the content\/module sections from view as best i could. I had hoped to have the content viewable only by linking through the GUI, but was unable to do so. If i used the eye tool, the content became inaccessible not just unviewable. I settled on using the &#8216;Show only topic&#8217; button. Not the best since students can still click this to &#8216;unshow or show&#8217; it. I&#8217;d love to learn a better way to do this!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Selective Release &#8211; \u221a<\/strong> &#8211; This was tricky&#8230; but I tried to do this in three ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Intertidal invertebrates quiz is &#8216;available&#8217; from a selected date.<\/li>\n<li>The course evaluation module is in closed eye or hide mode until I enable it.<\/li>\n<li>there is a &#8216;live presentation&#8217; in the invertebrate modules using authorStream scheduled for May 3rd (it won&#8217;t <em>really <\/em>happen that date, but you get the idea!) and also a live chat available on a set date.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Forums &#8211; \u221a &#8211;<\/strong> I created several discussion forums including a Q&amp;A forum, a general marine program introductions forum, a &#8216;look closely and describe&#8217; activity forum and a\u00a0 &#8216;Chat with a Nat&#8217; chat room plus a live presentation using authorSTREAM. I experimented with different configurations for the forums and have one in group mode &#8211; The Eelgrass discussion &#8211; two groups &#8211; primary students and intermediate students, allowing more advanced questions and discussion by the second group.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reflection:<\/strong><br \/>\nDeveloping this course around a topic of great interest to me has been an excellent, if time consuming and, at times, frustrating learning experience. I had hoped to create some content that was less text intense and, to an  extent, was able to do so. I&#8217;m still disappointed by the end result in  some ways. While the modules are good learning experiences for students  in intermediate grades, primary students would struggle with certain  aspects &#8211; unless they have good support from a buddy or their teacher.<strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong>Initially, I felt quite constrained by the Moodle environment since the design affordances are somewhat limited. Further, I had hoped to create a resource website that would be immediately useful\u00a0 in my own classroom, my school and with the teachers I work with in my volunteer capacity as educational director for a non-profit. Moodle isn&#8217;t supported in my school district and the non-profit doesn&#8217;t have the resources to host it so I felt I wouldn&#8217;t be able to actually use the end result.<\/p>\n<p>Sometime during March break, while watching the tour of moodle provided online by John, I learned that the preferred way to develop a course in Moodle would be to use an external publishing program, save to html and upload to Moodle. A lightbulb went on ( or perhaps off!?)&#8230; here now was a way to create something that would be immediately transferable to a different environment once 565 was complete! If only I&#8217;d realized this earlier on&#8230; I had little to no experience with web design programs and so began to muddle my way through.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, I spent a fair bit of time creating  some beautifully (I think anyways) designed pages in Word only to find  out that, while I can save for the web, Word for Mac doesn&#8217;t allow me to add alt text to images and so I  was unable to use these pages! I&#8217;ve uploaded a PDF example ( <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/files\/2010\/01\/tidezones.pdf\">tidezones<\/a> ) of one such page &#8211; my goal will be to learn to create this sort of page in a proper web design app. Each tide zone on the page is linked directly to some resource information, a website and\/or multimedia that tells a story about the zone (Of course, these links won&#8217;t work in PDF, but you get the idea&#8230; unfortunately, my html skills, while greatly improved over the past couple of months, still aren&#8217;t THERE!).<\/p>\n<p>I explored several programs and eventually landed on NVu and had some (limited) success. This program was quite intuitive and, with only a few missteps and some research and support from classmates on how to load images correctly, I was able to create a few decent pages. Now that I understand this program, I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll be able to transfer the knowledge to other design programs and can recreate my Moodle pages fairly quickly for upload to a &#8216;real&#8217; Conservation Education Resource Page. Definitely no time wasted here! A steep but valuable learning curve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Moodle Course, Conservation Education Resource Pages, can be found here. Overview: The course contains an overview page with information about the purpose and some background information about the program. My initial intention was to create a resource accessible to grade 2 thru 7, but this proved too difficult. I ended up with something I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1697,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1697"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dawydiaketec565a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}