For my Moodle course project, I chose to do a year long Current Events Unit that could match up with Social Studies curriculum from grades 7-9. My course can be found HERE.
For me, the whole process has been an incredible learning experience. Prior to this activity, I had heard of Moodle, but had not used it in any way. Since I am not a distance ed teacher, I was unsure at first how I would be able to incorporate this into my day-to-day teaching, and was contemplating creating a fake course just to meet the requirements. Once I started snooping around the Moodle site and saw the huge variety in the example provide there, I realized that Moodle was not just for distance education! There are so many ways that online learning can be added into the f2f classroom.
One of the things that I really valued when working with Moodle, was the large learning community; both within our 565 class, and outside of it. I found it quite easy to find the answers to most of the questions I had, and if I could not find the tutorial right within Moodle, there were many Youtube videos out there to help me along.
As John explained right at the beginning of the project, some parts of the assignment were easy and very straight forward, and others were a bit more challenging. What made it most challenging to me, was deciding which way to design some of the aspects of my course. For example, the selective release criteria would have been much easier to meet if I had set my course up to run in weekly chunks, but that did not work pedagogically with how I had set up the Current Events schedule. So that became a bit more of a challenge than I needed it to be. I can see the benefits of both the weekly format and the topic format, and in the future will tailor that feature to the content I am presenting.
Reflecting back on the experience, I think what I have taken away from it is the attitude to just get in there and try it! If you had asked me in the summer if I would ever play around with webpage design, I would have said nooooooo! But since I learned some basics through this course, I have set up a webpage linking to my name on the Staff List page of our school website for parents to follow. (The tech teacher in my building is so proud of me….and frankly, so am I!)