Background

My Moodle course is designed to support f2f learning in my grade one, French Immersion classroom.  It will be used to enhance French Language Arts lessons, reading and writing, through the use of a theme, SPACE.  My classroom has a SMART Board which I will use to project the course for all students to see and interact with.  My school has a mobile computer lab, which we have access to for one hour every six school days.  During our time with the mobile lab, I will have students work through the activities I have set up in my Moodle course in addition to the quiz, which will be a culminating activity.  Some students may be able to complete the quiz on their own, with others, we will work in small groups with the laptops or we will just use the SMART Board.  This quiz is a formative assessment and will not be used for summative assessment of my students, rather it will be used to consolidate our learning and to wrap up the theme.

Reflection

That being said, I have created a quiz that could be used for summative assessment.  I followed the expectations outlined in Module 3, Unit 3, and as such created a quiz with 3 multiple choice questions, 3 matching questions, 2 short answer questions and 2 short essay questions.  I was able to set up the auto assess/grading feature and timing for the whole quiz.  I set the timing at 60 minutes, which is probably too much time.  However, I imagined myself with 17 six year olds each with a laptop, trying to work through the quiz!  I am allowing myself time to circulate around the classroom and assist my students.

I was able to pre-program post-exam feedback for students and five of my questions have embedded images.  This is very important in grade one as reading skills are developing.  With this in mind, for any question containing a colour, I made sure the colour word appeared in that colour. Overall, I found creating the quiz to be relatively simple and intuitive.  It did take a fair bit of time to create (approximately 3 hours), however, I feel that this process would become faster with experience.  The choice of types of questions is fantastic, as the teacher is able to choose questions that will provide constructive feedback.  This is important to support student learning as Gibbs and Simpson (2005) state as Condition 5: “The feedback focuses on students’ performance, on their learning and on actions under the students’ control, rather than on the students themselves and on their characteristics” (p.18).  With this in mind, I was able to set up immediate feedback for each question.  I have also set up the quiz so that students may attempt it as many times as they wish without penalty.

A limitation of the quiz function in Moodle is that short answer and essay questions cannot be automatically graded.  Even when I took my own quiz, I was disappointed in my result!  In order to protect my students from misunderstanding their result, I would be sure to show and explain to them how their work is graded in order to “develop understanding through explanations”.  (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005)  If I were to develop a quiz again, I would probably limit the questions to the types that can be automatically assessed and provide other activities to assess other aspects of learning.

I believe a challenge of on-line assessment is accessibility.  For students who are not strong readers, or do not have strong computer skills, an on-line assessment would be difficult.  I question if this method is proper differentiation for all students.  For some, an on-line assessment may not be the medium for them to demonstrate their learning.  In my situation, I would have some students complete the assessment on their own, others in small groups with support, and still others with a different form of assessment all together. I was curious about embedding audio files into my quiz, and with a little searching around, I found this article:  http://docs.moodle.org/en/MP3_player#Inserting_sounds_into_questions.  So far, I have been able to use GarageBand to record myself reading out the first question in my quiz.  From there, I was able to upload the .mp3 file to my quiz and students can listen to the audio and then select their answer.  I have tested this out and it works!  This is inline with my Flight Path:

Goal #2:

Continue to implement the principles of Universal Design for Learning in my teaching and provide purposeful digital-age learning experiences to my students.

I will be continuing to add audio files to my quiz and am very excited at this prospect!

Conclusion

As I am using my Moodle course in a f2f environment, I believe that grade one students would enjoy working through my quiz.  In my teaching, I have observed how students enjoy working with computers and are very engaged while doing so.  Whenever possible, I would provide opportunities such as this in order to give students a break from pencil and paper tasks.  This is the balance I hope to achieve next year as I modify my grade one program to include the use of the SMART Board in my classroom.

Reference

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 15 June 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf