For this assignment, one challenge was that I wanted to do work that could be reused, and to meet the assignment criteria at the same time. I was hoping to get further along with the actual content, but timelines for getting information from the subject experts did not work well with the assignment timelines. So in the end I made up some of the information which will go into the units, based on the topics alone.

Moodle, was a challenge, but a good challenge. I am familiar with Blackboard, so it was refreshing for me to learn and use a different LMS. There are definitely some things I like about it. For example, most Blackboard course home pages are set up as  with the “notifications” page as the home page or a content page with folders for the units or weeks. I personally don’t like using the notifications page as the home page, as it doesn’t give much information immediately. Students need to click again to read an announcement or message, and they have to locate the content from the navigation. Moodle seems to be able to present the content on the home page much better than Blackboard. There are more  options about where to place the navigation menu and other “blocks” of information on the home page.

Another feature I liked about Moodle, is the Glossary tool. It has more options than Blackboard’s version. I liked that users, even, students are able to add in definitions. The defined words are automatically highlighted in the other content areas, so student are able to refer to the terms from in the content. Except Moodle is not able to recognized the defined terms in the externally created HTML pages- like Blackboard can.

My goal for the content module ( and the course) was for the learning to be based on constructivist principles. I found that Moodle offered many ways to apply those principles in a practical way. For example, I toyed with the idea of giving a separate participation grade for student’s input into the glossary. In this case I ended up making glossary contributions as optional, but factoring into the general participation grade.  However, I can see the potential to use that tool as another way for students to share knowledge.

Another way Moodle facilitated constructivist learning was with the ability to embed  a twitter feed. This worked well with my subject, and learning objectives. One thing the students should from this course is the knowledge of resources and information, and gain access and make connections with the FASD community. One way to do that is to keep up-to-date with the most current news and public discourses. The Twitter feed worked well for this.

As far as the digital story, I think my selection was the right tool for how I want to present the information and digital story. From a pedagogical perspective, it was important to emphasize the assessment steps within the whole diagnostic process.

Initially, I had thought of using a video animation program, like VideoScribe or PowToons. I decided against it, mainly because of the student demographic. The students in the course have range of prior knowledge from basic to quite specialized. I did not want the digital story to be one that forced students to either sit through something they already knew well, or on the other hand, try to take in new information which may be presented to quickly.

I thought of using an interactive time. I played around with several online timeline programs. I was either restricted by the type of media I could include or, the date display features. I still think a timeline type of presentation would have worked well.

In the end I decided to use an infographic I created and make it into an interactive graphic, using ThingLink. The use of the infographic emphasized the steps as part of whole process visually. The interactive media added to the Digital Story, in a way which, again, worked pedagogically and addressed the fact that the student’s prior knowledge is highly varied. Thinglink works well to show the media links, in relation to the visual content, but I am able to provide information about the attached media. This gives the students to either explore the information in more depth, or not, depending on prior knowledge.

An of course the Thinglink digital story could be embedded into Moodle using several methods. I tested it as a pop-up window, and in an HTML page.  I wanted the content to “flow” in Moodle as consistently as possible, so I decided against the pop-up window. I did not want to confuse students with it displaying differently than the other text. For consistency, I linked it so it opened up in Moodle in the same manner as the other files.

I showed the subject matter expert the digital story, and we will be using it in the actual course, near the end of the module as a way for students to review  the  content.