Katie Hay and the Adventures of ETEC 565

Using the wiki was straight forward, largely due to a project I did in another MET course.  I found trying to communicate on the Discussion page cumbersome because of the lack of time/date stamp and lack of structure.  Perhaps there is an etiquette of how to properly carry on a conversation on a wiki page?  The threaded aspect of LMS discussions is much easier to traverse 🙂

I can see classroom groups using a wiki to produce a collaborative project, such as an end-of-year review, where each group is assigned one page of the wiki.  In a high school atmosphere, I’m not confident that much collaborating would occur on the Discussion page.

Cheers, Katie.

Is it a labour intensive process?

Somewhat.  It’s like learning any new piece of software – it was time-consuming at the beginning while I figured out where the options were.  Lots of playing around – saving changes to see how an option looks and then changing back, etc.  For example, once I had invested time learning about the different types of forums, subsequent forums were straight forward to set up.

What worked well?

Creating a simple Welcome (web) page was an easy experience (great directions in the toolkit!).  Changing the site’s appearance and switching between topic and weekly views went smoothly as well – just time consuming learning where everything is!

What was challenging?

So I have my Icebreaker discussion forum all set up but … when the site won’t allow me to save any changes I make to “aggregate type” under Grades.  Hmm, I’ve searched the moodle.org type and I see that others have asked the same question but there haven’t been any responses yet.  So I haven’t been able to change the grade to “5” yet and make my response.

What surprised you?

I like how easy it is to switch between the student, teacher, and editing views as I make changes so I can see how it will look from a student’s point-of-view.