For my site I decided to create a comprehensive 6 week course dealing with a unit of inquiry entitled ‘Sharing the Planet’ that I teach my Grade 5 class. As my flight path attested to, I wished to simply create an environment for my class that parents, students and teachers could go to learn more about Grade 5. This evolved somewhat, from a place merely to gain information, to an online course, where students could post their comments, reflections and answers to activities offered on the site.
I wanted to add as many opportunities for my students to interact with the content, and each other, as possible. As Anderson (2008) states, “modern constructivist and connectivist theorists stress the value of peer-to-peer interaction in investigating and developing multiple perspectives” (p. 57). Conceptually, perspectives play a huge role in my class, and especially in a unit such as ‘Sharing the Planet’ where there are many viewpoints available to learn from. I believe that by giving students the opportunity to share their knowledge, in an online forum no less, allows more perspectives to be shared.
Anderson(2008) also postulates that the net provides greater opportunities to delve deeper into knowledge resources, as there is such a great amount of data online. He also stresses the importance of providing the big picture, and to scaffold student’s knowledge construction. These points made me realize the importance of including a ‘Central idea’ and ‘Lines of Inquiry’ into the introductory pages of the site.
In terms of Moodle as a platform I am still not 100 percent sold. I became quite frustrated with its overall intuitiveness and performance, or lack thereof. I found myself having to redo much of what I initially created, as I would want to change the design and would need to delete entirely what I had and start anew. The ability to augment information within Moodle is quite difficult, and I would say that is its biggest drawback. As well, having to remember to save everything after editing had me redoing some of my work…urrghhh! Perhaps it is my own lack of experience using Moodle, but I can honestly say that the time it took me to create what I did would have taken much less time using Google, or WordPress.
Although these struggles existed, it forced me to really think about what I needed to offer my students, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of design. I am very aware that my course might not look as sharp as others, but I think it flows well and is easy enough to navigate. Speaking from a Grade 5 teacher’s point of view, I felt that was the biggest factor in creating the site. Making it organized, having links to the homepage on most pages, as well as adding video and pictures dominated my priority list when creating this site.
I hope you enjoy taking a tour through the first Module of Grade 5!
Reference
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved fromhttp://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf