My Reflections
LMS-Moodle Reflection:
How labour intensive was the process? What worked well? What was challenging?What surprised you?
Having never used Moodle before I found navigating the interface to be fairly straightforward. Pointing and clicking buttons and links on Moodle was reminiscent of traveling through web pages. So my first foray into Moodle was uneventful and intuitive. I found that this LMS was easy to alter and modify. One press of the mouse button to activate a command, and then it was easy to turn on a ‘text page for example.
What I found most challenging about working through Moodle was that I was having difficulty with adding an image to my splash page. As of this entry I have followed the instructions and still cannot add any graphical image to my opening splash page. I’ll keep working on this however. After two days of playing with this feature, success! It would seem that I forgot a key word and parenthesis within my html code. I can see my image at last on my ‘splash page’.
I would say that what surprised me the most with the Moodle platform was the relative ease and speed at which I could begin to develop my online presence. Within two minutes, my basic online course was created. As I become more comfortable with Moodle, the level of my expertise will increase, and I will become more adept at building a course that will meaningfully improve student learning.
DVD Reflection:
How labour intensive was the process? What worked well? What was challenging? What surprised you?
I have used DVD authoring applications in the past, from imovie to movie maker, to several shareware titles find that the technical aspect of the software is fairly straight forward to comprehend. A little time spent playing with the software will cure most problems associated with successfully using it. I make quite a few movie using imovie every year at school, where I then use iDVD to burn and add some ‘flashy’ effects to make the video as appealing as the software will permit.
One thing that I do not like is how iDVD will open up the last movie file that was used, instead of offering me the choice to begin to create another project for a burn session. This is obviously not that important, just a slight irritant to me. It slows things down, when I am looking to burn different movies, one after another.
I guess the only thing at this time that is surprising me is that I seem to be a little impatient when waiting for a burn session to complete. Even though I have a very fast Macbook, I still find the entire burn process far too time consuming. I always wanted the burn time for a DVD to be as fast as it once was to copy a file to the old 3.5 inch disks.
Reflection about My Experience Building my Quiz on my LMS
My LMS course is based on having teachers improve their numeracy programs by using SMART board technology (a pro-d like course if you will). Since I do not personally possess a Smart board, nor does the school that I am presently employed at own one, I have developed a quiz that is based on how teachers would possibly present quizzes to students using the Moodle platform. I am using some grade 6-7 numeracy outcomes found in the Integrated Resource Package for the BC school system provincial curriculum.
I really enjoyed building my quiz using the Moodle platform. I found the quiz user interface to be intuitive and easy to navigate. When I activated a function that I didn’t intend to, I was able to easily retrace my steps and correct myself. I enjoyed testing the features within the ‘update this quiz’ preference tab. I found myself thinking about improving student learning as I toggled between quiz time limit, questions per page and the number of attempts students will have to master the quiz content. Specifically, I thought about my students this year, and how their various learning styles would be impacted as I fiddled with how many minutes to make the quiz. I setup the quiz so students could have up to 4 attempts to master the content, while each subsequent attempt would build upon their previous performance. My thinking was, as Gagne (1977) states, helping students monitor their progress would undoubtedly help them understand the content in a more meaningful way. If my students can see their previously correct answers as they re-take the test, then their confidence and motivation to pursue a better score will be amplified.
I definitely thought that applying penalties for incorrect answers would be detrimental to student self-confidence. As Wootton (2002) reported, the negative impact of assessment is very damaging to student self-worth. Frankly, I just do not see how penalizing elementary aged students for incorrect answers could benefit their overall learning conditions. I paid special attention to all the areas within Moodle that I could apply feedback for students. I found myself thinking about how I develop my rubrics for my classroom activities, and this helped me consider my terminology when adding feedback. For example, I very much liked how multiple-choice questions permitted individual feedback per question/answer, and then a general feedback box was also available. As I prepared these questions my thoughts were how to cue and support students as they interacted with the quiz. The general feedback area behaved like extra instructions that I would place on a traditional paper and pen test.
I didn’t like the fact that the system would prevent you from observing the question bank, after a student had been made their first attempt at answering the questions. As I was preparing the quiz, I was testing each question as I completed it. I really needed to know that each question worked as I proceed along my creative endeavor, as opposed to testing the final product after having built all my questions. To me, it’s like formative vs. summative assessment. My incremental assessment of my own questions helped me with the overall building of the quiz.
After I took the entire test for myself, I realized that I needed to manually grade the two essay type questions. I would have liked the system to alert me that this would be required, as I was initially amused at my mediocre score. I quickly realized that I would have to grade these essays, and the system dynamically updated the final score after taking into account the additional numerical grades that I gave myself. I rather enjoyed grading part of the quiz, while the LMS auto-assessed the remaining answers. I noticed that if this quiz were constructed with pen and paper, it would have taken me longer to evaluate and provide feedback for students, as compared to having the quiz partly auto-assessed by the LMS. Ultimately, feedback not received in a timely manner will have little impact on student learning, because students will have moved on to new content when the feedback eventually reaches them (Gibbs and Simpson 2005).
References
Gagne, R.M. (1977) The Conditions of Learning, 3rd ed, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
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
Wootton, S. (2002) Encouraging learning or measuring failure? Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 353-357.
Wiki Reflection:
After you have completed the wiki activity, take a few minutes to consider how the group collaboration and discussion within the wiki space differed from what you are accustomed to in a standard threaded discussion space (like the one we’ve been using throughout the course in WebCT Vista). What kinds of advantages do you see in using wikis for group collaboration? What are some of the challenges of working with others in a collaborative wiki space?
As this is my 5th MET course I have become very accustomed to reading peer entries, replies to those posts, and replies to those replies. This threaded forum sometimes feels like my peer group is in the same room with me, and we are having a face to face discussion. Metacognitively, it would appear that I have assigned a voice to each of my classmates, which I activate within my brain depending which peer’s discussion posts I am reading. This is analogous to visualizing imagery in your mind as you read through a novel, for example.
I found myself wanting to have more discussion on the WIKI page by all the members who contributed to it. I have been used to reading forum entries, and then a massive amount of peer discussion afterward. But, with the WIKI, there was scant discussion attached to most ‘peer sightings’, and that made my knowledge building exercise for this activity limited. It was as if I was experiencing some form of writer’s withdrawal symptoms. Odd, as this may sound.
Having used a WIKI during the ‘rubric’ building activity at the beginning of this course, I feel that this medium has the potential to promote student/peer creativity. There is something motivating in seeing a blank canvass that one can begin to populate with his/her ideas. From here, others can add to the mix, and then through mutual negotiation, the group can distil the more optimal ideas, synthesizing a product that has contributions from all members.
Of course, I would surmise that the negotiation process of collaborating on what are the most beneficial ideas for any wiki assignment, can at times be difficult for some in the group. Members of any WIKI project must spend meaningful time providing feedback to the other WIKI peers. Offering positive suggestions to move the project forward is paramount, if all members are to feel that their contributions have been crucial to the project’s success.
Synchronous Communication Tools Reflection
Write an entry for your course weblog about your experience here (on your “Home” page and posting a new entry). How labour intensive was the process? What worked well? What was challenging? What surprised you?
I found setting up the chat feature on my Moodle course to be straight forward and intuitive. Creating the Wimba space was a little harder to do, initially. I was unable to integrate the Wimba classroom within my course, so I ended up providing an external link to the main Wimba home page. After this, the link worked, and students could click onto the Wimba URL and be taken to an external site where they could then enter the virtual classroom. I wasn’t able to test these communication tools because I didn’t have any other students/peers logged into my course. I followed all the instructions while making these tools, so they generally appeared to be working to the best of my knowledge.
The most challenging aspect of creating these synchronous communication tools was thinking about how I was going to utilize them in the most efficient and motivating manner for students. I have come to know that most students are engaged in some form of daily synchronous chatter upon returning home from school. So my task is to make this form of communication relevant to them in a knowledge building sort of way. I want to be sure that students do not see this form of communication as a casual means of just having social banter with their peers.
The most challenging aspect of creating these synchronous communication tools was thinking about how I was going to utilize them in the most efficient and motivating manner for students. I have come to know that most students are engaged in some form of daily synchronous chatter upon returning home from school. So my task is to make this form of communication relevant to them in a knowledge building sort of way. I want to be sure that students do not see this form of communication as a casual means of just having social banter with their peers.