MET Blog of Louise Thomson

As I have already said I am not a real user of quizzes.  I am more of a show me what you know kind of teacher.  As I teach in a F2F situation I am not sure about the benefits of setting up detailed questions in Moodle for subjects such as socials, language arts or science.  I have put the whole quiz together to satisfy the course requirement but I am still not sure how using an LMS platform is beneficial for short answer and essay questions.  It seems that the short answers for these types of questions need to exactly match what I have plugged into the course in order for the student to get credit.  Otherwise I need to manually override the grade.  Perhaps I am still not understanding this type of question.

The essay questions are still manually marked by the teacher so I can see no benefit there.  I am no Moodle expert though so, again, perhaps I am missing something. 

Overall, I can see the benefit for other, less subjective, types of questions and would definitely continue to explore their use in my F2F classes.  The process was fairly straight-forward, albeit time-consuming, and the finished look is very attractive and simple to administer.

I have spent the better part of today learning about Moodle.  I have chosen to try and develop an online version of a Cariboo Gold Rush unit that I do with my grade 5s.  I am struggling with the mechanics of Moodle and am still not sure where to post certain types of information.  Text page?  Web page?…

So much to learn!

I am also struggling a bit with how to utilize some of the great assessment tools that I have developed in an attempt to give students a wide variety of ways for them to show what they know.  I am not a teacher who uses quizzes.  I am much more likely to have my kids develop a poster, create a skit or write a letter in-role to demonstrate that they understand the challenges of the people that we study in socials.  How to deliver this kind of assessment within a course shell format I don’t know.  This will obviously require some further research.

The unit that I am creating in my Moodle course site is one that will focus on perspective.  Students will examine the gold rush in the Cariboo from the perspective of different groups who were present and will not just look at life as it pertained to the miners.  I chose to have the students work in a forum that would utilize a jigsaw strategy wherein each pair of students would learn about their person and then teach the other groups about that person by introducing themselves in-role. 

I wanted make sure that the other students read and thought about the experiences of these major gold rush characters so I have required them to respond to each of the other group’s characters in-role as well.  I have provided some suggestions for how they might go about this but think that this format will provide a lot of opportunity for students to display some critical thinking skills.

I also fully intend to create my own character, fictional or otherwise, and participate in the forum myself.  This will allow me to ask students questions and try to challenge their knowledge of the time period.  The asynchronous aspect of the forum environment will allow students the time to go and research the answer to any questions they may be given.

From the teaching perspective I feel that using a forum will allow me to easily track participation as each group will have its own thread.  Groups failing to participate will be obvious. 

In addition to this I would also like to have the students create blogs in their own voice as another way to demonstrate their learning.  I have been unable to figure out how to set up a blog in Moodle yet so I will continue on with my quest!

***An update to this post…For now, I have given up on the blog as discussion with fellow classmates and my online research shows that an internal blog format is something that Moodle is still working on.  My school district is quite restrictive about allowing the students to access blogging sites so I have chosen to insert a chat into the course shell instead. 

As part of the Gold Rush unit my students will be reading the novel Cariboo Runaway.  The chat format will be one that I think the students will find engaging as it is something they have not experienced in the classroom.  It will be conducted during class time in the lab and will test the students understanding of the novel as well as their ability to respond to higher-order thinking questions that relate the fictional characters to real characters from the Gold Rush that they have studied. 

The chat function may be limited by the fact that students who have a better understanding of the novel may monopolize the discussion so accountability will have to be built in by requiring a number of contributions from all students.  Another limiting factor may be the typing issue but they have spent enough time on All The Right Type haven’t they?

It used to be on flights that you got a bag of honey-roasted peanuts but the poor peanut has gone the way of the Dodo these days.  So too, do technologies and applications come and go.  This week we have to decide between Moodle and WebCT/Vista.  An interesting set of choices when you don’t really know anything about managing either of them. 

I had a discussion with a team member who said that he didn’t want to focus on the cost aspect of LMSs as they tended to cloud the other issues.  My concern though is that we, as educators, must be grounded in reality.  Unfortunately, in days of dwindling budgets cost may just be the biggest deciding factor for many decisions…including the choice of a learning management system for a school.

My decision to choose Moodle for my LMS was simple.  It was free.  My school district is out of cash and the reality is that if Iwent to them and said that I wanted to spend money on another platform the answer would not be positive.  I have used Moodle before as a student and am somewhat comfortable with how it functions. 

Setting up my own Moodle course has been interesting.  I have found the toolkit instructions to be very user-friendly and Moodle itself to be fairly intuitive.  I have had some trouble getting the discussion to show up as “graded” but will hopefully sort this out. 

At this point I am not sure what I am going to design this course for because I am an elementary teacher without my classroom so don’t really have a target to shoot for.  This still needs to be worked out.