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.