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.

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.