After reading through the Anderson Article, and this week’s online reading and assignment, I was excited to get back onto my Moodle site and start creating! I have to be careful or I will spend WAY too much time on this site 🙂

As I was considering the value of both synchronous and asynchronous communication in an online learning environment I realized that one of the things that I enjoyed most of my undergraduate program was the available office hours of my professors. I knew that if I ever had a problem, there were dedicated times when I could go over to their office and they would be available to talk with. Based on this idea I created what I refer to as “Virtual Office Hours” (VOH). I have dedicated several times a week where I will be “electronically present” for students to make contact. I have added my office phone, my email, and my Skype ID for students to be able to Contact me in ways that are most comfortable for them. I have also set up an ongoing chat activity that I will open during my VOH to allow students to pop on, ask a quick question, then head back out. These conversations will be kept for other students to review, and to check back on previous answers.

I also decided that to keep communication simple and cohesive I would concatenate all methods of communication within a single Unit at the top of the course. All discussions, chats, and questionnaires throughout the course will be stored in one location. As I work through modules I will simply link all discussions back to the communication section. I believe that this will make it easier for students to review discussion threads throughout the course, as well as make the navigation easier to find each activity as they arise in the course.

I am interested to know how other students have decided to set up their courses, but I know for myself, I am really enjoying this “Moodle” exercise and today put in a request to our IT manager to have a Moodle instance installed this summer so I can start working on moving some of our in-house online courses to a more robust solution 🙂

So, today I took the time to work through some of the E-learning Kit activities for Moodle. I created a welcome page as well as a discussion forum, and you know what? I’m impressed. I have heard a lot about Moodle in the past; the good, the bad, and the ugly. But today I discovered – it really isn’t all that bad. The first thing I did was create the Welcome page – simple, and straightforward. I did find that the instructions weren’t spot on, but I was able to work through the holes – perhaps the Wiki is just out of date… I think the next step is to make the page more “welcoming” rather than just having some text – I’ll play with the HTML and see if I can’t throw a simply repeating image in the background… something to break up the static grey. After the welcome I decided to make one more page – just to make sure that I had it down, so I created an “About me” page, and threw a picture in there. It would be nice if the editor allowed some manipulation of the image (float left etc) but i managed to make it look ok.

Following the page exercise I created the discussion forum. I found that the instructions in the Wiki were WAY off on this one, but I managed to make that one work as well. I went along with the icebreaker idea and invited students to answer 3 questions from a bank of a dozen or so “interesting” questions. A fun simple exercise to hopefully get students typing…

Again, over all a simple experience that took me around 30 min in total to complete. I know that as I work through this assignment i will need to be very cognizant of the time as I can get very caught in the minutia, and not finish the bigger picture as I get lost in the details!. But in the end I enjoyed the opportunity and am beginning to look at how I can start to introduce the Moodle environment into our district infrastructure… slow and steady wins the race. I will introduce it at a tech meeting I am running tomorrow with teachers from all the schools, and we will see where it goes.

until next time – happy Moodling! 🙂

You can find my Moodle proposal assignment here https://blogs.ubc.ca/mateohull/moodle-proposal/ – take a look at let me know what you think!

After some consideration I have decided to build a Moodle site around a Spanish 10 curriculum. Several years ago, after I had started my current job in the technology department, I was asked by the director of instruction to apply for a .25 Spanish teaching job as the full time teacher was going on sick leave and I was the only qualified person to take the class. So two days before the beginning of the 2nd semester I began to prepare to teach Spanish 10 (on the side of my current full time job). Walking into the job I took one look at the text book and decided that I wanted to create my own textbook, so in the evenings I began to develop my own textbook, complete with activities and worksheets. I have decided to move that textbook into the digital age and will be recreating each of the modules. I am looking forward to finding new ways to present the materials using different digital tools. I can see resources such as the soundboard being very useful in a language class – as means of presenting recorded sounds from the instructor and capturing student progress. I’m very excited! I’ll keep you in touch with how it goes 🙂

After working through this past weeks assignment of creating a rubric to select a LMS for Athabasca University, it got me thinking about the process our district is currently in to find a replacement Student Information System (SIS). For the past 2 years Districts in BC have known that the dreaded BCeSIS would be discontinued sometime in 2015/2016 – that time has now been set for the first part of 2016. You would have thought that district would begin to call in their stakeholders to look at options, and to discuss the selection and implementation of a new SIS… you would think… However, in my district that hasn’t been the case.

The replacement of BCeSIS has always been the white elephant in the room. Nobody wanted to talk about it because it was thought that the ministry would just provide a new one and life would be grand, but as time went on and the ministry’s path appeared to be “frightening” sour IT manager and I began to feel a little on edge. So we decided to attend a presentation put on by Pearson showcasing their product “PowerSchool”. These companies always put on a good show and I thought – “hey what a great product, we should look into that further”… nothing. We spoke often of the fact that BCeSIS was on the way out, and the impending changes, but no groups were called, nothing was discussed. A group from SD63, Saanich, decided that they were tired of the Off The Shelf products that were currently on the market, and decided to design “your last SIS” using opensource products. I attended a couple of their think tank meetings and reported back on the process… nothing. A few months ago the IT manager and I decided, on our own, to travel to Saanich and meet with the development team and discuss the product and talk about some of our concerns. We went, had some great Pizza, and were impressed. After returning home we mentioned we had gone and… nothing.  Shortly after that we attended another brainstorming meeting in Victoria and we were very engaged in the conversation, but we were not there on assignment, we went because we felt it is better be part of the conversation than not, we came home, the secretary treasurer asked what we thought, we told him, and he went away. The next week the OpenStudent group sent out a tweet with a link to a Times Colonist Article congratulating our district for Joining the OpenStudent project! We were… surprised to say the least. There was no planning, there were no discussions, or rubrics, there was just an announcement.

I hear about other districts and enterprises as they form committees and discuss their implementation plans, and think – “that would be nice”, to take a chance to form a consensus. To move TOGETHER as a cohesive group. I am considering taking the SECTIONS module to our Sr admin and asking if we could create a group to discuss the themes on an implementation view as opposed to a selection process, seeing that the product as already been found… it should be an interesting process…