Course Site

My Reflections on Moodle

I dare say that this component of the course was the biggest beast of them all; sometimes the ugliest as well. Perhaps challenge is a better word than beast… things weren’t that frightening (just daunting at times). To better organize my explanation, I’m going to split this reflection into paragraphs that deal with specific Moodle components.

The Splash Page and GUI
I was familiar with the idea of a splash, or graphic welcoming, page already. The design of a graphic user interface was not unfamiliar as well. Having been the creator and maintainer of a couple of school websites, I have some previous experience with image editing and linking. For my introductory page, I chose to do a few things. I took a picture that displays all of the course materials, then framed and labeled it using Picnik.com. My icons were a little more challenging. I had to find a free-to-use set that I liked, download and unzip them, and pick ones that I thought best suited the links I was going to use. Once I had them on, the eventual way of lining them up that worked best was putting them into a table with their descriptive label; that way everything always stayed centred, no matter what the screen width would be. As part of my introduction, I also included the Prezi I created in the course. It serves as a way for students to get to know me, as well as an example of their first activity of the course.

The Discussion Forums
I am a long-time user of Internet forums and message boards, so I expected these to be easy and familiar. While they weren’t that hard to do, they also weren’t that familiar. The look of them, as with other things in Moodle is just enough to throw me off and make me feel like I’m in unfamiliar territory sometimes. I followed the instructions in the initial Moodle set-up activity, and it was simple enough to do. When I came back to my course site to make more, related to lessons, and to split one into two groups, it was a little more difficult. In general, I just had doubt about certain things and wanted to know how it would look when used and if I was doing things correctly. I don’t like that unknowing (a reminder/lesson for me in how students can feel, for sure). In the end, I read some manual literature on it and viewed some videos on YouTube to help myself out. I thought I had done the splitting / creation of forum groups correctly, and when one student in the class later said it looked OK, I was relieved. In general, I used forums in my class modules in a few ways: to share and comment on original work and to share /discuss answers to questions / prompts based on texts we viewed. It was no problem coming up with enough ideas to use forums, or how I could split one up.

The Modules
In a technological skill-sense, these weren’t that difficult to learn how to set up. Some new things were learned along the way, like how to embed video, and how to move resources/activities up or down in a list within a module. What I found to be the biggest time-eating challenge of this whole activity was just the making of worthwhile, quality activities on the Moodle course site. I piloted the program you see in the site just last year, so I was familiar with all of the pieces of text. Doing things in an online way forced me to (already) re-plan and re-think what I could or should do with the lessons. Having all of a lesson in front of me… all activities, assessments, etc. was helpful in planning good, cohesive units. At the same time, though, it took a lot of time. I found myself changing activities and resources, writing and scratching things out on paper, planning and re-planning. I had to think in two places – the classroom and online. How would I balance the two? I eventually decided that the best (ie most useful to me and my class) method was to split things. I reserved some activities (unmentioned for the most part in Moodle) for class, and saved all reading for the classroom (although it could be done on one’s own). This site became a place for myself and my students to share, interact, and augment what we already got it class. I found new resources and tried new-to-my-class things like VoiceThread. I think they’ll really enjoy that activity. As with the forums, I wasn’t sure initially on how to do one main skill… selective release of modules or certain items. Eventually, I (and the MET class) discovered it was just to hide them from students with the “eye” icon. I was thinking there would be some kind of field where you could select a date for things to magically appear. I didn’t put a date on my modules, in terms of when things would start / be done by, because I have no idea of how it will work out yet; I’m sure it will take longer than I think it will, though. Just like this project!

Final Thoughts
Overall, I did get a fair bit of new knowledge out of this project. I grew with my curriculum, and know it even better than I previously did. I had zero Moodle experience a few months ago, and now (while I’m no pro), I’m confident enough to work with it if I ever can in my school or in future courses. I got more practice in using things like wikis. I decided that they were the tool to go with in a couple of cases in my modules; when students just need to get one task done together rather than to discuss different views or ideas based on one or two things (in a forum). The process was definitely an education in planning as well. I was forced to use what I tell my students, and to plan it on paper first. Plus, how long I thought it would take to do in my head was much shorter than what it actually took to do. There were so many unplanned edits and things like aligning items in a table, graphic editing, finding background music for my VoiceThread introduction, etc. It was a very “full” exercise, but rewarding nonetheless. I definitely grew in my skills and knowledge.

Click here or on the Moodle image above to get to my course site.