My objective this week was to create a “first draft” of an activity that I could use either a synchronous or asynchronous tool to support student interaction in your Moodle site.

A major reason for me taking the MET Program is that I want to be able to create meaningful and practical works that I will be able to incorporate into my daily teachings.  So, not unlike most I am sure, I have to decided to create a Moodle site for one of my courses – Engineering Technology 10.  I figure I will be able to transfer existing works as well as create new works for my class.  I think the site will allow me to build stronger teacher-student, student-student as well as teacher-parent relationships.

This first activity is one of my “new works” that I have created.  Working with Moodle has come with some mixed feelings so far.  At times I have been quite happy but sometimes I have had to log-off and walk away before my frustration level gets too high.  I experienced both emotions when creating this assignment.  The walking away feeling came when I couldn’t easily transfer what I had just created in a word document to my Moodle site.  I wasn’t interested in re-typing it word for word so there are a few minor formatting issues but in time I am sure I can work those out.  To compensate, I uploaded the activity in Word format so those using the Moodle site can see the Moodle activity (with its glitches) as well as the “original” document.  The goal, however, would be to eliminate the need for the paper copy but as the old saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

Description of the activity
Basically, I have created a Wiki Activity for the Bridge Unit of my Engineering class. In groups of two, students are to select both a term and a type of bridge and define/explain what they are (in context of Engineering).  The two parts of this activity have slightly different criteria which is laid out in the assignment.  After collaboration, each team is to post their solution to the wiki page of the class Moodle site.

Rationale for selecting this type of activity
I chose this activity for a couple of reasons.  First or all, I have found in the past (and present) that my students often have a poor grasp of terminology.  Many just want to “do” – they don’t want to “learn”.  I figure that if I can create a place (the wiki) where students can refer to it will increase their retention.  Also, by making them the “authors” of the definitions they will also be more likely to remember the terms and their meanings.  Secondly, I had them work in pairs because I believe this now becomes both  a synchronous and asynchronous tool.  The Synchronous communication will take place when the two partners work together (f2f) during class-time.  It becomes asynchronous communication when either they send each other emails and updates during non f2f time and/or when they finally submit their work to the wiki and other students read their postings.

How do I see students working within the tool I have set up?
Essentially I see this is one big collaborative class assignment where each group of two will be responsible for the learning that takes place in the class.  I can already envision a secondary assignment to this one where each student or group would then be responsible to posting their thoughts and comments to 2 -5 wiki entries (ie: what was good and what can be improved) in a discussion .  This way, students would get feedback from their peers and would be able to increase the accuracy of their submissions.

What tools are available to you to help you to track or record student activity within the LMS?
This part I am still working on.  Rather than asking for help I am trying to work through this.  I believe that I can go to the wiki page and look at the history to see when changes were made as well as who made them.  So if I wanted to do progress checks I could.

All-in-all this was a good activity for a newbie like me.  In the past I have always struggled with technology on the first attempt but I like to think that my learning curve is steep.  I hope this will be the case with Moodle!

~ Ryan

Posted: 03|7|10 at 9:00 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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