Communication in Moodle
Develop an Activity and Provide a Rationale
My Moodle site will be used for the purpose of blended instruction. I have chosen a unit in the Physics 11 curriculum call Special Relativity. This topic has many weird and wonderful anomalies that are very tough for the human mind to wrap itself around. It is because this topic lends itself to more discussion than the other Physics 11 units that I have chosen it. The forums I have put in my Moodle site are asynchronous in nature. I want my students to be able to really think about their posts and they can do them at any time in the day or night. However, I will release my modules one at a time to prevent anyone from working too far ahead. This will better allow the class to create a healthy online community. We will continue to discuss topics in a f2f setting during class.
I have chosen the “Standard” forum for my announcements so that everyone can view all of it at any time. I will use the forum to give instruction and feedback as is necessary. My icebreaker forum is “A single simple discussion,” which will allow students to post once. This means they will have to carefully think of their response. It will be our first chance at building our online community and will happen at the end of the Physics 11 course, so we will all know each other. In addition, I have made a Q&A forum to discuss the effects of time dilation. Students will only be able to view other posts after they have done theirs. This will prevent copying and promote quality. Finally, I have created a class wiki called “Key Terms” where each student will be required to put up one term and then define it.
To assess these posts, I plan on giving a mark of one if a satisfactory post has been given. In this way, the grade book will allow me to see who is posting and I will be able to tally the amount of participation. There will be a maximum number of marks for each forum. This approach is simple and will be easy for me to get results.
I’m not sure if I will use a synchronous chat session, but I feel as though I would love to try it. I wonder if allowing a chat session during class in a computer lab will work. The students would be in the same room so I suspect that they wouldn’t take the chat very seriously.