Moodle: Why bother?

What features does a moodle provide that provide an advantage over online learning??

•Provides an incentive for tech savvy students

•These documents are available 24/7 to students with an Internet connection – this should free teachers up from reprinting lost handouts

•Great for constructivist teaching

•Great way to securely archive documents you will use/edit again

•Applications such as wikis, the journal, the database and the glossary are perfect for collaborative activities– Each student can be assigned data to contribute; moodle tracks who has posted what

•Unlike small group discussions, every part of student online discussions can be monitored

•Teachers can post days, weeks or months worth of work and release it at a pace convenient to the teacher – very helpful in allowing students to work ahead, providing enriched activities, etc.

•The bulk of the quizzes created in moodle can be marked instantaneously, providing feedback for the student and teacher

•(So far) the YRDSB version is running quicker than the pilot projects run on York U’s Abel Web

•Multiple choice work is automatically scrambled to discourage cheating

•Your students can real-time chat with students from across the board who are enrolled in the same moodle (e.g. reading response groups)

•Teachers from within a school or across the board can network resources

•Marking is made easy, using an interface that allows you to open a file, read it over, make revisions if you wish, send the revisions (optional) and add a grade and comment

•Moodle tracks to the minute when a student has viewed a document, how long they have spent in a forum, when they uploaded or posted an assignment, etc – great for student-led conferencing!

•If YRDSB goes ahead with its plan to make all video purchases streaming-video, a moodle will be a great interface for teachers to make videos available to students

This is 1 of 6 companion instructional videos to this workshop posted on my workshop moodle

Once the Podcast feature is running, you have many more options for exposing your students to different forms of media

The podcast example here is from CBC Radio’s Vinyl Café; although Vinyl Café makes for excellent modeling of narrative, this clip is not specifically endorsed by me for the classroom

Happy Moodling!