12
Day 2 of the TIGS Moodle for Teachers PD workshop - 12th August 2009
This morning began with a roll up of enthusiastic teachers chatting about the things we had discovered about Moodle yesterday, and the many possibilities for setting up our own class pages.
Formal discussion expanded some issues that arose from the SWOT session at the close of Day 1. Several teachers expressed concern that multiple teachers would be sharing the one subject (course) page and how the contents and activities might be supervised or controlled by Head teachers and Co-ordinators. It was mostly acknowledged that 21st century learning for both students and their teachers is collaborative and that the term SHARING underpins the pedagogy. The strengths of sharing and collaboratively developing a dynamic learning environment were documented in the Day 1 evaluation session and these far outweigh the weaknesses of the transparent ‘open’ page format of Narradan/Moodle. This concern however, was recorded as a threat to other structures within the school, in particular the PYP program. It was noted however, that Edumate itself, is not setup to recognise the different dynamics of the PYP program, consequently work needs to be undetaken to resolve these issues for the Junior school.
Today we learnt about and used the collaborative tools available in Narradan (our Moodle site): chat rooms, assignment, forums, quizzes, wikis etc. Many of these are fantastic and have tremendous potential for develping rich tasks and interesting ICT activities for students
However, the most challenging feature is Quizzes or tests. These require considerable effort to set up, although all questions are filed in a question bank and can be reused in other tests. This is the most clumsy feature of Moodle and does not seem the best way to create tests.
Julian told us how to create a test in Hot Potatoes - available in the Start > All Programs folder we all have on our school intranet and save it, then use the Moodle Quizzes Import tab to import as a Moodle Quiz. I think I prefer the sound of this method!
Another shortcut: I went online and googled ‘moodle quiz questions’ and found many sites with preset question and answer formats that I imported into Moodle. I was then able to edit the key words and save! I think I saved at least 2 hours in the process!
We quickly ran out of time today - so much to cover and by the end of the day we were quite numb with information! All teachers attending were positive about the training and left with valuable info and ideas to get started on their own class pages. Julian Ridden was a great presenter and trainer who pushed us through an enormous amount of content with good humour and an engaging presentation format.
Watch my next posts where I’ll publish some formal evaluation feedback.
