Ok. I have had an installation of Moodle installed for a long time, and I am starting to see how it can really benefit my kids. To be honest, it looks like a bit of a learning curve for me. I have used Blackboard for a number of years in my University of South Carolina days, but never really have had any experience with Moodle as a user. Listening to Steve Hargadon’s interview with Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas really has inspired me to take the bull by the horn and get to learning!
Truth is, with all I am doing now with my students, I am largely replicating my efforts and it has gotten a bit out of control. I probably have a dozen websites that I send my kids to so that they can do their work. Time to consilidate.
Here are the components I want to use with my kids, why I want to use it (so crucial to define), my current solution, and how I think moodle will handle it comparably, if not better.
To preface, I upgraded to the new 1.7 Beta to try out the new features. I like 1.6, and am looking forward to the new admin interface, especially. Seems like the old one was a big fragmented. The new interface looks wonderful!
Blogging – This is almost a no-brainer. Our kids need to be writing and publishing. I have covered this before in a roundabout way in dealing with new literacy and the like. Our kids need the experience of publishing content to the web and receiving feedback, both positive, negative, and spam. Truth is, Spam is an important feedback because in part, it separates the Internet from any other medium. You don’t see much spam in the traditional school assignment, unless you count anonymous vandalism, and even that is done by someone in a close proximity. So, I want my kids to be blogging. I am using Drupal right now with my kids and they seem to like it just fine. One check in the win column towards getting that passion up. One of the reasons I like Drupal so much is that every post by every kid aggregates down to one single feed. That way I subscribe to ONE feed and keep track of every post. What I don’t like is that this solution is fractured from my current setup and is fairly plain. Kids like to jazz things up. I also like that Moodle supports tagging, although I am not sure I think the kids would utilize this much. I may create some site-level tags for them to use to differentiate between their rambling blog postings and required ones.
Something I have noticed from reading the forums there is that there are no comments available for blog postings. I understand the reasoning, but I wonder if my kids won’t miss that a little. One of the things they most looked forward to was commenting on each others’ blogs. Now it’s worth notice that the comments were usually trite and didn’t have a whole lot of literary value, but I am working on improving their commenting skills. Maybe the new Moodle will integrate well with forums, to allow for easy discussion.
Wiki - I want to use a wiki for the obvious reasons of collaborative learning. I like the idea that more than one student can work on a single document. My standalone application for this has ranged from Wetpaint to Wikispaces to Jotspot to Mediawiki. See my Wiki posts for more details and applicable links. Moodle’s benefit here seems to be integration. I like that with one single login my kids will be able to access this all. I see that as the sole benefit here. I wonder if OpenAcademic will rival this integration. Oddly enough, I tried to get involved with OpenAcademic as a beta tester/amateur coder some time back. I sent two emails and got no response. There isn’t much news flowing from their feed, either. Not sure where the project stands.
Chat - Not sure if I like this idea too much. My school and district are a bit worried that kids will use anything technological to negative ends, such as cyberbullying or just inappropriate words/posts. I don’t really have a solution quite like this in place now, although my Spanish website (based on php nuke) does have a shout box on the bottom left which allows kids to leave sort of a digital grafitti. They do enjoy it.
Quizzes - My kids take ALL their quizzes and tests online. I do this partially to help me not have papers to grade (which lets me spend more time working on solutions to teach new literacy!) and also so that kids can practice for tests and potentially take them at home. Since I teach Spanish, there is a certain amount of vocabulary necessary for the content. Quizzes and tests are exactly that. Taking them online lets us get through it and onto more side trips much quicker than before. I use a piece of software called Nukequiz that integrates into my php nuke distro. It’s ok, but lacks a lot of the features I would like, such as a more random quiz mode and the like. It’s also buggy, to be expected, though. Not a lot of ‘nukers running class sites. It has served its purpose well, now it’s time to retire.
That is the fairly exhaustive list to begin with. I am sure that as my Moodle knowledge grows I will find new features and better ways to implement them.
What do you think? Am I on the right track? Should I invest this amount of time into learning Moodle?
It’s really the answer to all your problems once you learn how to use it. The quiz ability is absolutely mind-numbing in its configurability. All my classes for the last three years have been using Moodle. The forums are absolutely wonderful for online discussion. The fact that you can give each posting and comment a grade is fantastic for ensuring your students think about what they are posting. It’s also helpful that you can place students into groups which can then only see other group memebers in forums or chats. This is great for cooperative learning situations. The chats are also all logged and recorded for your perusal. Then the glossary integration is amazing as well. Students can enter vocabulary words as an assignment into a defined glossary and you can grade their entries. The words can be entered many different ways by the way. Then you can set up a classwide glossary to which you can “promote” the best student glossary entries. This master glossary then goes throrugh and hyperlinks every occurence of one of the terms within anything in the site back to its entry. In my class we call it the digital word wall. The kids love getting their entry bumped up to the class glossary to link throughout the site. Then there’s the wikis which can also be group controlled to be separate for each group of students. They only see their own group’s wikis unless you want them to be able to see the other groups too. I could go on and on about Moodle’s abilities, but you’ll figure out soon enough as you keep playing. The power is amazing.
I am basically doing the same thing with my wikispaces home page. I want to use moodle, however, I need something that kids can access from home and the library because we do summer work as well. I look forward to seeing how moodle works for you.