NECC - Making Moodle Work For You

This session discussed the use of Moodle as a course management system, primarily in the context of supplementing a traditional face-to-face classroom (although they did discuss how you could use it to completely conduct a course online). I didn't learn a whole lot that I wasn't aware of before, but it just reinforced that I want the opportunity to pilot Moodle in our district. I'm going to meet with our new district CIO to see if we can work something out.

Teaching with Moodle - resources from Moodle.org
Faculty Room - teachers discussing how to use Moodle

Quote 1: The traditional newspaper idea of keeping important items "above the fold" translates into "above the scroll" in an online environment.

Try to keep anything important on any given screen at the "top" so that they don't have to scroll down to find anything.

Quote 2: The most important thing is to post robust questions.

I think this is so important in so many ways. Both in terms of a Moodle or blogging environment, but also just in terms of the questions we are asking in class. As I've said before (and stolen from somewhere), if the only questions students are answering in our classes are our questions (and they are just factual questions), then we're really wasting everyone's time. They should be answering their own questions, and they should be "robust" questions that don't have easy answers - the easy answers are very easy to find, so why are we spending so much time on them?

Tags:

• necc06
• moodle
• cms