Teaching with Moodle

Art,

You beat me to the punch - honest.  I was about to post to the list (couldn't think of a suitable header )  as I am doing this with my A Level ICT students this year.  Hence, my intention is that instead of ONE teacher (me), they effectively have 13 (all of them plus me).  I'm hoping this will lead to other departments following my lead in due course.

Drew

PS Did you ever see my Oxford MOODLE MOOT presentation where you (and Jill Kaminsky) got a mention?

A simple idea for teaching students to use a Wiki in an introductory computer class:  Have them contribute to a Windows (or Mac or Linux) "Tips and Tweaks" (or some such name).  There could be a section for keyboard shortcuts, speed tweaks, virus info, sypware info, open source software ideas and links, etc.

I just had my first real wiki experience over this last month and it was very cool! I collaborated with a team of teachers and administrators to write a grant application using the wiki.

There were about 7 or 8 people involved in contributing ideas for the grant and we used Moodle discussion forums to first share ideas and then, as the actual grant writing began, we set up a wiki. The wiki had several pages with each page devoted to a separate section of the grant. We started by entering the content into the wiki and then other members of the team were able to go in and add to and edit the information. When we were ready to submit the grant, we were able to just copy and paste the text from the wiki.

Just 'done' our first wiki for Year 6 maths.
It went very well indeed. We've been doing some work on applications of maths to personal finance, (with spreadsheets for trial and improvement), so for the weekend HW, I asked them to find out and explain what a number of the technical terms meant, and post the results into a wiki I'd started.

Initially they were very worried about the possibility of vandalism, but the news that all changes were tracked and reversible reassured them. They got to it over the weekend, some obviously making more of a contribution than others, but the logs suggest that even those who joined in later looked through the majority of entries, with one pupil in particular choosing (without any prompting) to adopt the necessary house-keeping role and correcting everyone's spelling and punctuation. There was a strong sense of collaborative work that's largely been absent from the on-line quizzes.
Here's a post from the discussion forum:

I think the weekends work is a great idea!
We should do it more often!!

This wiki stuff is, IMHO, one of the clearest examples of the social constructivist philoshophy underpinning Moodle. We'll be doing more of these mini-wikis from now on, and I think we'll have a go at the course notes idea from next September.

BTW, has anyone else experienced problems with HTML-editing wiki pages in Firefox? The screen flikers, and whilst I can save an initial entry, when I come back later it ignores subsequent changes I make. The problem disappears in IE or if I change the option to safe HTML, and use good old webforms. Firefox HTML editing works OK elsewhere.