If you were going to develop a blended course around this little story, what elements would you include? Assume that you have 14-15 year old students and that you are a pretty big believer in Bloom's Taxonomy. (And that you just looooove Moodle, of course.)

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_in_Samarra#Explanation_of_the_novel.27s_title)

I think that I might start by asking students to read this information about the meaning of the word fate and then follow with a choice about whether or not fate really exists. I might ask the to read the Jack London story To Build a Fire and compare the importance of fate - or lack thereof - in both stories. (Maybe I would start with the Jack London story, actually.) And I might... Well, what would you do with this topic?

-- Art

1. Investigation: Students would investigate a concept.
2. generalization: Students would use and extend their findings to answer questions
3. application: Students would explain something or solve a problem using 1 and 2 or with further research

Hi Art,

Thought I would kick into the conversation from an Australian school perspective.  We have been using Moodle in a High School situation (12-18 year olds) for 2 years now and we recently had a brain storm on what Moodle features keep our classes interested to come back and consistently use the product.  Here is a list of 19 of the suggestions from our staff:

Even if you have some great resources on your class page, you are competing against all the other Web Based Activities that your students are doing at home (Facebook, Twitter, Games Sites, MySpace, etc.)

The trick is to encourage your students to want to visit your class Moodle site at least once or twice a week. Here are a few of our hints to encourage students to use your Moodle Class Page.

1. Use your class Moodle site to post all work that has a due date as either an offline or online assignment
2. Use the Calendar to post any class activity dates such as tests, excursions or special events
3. Introduce images to your page that break up the list of resources…100 X 100 pixel images are a good size for course page images
4. Avoid scrolling by putting like files into folder directories
5. Use PODCASTS and VOKIs for the Auditory learners
6. Use links to and embed videos or SlideShare Presentations for the visual learners... Embedding Youtube videos are still a problem because the students do not have access to YouTube at school. You can download the video as a FLV file (Use KISSYOUTUBE method as one possibility) and link to that file using a normal file link or using a label or website. Another way is to download the YouTube video to Teacher Tube and then you can embed the code
7. If you have existing Powerpoints to include on your page, have a look at this Makover for Powerpoint video. Probably best to save your powerpoints as .pps (Powerpoint Show) documents so that the students just view the show without having to have Powerpoint as the opening programme. If the Powerpoint has no animation in it, it may be smaller and easier to save it as a PDF file so the students just view the pages of information.  Try going to http://www.slideshare.net/ to look for educational slide shows that could be used in your course pages.
8. Include photographs of students and their work using the Lightbox Galleries (Learn how to bring in multiple files using a ZIP file so this task is quicker) Lightbox Gallery photos fill the screen at a size of about 500 X 500 pixels.
9. Add something to your class page at least once a week
10. Add a Random Glossary Entry Block if you have an extensive course glossary (Make sure you construct your glossary properly so it becomes interactive)
11. Add a Countdown Block to display a digital countdown to a big event
12. Think about interactive activities such as Quizzes, Forums, Wikis, Choices and Feedbacks to get your students interacting with the course material.
Think about making an assessment (Grades or Profile Attribute) to be involvement in Forums or Wikis
13. Find a relevant Learning Federation Learning Object to introduce a topic or for extension work
14. Create a Class Blog to let students know what happened in each class…this is great for evaluating the content and timing of your course and also great for students who miss classes.
15. Use the label resource and Moodle's indenting tool to change the long list of similar resource files
16. Read about some of these Moodle Course Makeovers in http://www.packtpub.com/article/moodle-makeover
17. Communicate with your students by using Moodle Messaging
18. Ask a course question using the Moodle Messaging Module and reward answers with Chocolate
19. Use Look2Learn activities as part of your course…use a provocative image and ask a “Big Question’