WOW! Hannah, even though you kind of misplaced your comment in the moodle.org WORLD forum
- I think it IS the right place to reach teachers all over the world and make them consider who they are making the moodle classroms for and what the purpose of such an online classroom should be.
- Too often it is still used as a - what I call it: data dump - and teachers just upload their existing worksheets or whatever they already have to provide the stuff to students. This does not change anything for the students- one advantage just being to reduce the carbon footprint.
- If we want to engage students in learning we will have to make their virtal classroom a place where they love to be and where they can discover interesting stuff and activities.
- Moodle gives the teacher the chance to get the world into the classroom and to engage learners to take responsibility for their own learning and working together in teams. Still, the learning environment which is still kind of formal learning environment has to compete with the informal learning of our students in other places like social websites etc.
- We need to give them learning opportunities and giving them a voice when it comes to choose topics and ways they want to learn- the curriculum leaves quite some freedom to teachers!
- Why should we not play around with the design of a courseroom if the students don't like it- it is just a mouseclick away to "paint the walls in a different colour and to put pictures on the walls"
- If students are given a voice they will easily accept their courseroom as their "home"
- As for the lack of notifications Hannah, you will need to adapt your eMail settings so that you will get an automated notification whenever there is a new post.
- As for your teacher: I think you can't always blame the teacher- if he/she never got a good training on how to use moodle in a creative way it is already a good thing that he/she has the coureage to set up a moodle classroom. And as you can see from the reaction here in the international forum, there are quite a number of helpful people all over the world- this is also what makes Moodle a great place!
So, you hopefully triggered a development and a discussion in your school, Hannah.
If you'd like to get in contact with my students of English in Germany, just drop me a word.
Kind regards
Sigi
