General help

Hi Doug,

Firstly, loved the design on your site - very inviting for students IMHO. Now, in my experience I tend to use files rather than pages for a number of reasons:

a) in my experience, web pages built in Moodle can be clunky and not always the easiest to edit (of course if I could code native html it would help!!).

b) when you delete a link for a file, the file remains but I've found that the webpages made in Moodle are deleted.

So, I tend to use files (Word, Excel etc as well as Dreamweaver). You control the design and small slips don't result in the loss of your work.

Hope that helps.

Paul

Hi Doug,

Like Paul, I really like the design of your site too. I probably would like it even more if I taught physics  because then I would have someone to collaborate with, possibly.

I teach computer applications to seventh and eighth graders and I mostly tend to use a combination of five things: quizzes, forums, wikis, lessons, and multiple upload assignments.

• I have multiple question banks about the different software programs I teach so I can whip up a test very rapidly. I use a combination of pre and post tests as well as a daily, ten question, random quiz about the current subject.
• I use the forums when I want students to provide narrative input such as essays. When they are forums for student grades, I do the grading. When they are forums for developing stories for the school newspaper, I let the students rate each other's writing and make recommendations for story changes.
• I use wikis extensively: 372 of them the last time I looked. I use these for all my step-by-step directions that teach students how to use the various applications programs that I teach. It makes it very easy for them to work at their own pace. I especially like using wikis because it is so easy to rapidly change/edit a page and does not require any other software or uploading like you need for making webpages. It's also very easy to make them look very similar to regular webpages. For instance I just tried, and it only took a few minutes to reproduce one of your pages that has a picture of a cheetah and Galileo on it.
• I use lessons in two ways: (1) for lessons that require the students to read and comprehend, a self-paced lesson can be set up with questions that will check their comprehension, and loop them back through sections they don't understand the first time through, (2) lessons can also be set up as random quizzes (timed/or not) using multiple choice questions from my question bank. We use these for practice for quizzes and as an aid in retaining essential information about course material.
• The multiple upload assignments are used to provide links to the wiki directions and also provides a place for the student to upload the files that he/she creates for turn in for grading.

To me, the biggest advantage of using these built-in Moodle modules, is I can work from any computer, any where, that has Internet access without having to worry about that computer having a webpage editor/publisher or any other office type application such as a word processor, etc.

Now, if they just get Moodle 2.0 so fixed so that it will automatically update all my wikis. Right now – it's still a no go. Looks like I'll still be using Moodle 1.9.10 for a while.

My go-to resource is the forum.

No doubt about it.

- Art

Hi Doug,

I have actually created most of my stuff directly in Moodle using pages or better yet the wonderful Book module which is a multi-page tool with a table of contents etc.. I don't have problems losing pages as I either just hide them or move them to another section that isn't visible to students. As far as other resources and activities I use the Database activity a lot, the Glossary activity a lot and as already pointed out the Forum activity as well.

A while back I helped a science teacher use Moodle in kind of a neat way. He always has his students do papers on the organs of the human body. Of course the students always want to report on the same three or four organs. Problem solved with the Choice activity where each organ was listed as a choice and set so that only one person could select a given organ. Students were told it was a first come, first served event and there was a scramble to see who could get the organ that they wanted. Once the organs were selected using the Choice activity the papers were written using the Glossary activity. Papers were to include images, video and such to make it a really nice multimedia presentation. After the papers were completed another Glossary was put into play that asked students to use the Moodle GIFT question import format to create three questions from their presentation to be included on the unit exam on the organs of the body. The Glossary was set to be approved before anybody could see the questions so that students didn't see the questions. The teacher exported the glossary, cleaned it up in OpenOffice and then imported the file as a Quiz bank. He then gave the test using questions that students created and the study materials were the papers that students had created in the other Glossary.

Another great science idea is using the Database activity to create a big notebook for collecting data from experiments. This allows for all the data collected to be aggregated in the same place. After the lab is done students can download the spreadsheet and do analysis. Works really well.

Hope this helps.

Since I teach 3rd and 4th graders, I use a lot of Assignments, online text with multiple submissions enabled, and Databases.

I've found that the database provides much of the same functionality as the forum but with more structure.  For instance, I use separate fields for author, setting, characters, story problems, and solutions, etc.  Then ask students to comment on their peer's submissions of reading log entries.

The assignment with multiple submissions is essential for teaching writing; I use comments and revisions.  I tried the Workshop, and even with it fixed up beautifully by David Mudrak, it's still overkill for my guys.

And, Yes, Tomaz, I'll get the examples on Mt Orange; soon, I hope.