Using Moodle for learners with special cognitive needs

Using Moodle for learners with special cognitive needs

by Irene T -
Number of replies: 2

Can anyone refer me to an active installation of Moodle that is intended for use with learners who have special cognitive or physical needs?  I would like to speak with the person who runs that Moodle about what teaching methods are best for this group of learners inside of a Moodle environment and what assistive devices are currently well-supported in Moodle.

Thank you

Irene

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In reply to Irene T

Re: Using Moodle for learners with special cognitive needs

by Anne Nicolson -
Hi Irene can you explain what you mean by special cognitive needs? Perhaps the following helps?

I teach a group of dyslexic maths students - remedial maths. Many struggle with reading and writing. Moodle often allows me to cut down on the amount of extraneous typing they need to do. Here are some comments on the good things-

All paper work and web links are on site - avoids the agony of spelling long links and having to have all notes organised.

We use 'assignment' a lot. Typically there is a write on activity sheet in 'word or 'excel'. They save this locally - do whatever and then upload a version for feedback. This avoids a lot of writing(which they find difficult), keeps them organised and they enjoy seeing there progress via the log.

The students return again and again to some resources.

I can easily point some students to moodle resources - that I prepared earlier - while  focusing on others needs.

We display things that we have made - matching quizzes, images, spreadsheets etc.

The students like chat - but I don't think they talk much about maths!

The language requirements of forums is too daunting.

We had a big failure with wiki's - waiting for version 1.5 before trying again.

Quizzes are good - but my students like working together-and so results have been very qualitative. These are time consuming to prepare.

Hope that helps.






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In reply to Anne Nicolson

Re: Using Moodle for learners with special cognitive needs

by John Blake -
I have had very similar experiences with working with ADHD middle and high school students in my school. I have one tip for you Quiz issue. I have been using a US textbook that comes with a test generator- ExamView. I was able to find a programmer in these Moodle.org forums that created a plugin to make ExamView work pretty good. If you had the testbanks, and could find time to put together quizzes and save them in ExamView you would only have to import them into Moodle. One more thing, I am looking at a program that runs on a Windows server (I have installed it on a PC to use this coming school year) called LAMS. I like what I have seen about LAMS. I can not wait to try building lessons for my learning challenged students.

Also- I have disabled chat. Forums seem too daunting, but I tried this strategy with my students and they liked it: I posted a photo of a famous scientist. At the time, we were studying science in class and introducing a new topic- Energy. It was Albert Einstein. Some students knew the answer immediately and could post the answer in the forum. I temporarily turned off Read Tracking so the students could not get the answer from the smart kid in the class. After everyone had time to post they guess- I turned read tracking back on. It worked much better than just letting them post and the everyone sees the answer and no one really tries to look. They were asked to rearch on the web for the persons name, but if the person is in your moodle they could find it in the lesson... Try that instead of letting them chat. You are right, they get off task FAST. Good luck!
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