The Calendar of Jon becomes better and better, meeting the needs of teachers.
(see in the developers forum, please read first there the growing power of Jon's calendar...
I moved this comment to this forum, because it is more a free thought..)
In a real SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISTIC World (SCW) all STUDENTS need a PERSONAL calendar that supports their (bad?) planning behavior of MORE THEN ONE COURSE in a "self-reflectiv overview".
- Students of our secondary school, studying on their own, no longer boaring classes (the walls are broken down), we have just short teacher briefings, they decide how to work, so they need to plan and act..
- As organisation our board realised that we therefore need more formal structure in our organisation to give these students a reference frame for their self-pacing.
- They decided to split the year in four periods of ten planning weeks each as a study advice.
You could call that the bottomline for getting a certificate for that course, but students are allowed, alone or in a group to work faster, but are also stimulated to go deeper.. (There is where their personal improvable portfolio comes on the stage) - Every course should use not "a bigger then" the 10 weeks approach (smaller is allowed and longer courses are split and divided over more periods, part I part II..)
- the four periods are put in one moodle-course, maybe hiding the sections for the other periods but still having all the resources of the whole year available for the students, they are in control remember..)
- If you put all the student delivery activities for a week on the frontcard of a section, ONLY by using the Moodle-modul-hyperlinks as task descriptors then:
- A database harvester can collect the descriptions of all these activities for every student of all his courses by reading these titles of the hyperlinks in each section of all his courses.. "
- (you could then also add a button with "print an overview of ALL MY ACTIVITIES for ALL MY COURSES for ONLY THIS WEEK, or "print the outline for this course etc.. We do that now by copy the central column of a Moodle course and paste it in Word)
- It then can also automatically sort the modul-hyperlinks on base of type of modul (resources cannot yet be split up on content base...)
- A programmer can fill the calendar of Jon based on that harvesting process
- FOR A STUDENT THE FILTERS UNDER JON's NICE CALENDAR SHOULD BE MORE STUDENT CENTERED: show me my examdates, shwo all resources to read, show my homework-delivery-deadlines *), show my meetings, "show it only for his course" etc...(and only after clicking on such a link it should show the more detailed descriptiv information like: to which course it is related, meeting with whom etc.. the normal Moodle info, when you click on a link, I think)
- This way a student can visit his agenda and then one day he will realise that it is VERY VERY FILLED UP and shout for help. (not enough time anymore to do all...)
- The ONLY step he wishes then is filter away things that are luxury, ending up with only delivery deadlines and examdates.... (Do you remember this?
)
- A database harvester can collect the descriptions of all these activities for every student of all his courses by reading these titles of the hyperlinks in each section of all his courses.. "
- But can't we students help to view earlier that they are running out of time when it is still possible to do something with that brilliant observation? And in the spirit of Moodle: what is the most simple way to show it to them in a glance?
Yes it can be done, therefore we wish at our school(s) the next overview, simple to create - if you know how Moodle works:- make a raster-scheme
- put along the y-axis the number of weeks in the periods you use
- put along the x-axis the number of courses the student is activ in
- then fill each cell in that raster scheme with a color:
- red: 0% ready
- orange: 50% of the tasks in that section are ready
- green: all tasks in this section are completed
This way you can create in the left corner of each Moodle-course a combination of two student planning helping tools:
- on top the bars that show in a glance how you are doing against the reference (this is a mock-up, not a coded function yet..)
- next Jon's calendar with student filters. (this is still my changed calendar with the jump to that day hyperlink, so please Jon..)
- Showing this combination to deans and curriculum managers, well, I think it will have great effect on their choice of the eLearn platform, so who can help me?
*) workshop and other deliver-your-work in steps need further consideration: how to show the progress in these in the overviews?
