Hi everyone,
I will be managing an exciting project in our school district next year. We will be doing a 1:1 computing pilot project with approximately 550 students and 25 teachers. The students will each have an Apple iBook laptop to use 24x7 during the school year.
Of course, there is a significant staff development component to this project. I am planning to use Moodle to facilitate discussions among the 1:1 teachers. The project will be rolled out in certain 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classrooms, and I'm planning to create groups for the teachers in each grade level.
I'm new to Moodle and haven't had a chance to use all of the modules yet. Do any of you Moodle experts have ideas about particular uses of Moodle in this situation? Particularly, I'd like to give individual teachers (who are the students in this course) the ability to create and upload technology-rich lesson and activities for discussion by the other teachers in this staff dev course. Some of this work might be done within the Moodle groups.
I will be sharing links and documents in the Moodle course. That's easy. Can anyone think of any other ways to use Moodle in this setting?
I'd like to give individual teachers (who are the students in this course) the ability to create and upload technology-rich lesson and activities for discussion by the other teachers in this staff dev course.
This might be difficult, because if I understand you correctly the 25 teachers will have student rights in the staff development course, so they won't be able to create activities there.
I've had the same problem in a staff development course I'm running now. What I did was create a few 'sandbox courses' alongside the staff-dev course, which are shared among the participants. So, if you have 25 teachers, you might create 5 sandboxes and enroll 5 of your participants in each of the sandboxes (with teacher rights). What I do then is tell the participants that each of them should occupy one topic and create their activities there. In this way you avoid having to create 25 sandboxes, and each particpant can view the work of others (they can enroll in the other 4 sandboxes as students).
I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution (it isn't), but it seems to work.
Tim,
This is an old thread, but I thought I might contribute.
If I understand right, you're not training the teachers to use moodle, you're just helping them make the transition to this other, more "technology rich" teaching mode. Forums and workshops could really help. Don't give them instructor priveleges if they aren't going to teach with moodle, because it takes time just to learn moodle, and you want them to focus on the going project.
I'm using a moodle course to teach instructors how to use moodle. our webmaster found a course already available, open, which I've added to. you might want to look. forums and workshops can help a lot, and that way the teachers can upload their own stuff, and others can comment on it.
This link is the instructor training course. You can see the "Ask Amy" forum where they've all asked me their clever/whiny/stupid questions.
http://distance.alaskapacific.edu/course/view.php?id=12
This is an old thread, but I thought I might contribute.
If I understand right, you're not training the teachers to use moodle, you're just helping them make the transition to this other, more "technology rich" teaching mode. Forums and workshops could really help. Don't give them instructor priveleges if they aren't going to teach with moodle, because it takes time just to learn moodle, and you want them to focus on the going project.
I'm using a moodle course to teach instructors how to use moodle. our webmaster found a course already available, open, which I've added to. you might want to look. forums and workshops can help a lot, and that way the teachers can upload their own stuff, and others can comment on it.
This link is the instructor training course. You can see the "Ask Amy" forum where they've all asked me their clever/whiny/stupid questions.
http://distance.alaskapacific.edu/course/view.php?id=12