Glenys Hanson

Hi Everyone,

I've just had a very enjoyable read: Mary Cooch's Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds

I know it isn't a new book, it came out in March 2009, but I don't think it's ever been discussed here. I'm not new to Moodle and I don't teach 7-14 year olds so why did I find it as much fun to read as a novel? Those of you who've read Mary's many postings on these forums will guess why : it's her style of writing. She doesn't write about how great Moodle is, she writes to explain to her readers how they can get Moodle to do what they want. The word "want" appears 172 times in the book and mainly in the collocation "you want". They word "you" appears 1431 times ! I really felt I was sitting down with a nice friendly colleague keen to show me how Moodle could help me help my students learn better. Yes, I'm a me, me, me person and I like people who pay attention to what I want.

I'm grateful to the people who've written the Moodle docs but I've often had to struggle to understand what they mean and I don't always succeed. I often feel I'm in contact with super bright technical people writing to other super bright technical people about how Moodle is constructed, not about how it can be used by ordinary classroom teachers like me. Mary also explains how Moodle tools work technically, but the explanations are always brief, limpid and linked to what a teacher can do with the tool. I particularly liked her frequent three-column tables setting out 1) The name of a Moodle tool, 2) What it does, 3) Why use it.

I also liked the way the book is structured around the creation of an actual Moodle course that Mary really created and taught on Rivers and Flooding. As you know, it's very difficult to see other teachers' Moodle courses. Of course, now we have 50 courses in the Cool Competition to look at, but great as many of them are, they are static and mainly without students. They are finished products - we don't see the process. We can only guess at why the teacher made them the way they did and imagine how real students will use them. In Mary's book we not only follow her step-by-step as she sets up her course and gives her reasons for her choices but she also brings the whole thing to life with anecdotes about how her pupils used the course, what they wrote and did.

I read the paper book, but in fact I bought the book in PDF format way back last August. Maybe it's because I'm old, but there's not the same pleasure in extensive on screen reading as there is in curling round a book and a glass. But going now to look at the PDF, I realise that it does have the advantage of presenting all the screenshots in colour. That's not only prettier, it's clearer. Having the PDF, means I can give you a taste of the book here. In the screenshot below, Mary is explaining how to make a Hot Potatoes JCloze exercise.

No, I don't agree with everything she says: I'm an English teacher, I do bother about students' spelling.

Cheers,
Glenys

Hi Syach,

To expand a little on what Mary has already said.

MS Word is designed to give instructions to a printer to print words on paper. A html text field (like the one we use to write messages in on Moodle) is designed to create pages of code that can be interpreted by navigators (Internet Explorer, Firefox ...) so that we can read text and see images, etc. on our computers when we surf the web. The two technologies are quite different and only partially compatible. You can usually copy simple text from Word to a text field, but complex formatting, tables, images, etc. don't transfer well.

The solutions are :

• type your text directly in the text field on Moodle, and format it there,
  
• upload your Word file as a document to Moodle,
• copy your Word text into a a text editor (Notepad on Windows), which will remove the Word code and formatting, and then copy it from there into the text field on Moodle.

It's not just Moodle that works like this, all text fields that create web pages work in the same way.

Cheers,
Glenys

Bonjour tous,

C'est aujourd'hui la dernière jour pour voter - le 8 février. Il faut aller sur http://coolcourses.moodle.org/ pour le savoir. J'ai demandé à Helen Foster de nous donner plus de temps mais apparemment ça ne va pas être le cas.

Nous sommes environ autant de votants que de concurrents - une cinquantaine - alors chaque vote compte.

Je n'ai pas eu le temps de tout regarder, alors j'ai voté pour les copains.

J'ai déjà dit dans le "Lounge" anglais que je trouve que c'est pas très normal qu'au moins un "Moodle Partner" utilise le concours pour se faire de la pub. Qu'en pensez-vous ?

Cheers,
Glenys

Bonsoir Anne-Gaëlle,

Hot Potatoes peut également créer des exercices du type "cherchez les erreurs" avec Michael Rottmeier's Add-Ons

Voici un exemple : "I have a dream..." Martin Luther King
Ou, si on trouve que je donne trop d'exemples en anglais, voici un en Slovène Iščem te,velika začetnica! Il faut trouver les mots qui devraient avoir une majuscule.

Cheers,
Glenys

Hi there,

Do you realise that we only have until Monday 8th February to vote for the Cool Course Competition? There's some great stuff there and I, for one, haven't had time to look at it all. How about you? I've sent a message to Helen requesting more time.

I was a bit surprised to see an entry (there are maybe several, but I haven't seen all the entries) from a Moodle partner, excellent quality but - a kind of plug. How do others feel about that?

Cheers,
Glenys