Sunday, January 2, 2011

Middle School Moodle Mayham

Now try saying that five times fast....After telling you all about Moodle, I wanted to show you how you can use it in your class.  One of the best ways I have utilized it in my middle school English class is by having interactive message boards with the students.  The students love it and enjoy interacting with one another while getting to discuss literature from class.  Once the students have signed in to the Moodle, I had them read guidelines for Moodle use (midddle school kids can be mean when they think they can hide behind the Internet)

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Next, the students need to select the appropriate board topic:

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Once they've chosen the correct topic they will see the prompt question:

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Now that students understand the topic or posting directions they can begin posting answers and even responding to one another.  You can organize your students by period or even let them discuss amongst your classes.  Other teachers at my school who teach across grade level created a telecollaborative  Moodle by allowing older kids to help younger students with homework questions.  It's pretty neat!  And best yet: the entire site is safe and monitored by you so that the kids have a safe place to interact, blog, respond to message boards, and more.

Sample student work (without names of course):

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Also with the Moodle, teachers can:
  • Make quizzes/tests (that are self-graded)
  • Create posts where students can upload documents
  • Design a calendar of upcoming events
  • Have students upload projects/presentations
  • Create web pages and wikis students can access from the main moodle site
  • Establish a database of student info
Moodle would be  agreat way to create a telecollaborative project between schools as well.  It would require some planning on the part of both teachers but a project similar to the flat classroom project could be housed on the moodle while providing a unique opportunity for student growth and development.

5 comments:

  1. My co-worker spent this past summer taking literature packets that we do with our Spanish 2 Honor students and posting them to the Moodle. Now, other than the short-answer questions, Moodle grades them for us! The beauty of it is that you can also see all of a certain short answer question all at once to see if the kids cheated and/or copied straight from the novel. You can write in comments and provide reasons why multiple choice, true/false, and matching answers are/aren't correct! LOVE!

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  2. Did it take a while to create student accounts? I want to try this with 5th graders. What do you think?

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  3. I think this is a great way for students that may be shy to voice their ideas. I know some students do not enjoy talking in front of their peers and may feel more comfortable conversing via discussion boards like this.

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  4. I became interested in Moodle this summer during our distance learning class, but have not yet tried to use it at my school. The main obstacle- the time to learn to set it up and introduce it to students. How long does it take to get it set up and running? And then set up over 100 students? I would love to have the capabilities it provides all in one place, but time is a concern.

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  5. @Sarah-It did not take too long, but like I said my school is all on board so they actually signed up through their science classes.

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