Moodle birthing

I have generally been a teacher approaching Moo from the front-end. My interest has always been from a curriculum focus – what new tools I can incorporate into my courses to inspire my students.

Today, however, I became a back-end fella, and installed Moodle to run locally on my own machine.

I had a couple of reasons for doing so; firstly, I have been asked to be part of the process to phase in Moodle at another school. The second reason is simply curiousity.

I found the installation process to be pretty fascinating. Having downloaded the install pack, and already having a webserver running locally, installing and starting up Moo was a sinch! Literally a 5 minute job. Knowing what I know already about Moo, I was able to set up a few users and courses and began nutting out how to enrol one into the other…..

Anyway enough of techie stuff. what I found quite thought provoking was the sheer emptiness of the site once it is up and running, even with a couple of courses created. Our e-learning developer has spent the better part of 3 years building the monster that is now our multi-campus college moodle site, and I had to stop and reflect on the sheer volume of development that has gone into making a really neat, tight LMS.

It struck me that to make a site that really works on a curriculum level, a serious amount of planning, and thought needs to go into the ‘what-goes-where’ questions. I remember having arguments with our Moodle-development committee trying to decide how to create the links to separate Primary from Secondary, and one campus from another. Let’s not even get started on the difficulties we faced considering how to create links to subjects that had students taking the class cross-campus.  But if the site is to be student-friendly (and novice IT teacher friendly), this needs to be thought through.

The other thing that the blank canvas made me consider is the many uses of Moodle. Having adopted moodle at an ‘in-construction’ phase, the new courses we inherited already had some basic formatting and topic titles added. Yet when the course is empty, one tends to consider how many possibilities there are for a moodle course. Extra-curricular pages, welfare pages, pages for year levels…the list is endless and only limited by your imagination.

The thing I have come to love about Moo is its flexibility, the variety of ways in which you can use its courses, and the way that a teacher can shape a course to suit their needs. The other big positive with Moodle is the way it promotes collaboration, but more on that another time…….

Professional Learning & Good Teaching Practice

In response to AISV webquest on effective teaching strategies.

Having entered IT teaching only in the last few years, I have tried to seek out PD that will give me the skills I need to better student learning in the IT classrooms I work in.  As things have changed so rapidly in the online world, there have been a myriad of new things to consider.

One of my greatest strengths in utilising online technologies in teaching is my willingness to ‘play’ with new tools.  One of my colleagues once noted that I am ‘fearless’ in the classroom and will trying anything.  The same is true with web tools – I’ll try anything once.
The fallback on this is that sometimes things do fall over, or in my excitement at unleashing something new on the students, I don’t think things all the way through, and could produce a better model or a better prepared activity.
Another downside to this is losing track of the ‘big-picture’ in the culture we are trying to create within the classroom.  It is easy to lose sight of the bigger goal in favour of the exciting new tool.  One thing I can work on in regard to good practice is to always work back to the same teaching goal – better understanding of the topics at hand.

I am also a big proponent of the ‘play and learn’ approach.  Rather than standing and speaking from the front, I would prefer to build something that kids can work through or play with, and ‘learn while they are not looking.’  Unfortunately not all students are as creative as some, and prefer to hear information that they know is correct.  The other downside is that in leaving kids to work on something to get concepts into their head, they sometimes lack feedback unless this is diligently followed up.

The other concept that features in the source documents is research.  One thing that teachers struggle with in general is in finding time for the important but not urgent things that enhance effective teaching – reflection is one of these.  I have noted on many occasions that teachers have a habit of  ‘talking shop’; given a little time to consider the fruitfulness of their endeavours, they will always natter on for hours about their kids or what worked in class last week.  Formalise this with structured discussion and emprical evidence and we would have a powerful tool to see how well things are progressing in our classrooms.  But the time…….

The source document on research also points out that the public benefits when proper research and reflection is carried out.  I have sensed, as my skills in using online learning tools has grown, that it is of great importance to share this with others.  Being a PD leader in my school community, I try to drop tid-bits of clever tools to my peers whenever I can.  Yet there are probably ways of sharing new tools in a public way amongst my school community that can be effective on a wider scale.  I have considered using a public forum to drop new ideas and examples of neat things my peers are doing out there, but again it all comes down to hours in the day.