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Enter nature!
I was thinking, before Hurricane Irene blew through, that we could use the strategies for “hurricane days” that we have used for “snow days.” For snow days, we post assignments, links and...
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Bulk enrolling Moodle users
It used to take me hours and hours to bulk upload my users and set up groups. This year, it took less than an hour, even though I’ve expanded from 8th grade to include 7th grade students. Having done...
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Introducing Moodle to students
My strategy: Bulk enroll all my students, See this post about bulk enrolling students. Set up groups within each class, so that I can have discussions within groups that are subsets of the class, and...
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Enthusiasm!
So I introduced Moodle to my 7th and 8th graders this week. You know you’re doing something right when kids login from home without even being asked to. You also know you’re onto something when...
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Kid radar flags own errors
from wunderground.comYesterday, a student emailed me, begging me to remove a post he had made that he realized had crossed the line. After 30 minutes, he couldn’t get back in to edit it (a Moodle...
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Off-topic supports community in Moodle
This year, I gave my students a place to converse on the Moodle that didn’t have to be about school. In the past, I didn’t have this. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be necessary since many students are...
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Dealing with parent plagiarism
This past week, I had two instances of parent plagiarism. In one, a student copied and pasted an essay from the internet. I told him to write it over in his own words, but then his mother...
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7th grade vs 8th grade
This is the first year 7th graders have participated in using Moodle. While the content offered to both 7th and 8th grade is similar (vocabulary forums, for example), how they handle the work is...
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Learning what's appropriate
On my 8th grade class Moodle, I added a new feature this year – the Coffee House. It’s a place for off-topic discussions. A place to play. I get an email whenever anyone posts there, so I can...
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Sharing what you learn
Last month I had the chance to present at a state computer teachers’ conference about using Moodle for discussions. It was nerve-wracking to plan carefully so that I could be sure that the...
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Moodle eAssessment Course
I’m taking a fabulous ecourse, eAssessment in Moodle at LearnNowBChttp://www.learnnowbc.ca/educators/MoodleMeets/default.aspx, one of many courses offered. The course is well-organized and...
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Using the Lesson tool in Moodle
Thanks to the Moodle eAssessment course I took through LearnNowBC I’ve learned how to create a lesson – a highly structured way to take students through activities and a variety of possible...
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Private teacher-student conversation, the Online Text Assignment tool in Moodle
Ever want to have a way for your students to converse with you online that allows the student privacy from their peers? Email seems obvious, but my students don’t check their email. Ever. And...
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Using Hot Potatoes with Moodle
I’ve never used the quiz module in Moodle both because it’s hard to use, and because multiple choice isn’t something I use a lot. As an English teacher, I usually want my students to write. But I...
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Building Community in the Blended Classroom
Whether online, F2F, or blended/hybrid, to help our students learn, we need to build an effective community. That means learners feel a part of something bigger than themselves, they use bouncing...
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A bone to pick with Amazon alleged 2-day shipping
I buy hundreds of dollars of books every year from Amazon – used, new, Kindle. For me, for family, for school. Recently, I needed some leveled readers right away. As part of my regular English...
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Using personal online conversations to help students achieve
When students are engaged in an extensive research project, I want them to have a way to converse privately with the teacher, to reflect about what they’re learning, and to have an opportunity to...
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Two-way journals with 7th graders
This year I’ve introduced my 7th graders to Moodle (used already with 8th graders for two previous years). As always, the 7th graders demonstrate how very different they are from 8th graders. For...
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Logistics: assessing online discussions
Moodle provides a wonderful variety of discussion forums – they provide for reflection, engagement, deeper understanding, broad participation, and much else – but the work also needs to be assessed....
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Moodle Resources (especially 2.x)
Decided this information needed updating.Moodle Community· Moodle.org forums http://moodle.org/forums/ · Moodle.org documentation http://docs.moodle.org/ Sample courses: (sample courses to see...
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Getting to know Moodle 2
Since my Moodle host, GlobalClassroom, has just moved to Moodle 2 from 1.9, I'm doing it, too. GlobalClassroom nicely upgraded my existing courses into a new URL, so I can have both old and new...
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Menu avoids scroll of death, Moodle 2
I wanted to stop having my students scroll around to find work - and also wanted to stop having to drag units up and down as we move from one to the next. So I used Mary Cooch's lovely idea of...
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Moodle 2 Cheat Sheet
Here's a Moodle 2 "cheat sheet" to help users get through the basics of creating course content in Moodle. If you see errors or something you think I should add, please leave a comment....
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Demo course, Moodle 2.3
What fun to convert a course from 1.9 to 2.3 without too many wrinkles. To play with new features of Moodle (blocks!). And to create an image interface to link to each unit (something I've wanted to...
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Getting students to read the Constitution
My fiendish plot was simple - get my students to actually read the US Constitution, which is dry and long. I came up with a Constitutional Convention, having them work in small groups, with each group...
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