Today’s workshop was on Moodle. After a brief introduction and opportunity to experience some online quizes, we have been asked to reflect on the following questions:
How do you think Moodle can support student learning?
Will you use Moodle in your classroom?
I think Moodle can support student learning in a number of ways. Firstly, it can assist students to organise, revist and extend their learning by the teacher organising the resources so that students can access these anywhere and anytime. Secondly, I like the assessment features of Moodle that can encourage students to engage in formative as well as summative assessment tasks and get quick feedback.
I would like to use Moodle more in my classes. At this stage, access is a problem although this is improving. I can’t wait until the new version of Moodle arrives at the end of this year.
Today a group of students ran a great workshop on edublogs. They created a page about blogging with educblogs on the CEGSA website http://cegsa.editme.com/blogs
Part of the practical part of thworkshop was to respond to the following questions on our own blog:
Do you think Edublogs is a tool that you would use as an educator? If not, why?
How would you use Edublogs within your classroom with your students?
I think thatEdublogs is an excellent tool that I would definitely use with my students. 21st Century learning is all about getting students to be more aware of their thinking and abilities and needs as a learner. Blogging to reflect on learning is a perfect strategy for developing students’ metacognitive skills. It is also a wonderful way for students to write for a purpose to an authentic audience.
When using Edublogs in my class of I would create a class home page and link to students’ individual blogs. I would ensure that students are not identified in any way but use avatars and pseudonyms. When setting up of a class page, I would ensure that I had administration rights over students individual blogs.
Just came across this Slide share presentation from Melanie McBride on the best approach school boards (and similar organisations) can take to web 2.0. Steven Downs suggests thtat “the summary of approaches (slide 41) and the Howard Rheingold pic (slide 48) should be blown up and made into a poster”.
John Travers has shared this example of how he is using Diigo as an assessment tool to provide feedback and manage students’ comments in his Mulitmedia literacy topic. Pretty cool stuff that makes use of sticky notes and bookmarks.
Now this looks interesting especially for language teachers. This example is from the Box of Tricks blog. I found it from an automated Google alert that I have on interactive whiteboards. I love pull technology! I also liked Voki as this was another tool with potential to make learning inclusive for younger students that prefer not to write and for language learning. However, my Voki kept messing up my blog page so I have removed it.
I have been playing about with Diigo and checking out the fantastic bookmarks identified in different networks. In particular, I discovered the 101 free learning tools slideshare by Zaid Ali Alsagoff from Malaysia. I think this would be useful to highlight to my students as many enjoyed exploring the list of tools included on a survey I gave them at the start of the topic. So just as you thought you were getting a handle on things, more web 2.0 tools continously pop up like mushrooms!
