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Redesigning Moodle theme My moodle sand …

Redesigning Moodle theme

My moodle sandpit holds the reworked theme based on EduMoodle (http://edumoodle.veloxserv.co.uk/moodle/file.php/1/EduMoodle.zip).

http://digabites.co.uk

It has been fun and interesting to change the colour scheme and set the menus and manipulate images suitable to the theme.

I’ve been thinking recently that scrolling news is not so important for the front page of your VLE. Instead it might benefit to focus it as a portal to VLE content only.

A lot of the screen real estate is taken by the images in the header which only appears on the front page.

BTW – this is an experimental post using WP theme P2 which emulates twitter like updates to post to the blog.

Teaching other lessons with technology

Science. Year 9. Illegal drugs. Double lesson: 1hr 20 mins. 1 week to prepare.

Read through text book material.
Collate digital resources onto IWB flipchart (http://search.creativecommons.org).
Think of hooks: the drugs don’t work, they just make it worse (The Verve, Urban Hymns 1997).

Learning objectives (mine):

1. Understand what illegal drugs are

2. To know what illegal drugs exist

3. To understand addiction in relation to illegal drugs

4. To be able to visually identify an illegal drug; it’s characteristics and it’s effects

Technology:
ActiVote to gather opinion in the room
ActivSlate to enable pupils to ask questions and do match-up work on the board
Quiz and game from http://drugsinfo.org (ActivSlate again)
Wordle of keywords
Moodle course collating classroom and non-classroom resources
Flipchart
Images and lots of them (http://search.creativecommons.org)

Activities:
Starter for none: think of all the drug words you know (write in exercise book, mimicking the wordle displayed on the screen). Briefly discuss any new words.
Intro: flipchart, some images of drug taking, learning objectives
Quiz: done on board by pupil using activslate (unless no volunteers in which case I’ll do it in discussion with the class)
Spider Diagrams: one for each drug in exercise book. Word association. Example on board.
Plenary: ad hoc questions. anonymous mode. pupils ask questions – come up to board and ‘run’ the question.

I teach the lesson today so we’ll see how it goes. Concerned I haven’t put enough pupil activity into it. Too dependent on me as the teacher.

Lesson Plan:

Afterwards:

The lesson went well. Teacher was suitably impressed with use of Moodle to co-ordinate resources and homework including assignment, also varied use of IWB with ActiVote.

The ActivSlate activity didn’t go so well; pupils were to drag a word into the right place on a table. Take a turn and pass the slate along. However, they had not used one before so was clumsy for this activity with lots of images on screen to move around. Also, should have locked flipchart table to background because if someone nudged it accidentally everything went out of kilter. Abandoned this and made pupils line up at one side of the board and do one word each with the pen whilst (when back at desk) making spider diagram notes.

Pupils were engaged but my use of the ActiVote wasn’t the best. Questions were too simple or not really necessary. Required more thought. However, where it showed it’s value was in getting the pupils to ask a question (naturally they wanted to know who had taken drugs of the various classes). I had deliberately not set-up the user database to have their names on display. This allowed for information to be collected anonymously. How truthful everyone was I am not sure. Results were/are confidential.

Overall, the lesson was a success but I think I (my delivery) was integral; this wasn’t the aim. The pupils were very engaged throughout. Their learning will be assessed from the presentations they submit.

Once I get the teachers feedback I will post it as a blog comment.

Maths & Moodle #2

So where are we now?

I have opened negotiations/a dialogue with the HOD Maths in my school to discuss how we might use moodle to enhance what his department already offers. This HOD runs a tight ship and he and his teachers work very hard so he is understandably cautious before signing them up to anything that might take time to develop.

Currently they all use IWB software very well and share some of the resources (flipcharts) they make with other teachers, mostly new teachers because they all like to work in a particular way.

The ideas at the moment are to make skeletal moodle courses that position the learning with HW expectations and such through a series of lessons laid out on the moodle course. These would have direct reference to the text books and resources currently being used. The course would be tagged by topic so it would remain relevant to different year groups, e.g. Y9 top set doing some GCSE stuff.

My first post outlined an idea for students making screencasts with audio to model high-end A Level Maths work for younger students, maybe those that are struggling or new to the course. The Maths Department run a succession of surgeries for younger years to attend which are run by 6th Form. I am going to get the 6th Formers working on making these screencasts. I have in store an A4 grapgics tablet (awaiting arrival of Art computers). I thought this might be a good tool to create ther screencasts with. A group of three or four students sit round a table and solve a problem in calculas or mechanics. They discuss as they go each step by step action including mistakes. The pen would be passed from hand-to-hand to demonstrate the individual step by the person who suggested it. Microphone on the table too to record what the students are discussing as the problem develops. Possibly use an ActivSlate to do this too. The software might well be ActivStudio as it has the drawing potential but could easily be any graphics application.

I intend to trial this approach in March.

Any thoughts on how to improve it or other tools to use are welcomed as always.

Bridging the Gap between Technicians and Teachers

Reading & Moodle

Having read @mwesch blogpost in his digital ethnography blog I started to wonder if I could adapt the idea in moodle. Initial thoughts are below in a response to his post. Original post:

How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class

My response:

This is a great idea because it is for higher end learning. In 6th Form in UK (I think G12/13 in USA) I need tools that very established and successful academic teachers can use (Medieval History for example) who have been using a didactic style for 30/40 years.

I think I could create something similar to this via moodle with students using their blogs (not a great moodle tool as there is no comment facility) with a specific tag for the project they’re working on and then other tags may be included in the work as they see fit. Searching the blogs via the tag will collate all student entries into one list effectively creating the database similar to the zoho database generated in this blogpost.

This might be a difficult model to kick off in ICT as the subject doesn’t require much reading. The best approach maybe to pick a well talked about ICT article/topic and get students to research it via computer journals, newspapers, TV articles and blogs.