Feeling more competent now thanks

Just to follow up on my last blog where I proposed using a Questionnaire as a means of gaining some measure of session success from students, I took the opportunity to apply the idea in two separate classes this week and you can see the results from the screen shot. Just to recap, the initial impression was taken at the introduction phase and the final impression during the plenary. The material covered in the session 1h 45m, for most represented their first exposure to the topic. From the numbers it would appear that the confidence / competence in each area had more than doubled during a single session, and so I feel this has been a good measure for me and in fact for students who collectively felt that it was of value to them.

Continuing on with with my quest to find useful resources,  I came across an interesting link the other day from TeachThought.com named ‘15 Free Learning Tools You’ve Probably Never Heard Of’. The posting describes the collection as ‘under-the-radar free learning sites’. I confess that there are many that I was not aware of and are certainly worth looking into, so do please take a look at this one, and feel free to share your own under the radar sites or apps.

Closing on a somewhat lighter note, are you pod casting your classes? Well I do, though not the whole session, instead I will record (audio only), those aspects of the material that experience tells me often seem to need reinforcing; so basically listen again. The casts themselves seldom exceed a three or four minutes, looking at the hits on the vle, they are ceratianly used. But are they useful? Well it seems from a recent report from one of my students they would certainly seem to be distracting. While driving home, he was listening to one such pod cast to such an extent that he missed the usual motorway turn-off, and instead of arriving home at 18:30, he arrived at 20:15, how engaging was that!

 

As usual please feel free to comment

Being able to usefully capture student progress while in a session is without doubt one of those essential ingredients, not only because it allows you to know where they are within the course work, but also as means of informing me on differentiation and last but not least a means of motivation and engagement. I recall a while ago now, back in the days when the pda looked as if it was destined to become the computer in your pocket, I would use an Excel spreadsheet of student name and session dates to award colours for class performance such as green for completed, gold for exceeding expectations, useful, though I confess a somewhat rather loose subjective model. Of course we have dedicated tracking systems in place, but I really wanted something a little more lightweight and so I have started experimenting with the Moodle Target feature that has become available as an Activity option. Quick and easy to use, I simply apply a set of targets for the session, then upon completion students leave comments and I mark as completed. In the event that somebody achieves all the targets, as usual I set about negotiating extension work, and set the new differentiated target. Now if you are reading this and thinking, but that means I now have to think up targets for each session, well not really, I find the targets are in essence the session objectives, though be it couched in a little more detail. I like Moodle Target, and if you have found it useful then do please feel free to post any comments.

While on the subject of making use of Moodle in teaching session, I have been having thoughts on that rather illusive metric, how successful has the session been for me! Not an easy one really, however, could I acquire some useful feedback by using the Moodle Questionnaire Scale rating option? Basically at the introduction, students each select an option between 1 and 10 (with 1 being least) to indicate how competent / confident they are with the specific subject matter we are about to explore, then at the plenary they indicate how this has changed. Has it proved useful, well I have not really had the opportunity to give the idea a good test drive as of yet, so please stay in touch with future postings.

Bye for now Barry  

Resources, Resources and even more Resources

One of those things that I am always on the lookout for my Moodle courses and I feel that I am not alone here are resources and this week seems to have been particularly fruitful on that particular front.

First off was this ‘Your must-have classroom toolkit’ from TES, where they have from contributions from over 130,000 teachers assembled a really impressive list of class management and planning resources, and by the way these are all free.

So simply follow the links to. You will need to be a registered user though simply create yourself an account.

Next there was ‘The 100 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools ChosenBy You’ from Edudemic

Back in 2010 Edudemic ran the post 'The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You’. Following this it became apparent that a considerable appetite exists from everyone for the Web 2.0 and so there followed a trawl of Twitter polls and Facebook correspondence involving some 900 submissions that resulted in this very impressive list. If you have favourite tool that is not included then you are invited to post your suggestion.

 

Finally there was 'Resources A to Z' from the BoxofTricks Education and Technology website, and this lists a massive 209 links, that were last updated 28th February 2013, so that’s about as current as it gets. The list features what are considered to be the best free internet resources for education. This list is in fact the latest version of a page resource that is constantly updated so I recommend that you to include it in your feed and favourites.

Well I hope you found these little finds useful, and do please feel free to comment

Thinking Moodle Theme Design

I have been taking a loom at the some options for templates this last week and came across an couple of site that seemed to have some useful and I thought interesting content. The first was Themza. The themes features are free and cover a wide range of curriculum area defaults, and when it comes to installing the theme, there are short video tutorials that will guide through the process.

 

If you are feeling really creative then  Themato Web Moodle Theme Engine may well be the solution. The website feratures among other things video tutorials that guide you through the design process and has the following new features available: -

*New - Added keyboard navigation the website. Use your arrow keys in gallery to navigate fast and use Shift+1, Shift+2 and so on for menu links on the website(Not on Moodle). To use keyboard shortcuts in your Moodle themes, press Ctrl+Shift+K to see your list of Admin keyboard shortcuts. Watch out this space, Moodle UI is gonna get richer in interaction!!

*New - Added support for New Layout in themes!

*New - Added Moodle Bar for easy navigation.

*New - Added Menu Builder so that you can create your menu items without having to write a single line of code.


Finally I discivered Hayley eLearning Center, have nice looking page of free themes that covering Moodle 1.9 and  Moodle 2.0. I particularly liked the way in which the themes on this site have taken on customisation of menu options and colour styles

I hope you found this posting useful and do please feel free to comment