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 students ask hopefully if we’re going to the computer lab to work on the Moodle today.   Some highlights:

• Most of the students who keep “forgetting” their permission slips suddenly remember when  they see that everybody else is engaged in something they can’t participate in. 

• Having the Start Button activities helps a lot.   Students enjoy adding information about themselves to their profiles, even though some are describing themselves in silly hyperbolic terms. 

• Having  written directions at the very start  reduces “what are we doing” questions.  I respond, “What do the directions say?”  “Directions?  Oh, yeah…”
   
• Some kids still want to be spoon-fed.  “I can’t find …” Have to remember to  turn these questions over to their peers. 
   
• Students really like adding pictures to their profiles.  Some kids are very savvy about finding and uploading pictures, while others have never done it.  Uploading pictures isn’t required, but if kids want to do it, they are motivated to struggle with these new skills. 
   
• Facebook-like posting is typical – lots of terrible spelling, punctuation, capitalization (see sample).  I’m living with that for now so students can focus on learning to use this environment.  Kids do best when they focus on one  thing at a time.   
• 
  The second day, students post to a Vocabulary discussion.  The two discussions (netiquette and vocabulary) give them a chance to find the Reply button, and figure out what discussions look like.

Students are conversing with each other and having fun with it.  Yes!!

Classroom management

    I was really struck the other day by how different classroom management is online and face-to-face.  Some of the issues that are constant F2F simply don’t happen online. 

    For one thing, while online at home, students do the work (or not, as they sometimes choose), and then move on to Facebook, games, or whatever else they need/want to do.  F2F – and here I include the computer lab – is a whole ‘nother thing. 

    Whenever the kids are really in front of me, I have to consider the different paces they work at – speedy (but not necessarily well done), focused, highly distractible, and all the places in between.  Some kids finish early and I need to have something constructive for them to do so they don’t distract the rest of the class.  On the other hand, some kids won’t make it through the work by the end of class.  This means that I quickly have students working (or not working) on different things simultaneously. 

    This became so clear to me in my high school tech/computer skills class, where students are simultaneously F2F and on the class moodle.  Unlike in my blended middle school classes, where most of the online work is done outside of school, this class is all in front of me in real time.  Using the moodle to organize and present the work has been a God-send, but I need to plan for a wide variety of both focus and skill. 

    When students are mostly online, keeping them on task is a different equation.  I don’t really care what other things they are doing (and yes, I know they have multiple browser windows open) as long as they are engaged in work for my class.  When finished, they move on and that doesn’t matter to me.  F2F, though, I’ve got to keep the three-ring circus running, which takes extra planning. 

    The extra planning is especially needed because I’ve discovered how useful it is to have a written agenda:  this is what we are doing today, and when you finish, here are your alternatives.  I do find myself tweaking the agenda, and I need to modify it several times a week as we move to new work.  But the agenda is clear.  I get fewer of those annoying “what are we doing again?” questions (you know, the ones that mean the student can’t be bothered to pay attention until the rest of the class has started working). 

    Also, I’ve noticed that students are more on task.  In addition, this makes them less dependent on me, so I can focus on who needs help, not on directing traffic. 

    Kids actually read the agenda online, whereas they ignore the same agenda written on the white board.  Go figure.

Humble pie

    I wanted to have my students show their understanding of copyright and fair use issues, things we’ve been talking about all year, but which we had recently been focusing on.  I used four different cases, situations described in a paragraph; students were to use one case and explain if there was a violation of copyright, and if the person in the case could change something so this became a case of fair use. 

    I tried to set it up as I had experienced this kind of assignment in adult classes, with the discussion referencing the cases on a link.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  The students were confused by the two links – which were they supposed to click on, where were the cases again.  Moodle has these nice icons that distinguish between documents and discussions – only students weren’t looking at those.  Fortunately this is a hybrid class where I introduce new activities in the computer lab, so I could demonstrate what students needed to do and deal with the confusion.  Really glad I didn’t make this a homework assignment.  My students did fine once they understood what I wanted.  But it is so humbling to think that you’ve been so clear, and then to find out that you were not.

    While students feel free to click all over when they are surfing, this doesn’t necessarily happen in class.   I suspect part of the reason for this is the antiquity of the computers in the lab – they are old and thus slow; students don’t really want to experiment and then have to sit and wait, which already happens all too often. 

    So, the lesson is, put everything together in one place as much as possible.  I need to always be mindful of how my students will approach their work.

Getting students to read directions

                What are we doing?  What do I do now?  What directions?  I’m done.  Whatta ya mean I’m sposed to create a spreadsheet?  

                Verbal directions with middle schoolers really don’t work that well – especially multi-step directions.  They don’t listen past the first sentence, if they listen at all.  So of course I have written directions.  But that presupposes they READ the directions.  

                I’m still experimenting.  Moodle, unlike D2L, doesn’t show the “news” or teacher messages when students first come into the course; they would have to click on a link.  Will they click on the link?  Since they never have,  I closed the “news” module entirely.  

                Besides not reading the directions, middle schoolers are not big on sequence.  They tend to click around rather randomly, so I need to 1) carefully organize materials and 2) “hide” anything I don’t want them to be distracted by.  Within each activity (like a discussion), there’s room for directions; the problem is getting them to do more than one activity, to do the activities a particular sequence, and to understand the deadlines. 

Right now, I’m experimenting with adding the directions for the day/week right in with the activities.  I write them on a Moodle label and place them just before the activities I want students to engage in.  

                They still ask:  What are we doing?  What do I do now?  What directions?  But at least not as often. ;)