Introducing Moodle to students

My strategy: 

1. Bulk enroll all my students, See this post about bulk enrolling students. 
2. Set up groups within each class, so that I can have discussions within groups that are subsets of the class, and thus reduce the reading load for my students.  It’s so much easier to read and respond to 10 or so others – instead of 25 or even (gulp) 50.  It took me last year to get a handle around groups, but now I’m comfortable with them and find them surprisingly easy to do.  See this post about using groups. http://adventuresonlineteaching.blogspot.com/2011/01/choosing-group-discussion-format-in.html
3. Once students have returned parent permission forms (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/61853337/Permission-slip-Introduction-to-Moodle-for-Parents ), I give them userid (same as the school userid) an initial password which they will change, and the link to the URL for them to click on.  This minimizes “I forgot my userid” and keying in the wrong address. 
4. Students can then add their email, information about interests in their profile, and an image (they love to add a photo that is either of themselves or of a personal interest).  Our Moodles are private, so students can use their real names and images. 

    Of course, there are always a few students who “forget” to bring in their permission forms, but I have tweaked that, too.

• Students are still required to do the work, but don’t get to participate directly in any of the discussions and other activities (something to motivate them to get their forms in).  
• It’s a bit of extra work for me to post the basic assignments on the class Edline page (our non-interactive class webpages which are accessible to parents and students), but there’s an upside there, too.  
• If kids forget their Moodle password, they can still do the assignments (so no excuses).  
• And parents can see the work we’re doing, which they like. 

   The next post is about the Start Button and the first work students do in the Moodle.  Stay tuned.

Start Here Button

    Recently, I took courses (online, of course) to become a Quality Matters peer reviewer.  (More about that in another post).  One of my classmates there, Mary Wells, talked about having a Start Here Button, a place for students to go for all those beginning-of-course matters – what to do when things go wrong, some information about your teacher, how to navigate the course, and so on.

    I loved the idea and am incorporating it into my courses for next year.  On my sample Moodle course (no student information on it), you can see what this looks like, and one way it can be set up in Moodle.  I put it in its own HTML block at the top, so students will always see it first.  http://tinyurl.com/3wzynwp

    The links in the Start Here block go to documents I stuck in the very last topic for the course.  Thanks to Moodle’s “scroll of death” (= it seems to take forever to get to the bottom), students are unlikely to go down there.  Mary Cooch, Moodle blogger extraordinaire, has come up with a more elegant solution here  http://www.moodleblog.net/?p=24 

    If you don’t already subscribe to Mary’s blog, you should; she is a fount of Moodle wisdom.  http://www.moodleblog.net

Summer revamp

Now that summer is almost here, I’m thinking about how I’ll revamp my Moodle courses to make them more effective. Recently, I took classes to became a Quality Matters peer reviewer for K12, so naturally all the things missing from my courses have become glaringly apparent. I’ve always relied on being able to talk to my students, which overcomes a lot of online difficulties.

But when kids can’t talk to me – during snow days, at night, on weekends – that doesn’t work.

So this summer I plan to make Jing videos explaining how to do everything I can think of. Also, beef up my FAQs, and similar help documents. And add a Start Here button, with all the introductory information in one place.

And think about how to use the wiki this year, and… This is how we geeks play. ;-p