Assessment in Moodle

It’s not enough to have fun activities in Moodle.  If you’re a teacher, the activities have to have a point.  What do I want my students to know/do?  And how will I know if they have succeeded?

Moodle provides many tools – especially for formative assessment.  (If educational terminology causes temporary insanity, that means “as you go along.”)  It’s my favorite kind of assessment, and you can build it right into your activities.

• For example, forum discussions are a perfect way for you to determine – Did they read it?  Did they get it?  Can they incorporate what they’ve learned and go on to the next step?  The activity provides the assessment tool – love it, love it, love it. 
• Any project, whether individual or group, can use Moodle tools for collaborating, refining, publishing, all of which allow for either formative or summative (final) assessment. Students can use a forum discussion, add items to the glossary, use the wiki to collect/modify information, post ideas to their blogs…
• Assignment with upload – You can use the Assignment module and then have students upload their work (Word documents, PowerPoints, you name it)  or give them written directions (in a label or in a document/web page) and then have them upload their work, or have the directions in a discussion forum and have students post their work or attach it to their post…  Important:  make sure you increase the size of the possible student files, or your students will be unable to upload and will be frustrated.
• Post a picture/ embed a video on a discussion forum and ask for responses, a la VoiceThread.  Students can make text comments, post pictures, add podcasts…   It doesn’t look as jazzy as VoiceThread, but you don’t have to set up all those student accounts and teach your students a new tool, either.
• Moodle also has a quiz tool – you can create self-grading quizzes and give students repeated chances to pass the quiz (with possibly different sets of questions each time).  The quiz is particularly good for helping students self-assess if factual material has been learned.  I confess I don’t use the Moodle quiz, but see that Hot Potato (which is much easier for setting up a quiz) is now available from my Moodle host, so I’m going to check into that. 
• Moodle has a gradebook which I have barely used (as my school has an electronic gradebook that includes all work, not just Moodle work), but I want to work with this more because I can use it for student feedback.

Not to mention internet tools which can be embedded in Moodle or linked to from Moodle, such as:

• Poll – Students can vote and see the results immediately.
• Survey -    My students really enjoy surveys, and these are an easy way to find out what students know about a topic before you start studying it, to get student opinions afterwards, and even for short-answer or essay questions. 
• Mindmap – great for visually showing ideas. 

There’s learning going on and you can watch it happen.  

Update:  I heard from  @eixarach on Twitter about another assessment resource: @francesblo You can also find already made content at http://collection.wiris.com/quizzes Contact us if you need more info.

It's about the learning, not the technology

I am very active on Twitter, and was recently part of a conversation about digital storytelling. I was talking about using PowerPoint, a tool that is immediately available to my students, as an incredibly versatile tool. We’ve used it for creating animated story books and for creating glogster-like posters. It has endless possibilities – which my students teach me about just about daily.photo © 2009 Meena Kadri | more info (via: Wylio)


But teachers demanded to know, but haven’t you used this tool, haven’t you used that tool. Yes, I play around with lots of different tools, and I often let my students do that, too. But the point isn’t to try out each and every new cool tool. The point is learning.

I see dozens of new tools come through my Twitter and RSS streams every day. I check a lot of them out. I also look at what value they add to my students’ learning, and at how they do that. Voicethread, for example, often starts with an image, allowing students to comment on it. Starting with an image is powerful. That has encouraged me to include images more in my teaching, both F2F and online. I’ve started adding images to all my Moodle discussion prompts because I think they help my students make connections that words by themselves won’t do.

But does that mean I’m going to add VoiceThread to my arsenal? Maybe not. If I can get the job done – using images to help my students think and providing a way for them to converse about it – using an existing mechanism (Moodle discussion), then why add the overhead of still more student IDs and passwords? My goal is not “using VoiceThread,” it’s improving student understanding.

With each potential tool, I have to ask myself, “what are the logistics?” How much time do I have to set aside for this new whiz-bang tool? Because I don’t have 25 students. I’m a secondary teacher, and we often have 150 or even 200 students. And each new tool has a learning curve – whoever thinks all kids know how to use technology without assistance has never spent time in a school computer lab. It’s not obvious to all of them.

When I first really got into using online discussion, I tried out a blog, where I posted a question, and students discussed it via comments. We all enjoyed it and the benefits of the discussion were immediately clear. But the logistics just about killed me. That’s why I decided to use Moodle, because it reduces the logistics – never eliminates them, but makes them manageable.

That way, I can focus on what I want my students to learn – the whole point of the enterprise.