The journal concept has attracted most interest - students actually keep them up to date, a most unexpected thing in a secondary school. Generally, the introduction of moodle has recieved rave reviews throughout the school. Staff are very enthusiastic about their Course in Computing Applications - a good sign. The amount of non productive work (social internet access etc.) has dramatically decreased - is it that they are using the computers anyway in a directed manner? The issue remains of dealing with students who finish the unit a lot earlier than others - do they progress to the next unit or extension work etc.
The students responded well to the immediate feedback given to assignments and journal. The effect of "1 day 12 hours" to go for an assignment has achieved 100% compliance rate ( a 1st) - I felt "displaced" for a while as my role mutated slightly (the need for chalk & talk is engrained). Some have used the journals to store study notes for their later use. Students are very self directed (clear goals and deadlines) but remarkably the students have responded to using journals to document their daily progress on the unit of work. The learning atmosphere in the classroom has changed dramatically.
The student response is interesting! As they are all "into computing" anyway they enjoy using the application you have developed and majority of these students are also software programming students who are into php, so they are following the development of moodle with furvour. I have posted up a course in Information Technology for year 12 students, as part of a 2 year course, including resources (theory notes), assignments based on competencies, quizes to test the competencies, forum and a journal. I'm not sure what the problem is with content and department guidelines - I would assume that's up to individual teachers.
These are the types of qualities I'm pursuing in Moodle. etc.įrom the other angle, the technology as a whole needs to be simple, consistent and persistent so that it keeps drawing people in. Does it promote deeper learning of this subject? Does it allow more time flexibility? Is it providing voices to students who are normally drowned out? Is it promoting the use of electronic resources (and thus greater reusability)?.
When there are advantages, though, I think you need to know them and promote them widely and vigorously. Unfortunately this does not stop some implementers. In fact, for many situations where there are face-to-face alternatives then online learning may complicate the situation too much for many people. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the advantages of online learning are not always obvious. Perhaps you have experienced (as I have, many times) what happens when even good technology is just slapped into a culture with the expectation everybody will just use it. Your concern about the enculturation of online learning is especially interesting. I'd be interested to hear more from you down the track about how the high school students have taken to online courses (I've only used Moodle with postgrads). We can provide the technology, but have yet to grapple with the elements of training of staff, changing the culture of learning to a more collaborative and sharing one, and in the case of moodle, what content is appropriate, within Dept guidelines etc.Īny thoughts, suggestions, approaches etc? staff can post and access learning resources whereas students can only access them (for obvious reasons). This also allows personalisation of the sites based on the user being either a staff member or a student.
We have implemented 'phpbb2' as our forum base, 'mambo' as our articles, subject resources, news and general Intranet interface and now I am investigating moodle as the online provider of (enrichment to begin with) courses.Īs we have a captive clientle, we authenticate each user in the applications against the same database (so during registration they choose from a drop down list of their uptodate Novell account usernames), this also allows their photo etc to be automatically included in the different apps and postings.
Our efforts are based around applications from the open source PHP community. What disease does britt have on general hospital.The computing faculty at our High School is currently revamping the student and staff Intranet with the aim of developing an interactive and collaborative teaching and learning environment.