Evolving Education

I am now hosting this site myself…

Please go to www.tonitwiss.com/evolvingeducation

Also check out www.tonitwiss.com/newmediatech

Thanks,

Toni

Recently I attended the TUANZ conference where Miguel Guhlin was keynote speaker.  While I had been watching his blog for a while through subscription to his RSS feed, it wasn’t until he spoke and made it all seem real that I decided to get into the world of blogging.  So I started this site… and posted… once!  BUT to redeem myself I have started two other blog sites which I update a number of times a week and am just about to start my third.  Check out www.tonitwiss.com/newmediatech for my list of the coolest and latest Web2.0 developments – not even remotely educational!  That’s what this site is for…

So, when reading Miguel’s post a short while ago about Moodle I felt that really I should do something about replying – and kill two birds with one stone – and post to this poor neglected blog!

I developed my own moodle towards the end of last year, as the school intranet system was not up and running and I was too excited to wait!  So I secured the name myndrocket.com and some web hosting and Viola!  You can check it out at www.myndrocket.com/moodle/moodle but it’s all locked down (hopefully!) as I wanted to make sure I was keeping the kids safe as this was my own initiative if it all goes wrong it comes back to me – not the IT staff!

Miguel asked the following questions

What are your successes?

Too many to mention but here are the best:  In New Zealand we have standards based assessment – the students are both internally and externally assessed.  They can gain the following grades; not achieved, achieved, merit, excellence.  I trialled moodle with my Level 3 Media Studies class in the final term of last year – just before their external exam.  I taught the whole unit using Moodle and the results were phenomenal.  12 students (out of 37) gained Excellence in the standard they sat – compared with national figures of 10%.

 Do other teachers at your campus use Moodle?

No

How have you adapted your curriculum for teaching online?

Lessons are highly content based with more of the discussions happening on-line for homework.  We are getting into so much more depth within the lessons.  The students are able to consolidate the day’s learning at home particularly via discussion forums.  As a teacher it is an amazing feeling to see typically weaker students responding to a brighter students post by saying “Oh, I get it now… so what you are saying is this…”  Students have a lot more time to digest information without it being whipped away from them as soon as the teacher is finished with it.  Also, they are having in-depth discussions with students they wouldn’t normally talk to in class.  Moodle seems to bring down the walls between students.  Also, collaborative work can be posted onto the website – rather than making a poster to go on the wall it goes on Moodle and can be revisited time and time again.

What did you do first when starting with Moodle?

Uploaded all of the class notes.

How long did it take to train your students to use Moodle?

A lot less time than it took to train myself!  I navigated them through the site on my interactive board and then introduced elements day by day ie. the first day was just how to get a doc, then we did discussions, then assignments etc.

How do you monitor students in Moodle?

About twice a week I log in as administrator and check the logs.  I read all posts and messages between students.  I have shown them how I do this and they are aware that I am actively watching – but I have explained why; that this is new technology and if it goes wrong it is all on me to face the music.  It takes about 5 mins each time I check – so maybe 10 mins a week.

What are 5 strategies you would recommend to teachers using Moodle?

Start effective discussions.  I have found that the students (even seniors) really aren’t good at generating their own discussion topics.  So I will start a new Forum and then post a number of different topics that they can choose to discuss – they can still add their own – but usually they don’t.

Compress PDFs before you post them.

Watch out when you post links to URLs that shift eg. for us the news websites as they disappear after about 3 weeks and then you must pay a subscription to view archives.

If you say you will put work up – make sure you do.  If you don’t and they go looking for it and it’s not there they lose faith in it.

(Sorry only four)

Has on-task motivation increased?

Absolutely.  There is less down time in class – especially as kids can prepare by doing readings if they wish.  It is easier to set up classes so you teach at different levels as groups of students can work on projects set up on Moodle while you work with a small group.

How do you deal with technology access? Limited resources?

I teach at a very well resourced school.  I have 15 G5 Macs around my room and many students bring their own laptops (although they do not have internet access on their own machines).  All students have access to the internet at home – though not all have broadband connections.

Does it take more time to teach with Moodle or less?

Hmmm….  At first more… but then you change your style of teaching and stop doing things that you would have done without it.  For example – you still create worksheets but you might just put them on-line instead.  I upload as I go so during class if we go through a powerpoint or create notes using the interactive board I will up-load immediately after class or when there is a break from me teaching ie. when the kids are working on an activity.  It only takes seconds.  Once you get the knack of posting good discussion topics homework is a lot easier to set and assignments are very easy to mark using the assignment section

Have you had any pushback from parents, teachers, and/or administrators?

Nope – not yet.  The parents on the whole are really happy as they can see where their kids are up to.  Interestingly some students weren’t interested to begin with – so I just made everything available in print for the number that said they didn’t want to use it and gave them slightly different homework ie. instead of post to one discussion topic and respond to one other person’s post they might have to write a half page response to the topic (which I printed off for them).  Very quickly they all began to use it!

 And a question that I would ask… 

How do you work the hotpotatoes… I just can’t get that going…  I know it’s not very profound or anything but I do want to know!

So, thanks Miguel for turning me into a ‘blogging geek’.  It is now 11pm on a school night! and I am blogging.  Crazyness!

A course for Year 10s. They come to me for 4-5 80 minute sessions looking at ICT. I have decided to make blogging the theme of the moment for these girls and am looking at getting them to set up their own learning blogs. Most have Bebo so we have already established that they are blogging already so we are distinguishing these as personal blogs.

We will use learnerblogs for hosting. We have already done a lesson on web safety and search engines. We looked at the difference between search engines and portals and at how people make money on the web – this was a good angle to take because from this came the more dodgy aspects of how people make money from web surfers but in a very real world sense. It was amazing how naive they were about handing out their contact details etc. etc. so this provided an opportunity for some really good conversations.

They were fairly unanimous in their love of Google and weren’t too keen to swap to any new search engines even though we looked at kartoo and ujiko. They found these fun but only used them as a gimmick and when they really wanted something they went back to Google.

Hopefully my course will be really fun and beneficial to the students. I will update this page with my resources and specific lesson ideas.

So, it’s been a while since I set up this blog, but I’ve been trying to get it in my head as to how I should run my blogs – I don’t want to clutter this one with readings and theory but I also don’t want this to be a personal blog. So I’ve decided I will have three – the other two will be hosted at tonitwiss.com and I will link to them if there is anything really relevant.

So this blog will be about my teaching – in particular ICT in education. What I’m doing, what works, what doesn’t work, how I could do things better etc. etc.

It’s my big goal to become a lead teacher in the field of integrating new technology and right now I feel that I am right up there doing heaps of cool stuff, but there is so much that I am forgetting to use it in my classes as I haven’t had a place that I could brain dump and plan.

So I guess this is it. That means that this blog will be both planning and reflection – I guess the idea is that the two eventually merge together! At least that’s what all the theorists say should be happening!

I have decided – after much reading, listening to other teachers, more reading and thinking, that blogging really is an amazing tool. Web2.0 technology has made uploading to the internet accessable to everyone – teachers and students alike. There is an amazing wealth of information that our students can all contribute to and learn from – broadening their educational horizons. I had always thought that I couldn’t do a blog because I didn’t have anything new to say or to teach anyone. While at the recent tuanz conference in Rotorua, I had the pleasure of listening to Miguel Guhlin, he made the point that we blog for ourselves not for others – if others are interested they will join in too, but primarily we blog as self reflection and to consolidate our thinking about a topic… So, I can do that.