Teaching Good Practices (K-12)

Assignments

My students have to think harder before they bring in their assignment. How can I stimulate them?
- One possible way is using the workshop activity where students can be required to peer assess each other's work before getting comments about their work. They then make changes and submit to teacher. It's amazing how peer assessment puts the torch to a body of work before the teacher sets eyes on it! (Jason Hando)
- I am having success using the workshop module for peer assessment. This module offers at least four different methods to organize and record peer assessment.

The course needs to be accessible and engaging from the onset. The "why" and "what's in it for me" need to be addressed in every assignment so students are motivated and invested personally. Rather than bullet listing objectives, use engaging, active writing to inspire the activity.

Collaboration

How can you let students write a text together?
- The Wiki module is ideal for this.
- Before using the Wiki module, students might use the Chat module to share ideas on the assigned writing topic. They can then later view the log of the chat. This synchronous use of the Moodle is ideal for the student whose writing skills are weak. Peers model to each other ideas and the expressive language for their ideas.

Course Design

What course formats and settings are best for specific grade-levels?

I use Google Docs for collaborative assignments and then have the link posted to Moodle.

How to learn in an e-learning format:

Don't overload the learn, try to limit the ways that you allow students to learn each assignment. For example, instead of giving 5 different resources to learn the content, choose two ways such as audio and written. This will allow for students to not be overwhelmed by course content. You will have a chance later in the course to offer another format for the students to learn from.

Discussion

How to use a forum in a class?
- Consider rating by the quality of the post rather than quantity.
- You can assign one student to be the class blogger for a week/month. This student posts a record of the day (notes, assignments, activities, funny statements). This helps motivate the student who is the blogger, informs students who are absent what they missed, and extends the physical classroom onto your Moodle.
How can you let students collaborate on a forum?
How do you organize an on line discussion with Moodle?

Literature Circles

Basic literature circles have a number of jobs. Mine have 4 core jobs and an accessory job: Discussion Director, Illustrious Illustrator, Literary Luminary, and Creative Connector. (Students also complete Word Wizard.)

When students complete their weekly job, they go to the Moodle site to post their job in a forum. Once that is complete, students must post comments. --Jose Moreno 20:45, 25 October 2006 (CDT)

Quiz

For language courses (in K-12 setting), you could also use "Drag and drop" questions (not default, you have to install it by yourself) as students love it. Here is a tutorial: Drag and Drop question tutorial

The Quiz module is also a great formative assessment tool. We have the entire OAT question database loaded into Moodle for teachers to use to access areas to cover, weaknesses, strengths... It allows teachers the opportunity for real data driven instruction with no impact on their class times.

Documentation