The Good Teacher

Act 1: The Pretty Good Teacher wants to be a better one

 She wanted to do things with her students that she had never been able to do before. Things that were fun, things that were exciting, things that students actually enjoyed doing. Mostly, things that made her students WANT to learn.

"See how the students are simply filling in a form to create entries in the glossary?" he asked. "That's Moodle."

an online debate 

"How do you have an online debate?" she asked.

"They are using a discussion forum to talk with each other and are even rating each others' posts according to criteria we developed together," he said.

students seemed engaged and interested in their work.

"I use Moodle to complement and enhance my classroom instruction. I might, for example, just upload a Power Point presentation to the site for my students to review or post links to a good web site. Or we might do something more social, more collaborative, as you have seen today."

, "better."

go to Moodle and create a poll about global warming to administer to students here at our school and to students at our online partner schools in Canada and South Africa in order to see to what extent we all agree on the issue. We can design the survey together, invite our partners to take it, and have a discussion with them about where we see eye to eye and where we don't. And that is potentially a rich, valuable educational experience that we could not have without Moodle, don't you agree?"

the moodle community at moodle.org where she found other teachers like herself and lots of people interested in the moodle thing.

. And the chat room became very confusing when everyone spoke at the same time. Frankly, the lesson was a flop.

she didn't like looking foolish.

She knew he was right. She had expected Moodle to work some sort of magic on her students, but she had not really designed the kind of good, effective lessons she normally planned.

"What would you advise your students to do in a situation like this?" asked Mr. Dougis.

She decided to give Moodle another chance.

"What do I want my students to learn?" And she wrote down her objectives.

Then she asked herself, "What resources will we need to make the lesson work?" and she collected and organized her resources.

Finally, she asked herself, "What is it I want my students to actually do in order to be successful?" And she designed her activities.

wiki

Before going to the lab, she discussed the lesson with her students and showed them how to work in a wiki. She posted clear instructions about the lesson to the web site, reinforcing what she had said in class (and unconsciously stating a contract with her students).

The next day, they went to the lab.

While a few of the students did have a little trouble the first few minutes getting used to the wiki, most of them actually caught on very quickly, and it was a pleasure to see how they helped each other get up and running.

After about forty-five minutes, almost all students had contributed to the wiki. Some of their web pages were surprisingly good.

As the Pretty Good Teacher circulated around the lab, she encouraged the students and complimented their work. Of course, she also had to remind a couple of students that playing card games on the computer was not part of the lesson.

While she could not say that the lesson was perfect, the Pretty Good Teacher was pleased. The students had not only learned a lot, they seemed to enjoy doing so.

She was surprised to see that some students had continued to work on their pages from home. They had added graphics and links and some shocking, but enthusiastic, text formatting. She had not assigned this as homework, they just wanted to do it. 

When class met the next day, several of the students were quite excited about Moodle. One said, "When my father asked me what we had done in school, I showed him the wiki. He thought it was great!" It was obvious that she was proud of the work she and her classmates had done. "maybe we should think of a name for our online classroom."

They thought of several good possibilities and decided to vote to pick the best one. The Pretty Good Teacher said, "We do not have to vote right now. I will post a choice to our new web site and you can take a few days to decide."

Almost everyone agreed that this was a sensible idea. But a couple of students looked unhappy about it.

"What's wrong?" the Pretty Good Teacher asked one of them as the class was leaving.

"We don't have the Internet at my house, so I can't vote," said the student.

But she had an Internet connection in her classroom. And there were quite a few online computers in the school's media center.

posting lesson plans to Moodle. Not very exciting, but the parents seemed to appreciate it. After a while, she began setting up little practice quizzes to help students prepare for tests. Together with another class, the students collaborated on articles for the school newspaper. They submitted rough drafts of papers for peer review and discussed class matters online. Some students even used the chat room for occasional online study sessions. And once they discovered instant messaging and blogs, things really got crazy.

After a few months, Moodling became second nature to them. It felt natural. It was fun.

And other teachers at the school began to Moodle. Sometimes, they met with their wireless laptops at a local cafe for "Moodle and Coffee" sessions. The teachers began to look forward to spending this time together--even a couple of the teachers who had made negative remarks in the staff room.

After some time, colleagues began asking The Pretty Good Teacher for help and advice. The Pretty Good Teacher was happy to put on a few workshops. She even taught a professional development course in the evening.

One of her colleagues even asked about becoming an assistant teacher in one of The Pretty Good Teacher's classes. The Pretty Good Teacher was not sure about that. On one hand, she was always happy to support a fellow teacher. On the other hand, she did not want a new teacher "messing up" a course.

And then she heard about roles and the problem was solved in a matter of minutes. First, The Pretty Good Teacher created an "Assistant Teacher" role with limited privileges. Then, she assigned that role to her colleague. As her colleague became more and more proficient, The Pretty Good Teacher made the assistant teacher role more and more powerful. After a few weeks, the assistant teacher was just another teacher in the course. She had almost the same privileges as The Pretty Good Teacher. It worked out very well.

In fact, she learned a thing or two from her assistant. She showed The Pretty Good Teacher how to save whatever appeared on the Smart Board as an image and to upload those images to Moodle. The Pretty Good Teacher began to upload her lecture notes to a forum where students could discuss them. The night before a big test, that forum was always quite busy.

The Pretty Good Teacher liked collaborating this way. And like all Pretty Good Teachers, she especially liked learning from her students and her colleagues.

weekly podcast for our new partner class in Australia!

we should set up a forum where we can share on a regular basis And he was right. She had, indeed, become a Very Good Teacher.

She had to convince the school faculty council and the school director, but she finally succeeded in getting some free days for her trip to the next MoodleMoot. Her school administrators even covered the expenses of her trip, writing it off as "professional development"