Moodle Discussion Board

The pilot team of four of us met this past week to make sure that we had everything ready for our students to log on to Moodle and to verify their accounts. The beauty of Moodle is that the students can enrol themselves if you set up an enrolment key.

Each of us set up our individual sections of classes...which took awhile to figure out! We have no guide through this mess application since we are piloting it, so it has been in baby steps. We each created an opening activity that was appropriate for the upper level of the language. We also wanted to ensure that we were not doing a similar activity so that we can use this from year to year if possible. This way, the students would be forced to immediately create their accounts and have an activity in which to engage them. So far, I have only had a few emails from the students regarding technical problems, and most of those could be fixed if the students closed their browser and reopened it or if I confirmed their accounts from my account because their confirmation email arrived in their spam!

My students are completing a debate in an online forum on whether cell phones should be permitted in schools or not. This is also in accordance with the new Race to the Top argument writing.

Here is their prompt:

Here is part of a current discussion:

 

So far, I am only missing 7 students (who have until tonight at midnight) who need to create their accounts and participate in the debate. It is interesting to see how many of the students have already personalized their accounts by changing fonts, colors, and uploading pictures. Students were provided with a document (on Moodle of course!) on appropriate netiquette on discussion boards.

I spent a good deal of the summer creating "quizzes" on Moodle that will be part of the literary analysis for Spanish 4 Honors. Every time they have short story or poetry analysis, they will complete half on paper and the other half on Moodle (which will grade itself! YAY!). There is a lower risk of cheating because Moodle will scramble all of the questions and the answers, and I have set it up so that students can only take each quiz once. I felt lost the first time that I had a hybrid college class where a portion was online and another was in class; I had no idea how to participate in a discussion board. I am hoping that these students will feel more confident upon entering college if they have practice with a program like Moodle.

Although this ate up the last half of my summer, I am excited to see where it will take these classes. My only fear is that the county will say that we cannot use Moodle next year or that we switch to another server and lose everything that we've been doing!!!