Multimedia Moodle!

Yesterday, my mini-department team met to talk about the multimedia elements in Moodle. Since so many sites are blocked about Mt. Hebron (and Howard County in general), we have had to find other ways to upload music and videos to Moodle or provide a link and have the students view the material at home. I thought that uploading various files to Moodle would be similar to other Web 2.0 applications, but like everything else on Moodle, there are a million options and settings. I have a video that I want my students to watch next week that is a depiction of the short story they are going to read, but completely done in Legos! I embedded the video and provided them with the link to the site in case the video does not work for them.

With Moodle, I feel like we are constantly creating a back-up in case the technology fails. While I know this is good practice, I cannot even begin to add up all of the time that I have spent on this program this year. I know that is has been worth it, especially for the practice that students are getting by having a hybrid class.

Today did not take too long, and it is a busy week, so we only met for about 30 minutes to go over some settings and make sure that we are not only attempting to embed resources but also provide links to them.

I think next month we are going to work on the mid-year survey that we need the students to complete in compliance with having the program approved for us to use this year. I am hopeful that we will get to use Moodle again next year, but I suppose that time will tell!

ASPEN...take 4

I led the FINAL session on ASPEN for today. It was a disastrous day at school with millions of excuses as to why students did not have their projects to turn in, so I did not have the most positive attitude going into the session. My team leader had a few things to discuss, but that did not take long because we had just met on Friday for the professional day.

This last ASPEN session was fairly easy because we only had to change one setting in the ASPEN gradebook settings, and then, walk through how to add a course recommendation for each student. We will not complete recommendations until January, but this process does allow us to mark specific classes for the students without them being able to change their schedules (on the old paper copies). Students will also no longer be able to forge signatures because there are no more paper copies! YAY! This will not change the time that recommendations will take, however. I still want to have a conference with each child about what they are considering for the following year. It typically takes me 2-3 class periods to meet with each student and talk about college and course recommendations (since I teach mostly juniors).

My department was very receptive to this change on ASPEN and they have decided that this is the easiest change thus far! Walking them through the steps did not take that long. This session was slightly difficult only because teachers cannot actually practice with this, or they will be completing the recommendations for students! I am sure that they will have more questions once they start the actual recommendation process.

I am thankful for my department that they now have everything that they need in order to be successful with ASPEN this year. I know that other departments have not had as much support, and I have made myself available to them as well. I'm sure there will be follow-up sessions all year for this one!

Only one person needed some follow-up help with Weebly today, and it was simply to start linking to other pages in the Weebly, websites, and personal files. Once we practiced with linking the various items, she felt very comfortable with each type. Rote practice for her is the way to go! She had some other questions regarding the contact form that is available on Weebly and how any contacts from the kids will be sent directly to her school email address. Teachers are loving having technology to supplement our old gradebook program that was all-in-one. Eventually, ASPEN will be the all-in-one, but it's just not there yet. I like all of those features on Moodle, but I also know that my school will never get there because of the difficulty of accessing Moodle.

I'm sure there may be more Weebly questions in the coming week. One difficulty that I've had with this internship are the follow-up emails with questions and need for immediate help. People email me questions that I could not possibly answer unless I was looking at their computer screen. In some ways, I kind of feel like I know what it is like to be a computer support technician over the phone! I can only imagine how our technology specialist feels on a daily basis...and she is so calm and supportive!

Moodle Quizzes

I keep forgetting to post about Moodle! Moodle has seriously saved my life this year! It was a ton of prep work over the summer, but it is so worth it now. In our honors program, (the four of us who are piloting this program) we are designing literary analysis where our students still complete a portion of the analysis on paper and the other portion on Moodle. These are set up as quizzes on Moodle...quizzes that grade themselves! Before this, the kids were completing 6-7 page literary analysis. Multiply that times 25-30 students and multiple classes, and grading used to take forever. Now, all of the objective questions are online!

This has seriously cut down on cheating because Moodle scrambles the questions and the answers so that students do not have the same question order. We used to watch them in the hallways before school and you could see kids trying to copy each others answers. Now, we can see when each student started and stopped the quizzes and get an immediate grade report. The students also like it because they can see which ones they got incorrect and have immediate feedback after the quiz window closes.

We met last month, not to work on our actual quizzes (we had mostly made these over the summer) but instead to set the quiz settings and the feedback possibilities. There are SO many options with Moodle that it can get overwhelming, and I did not understand all of the options. A colleague of mine had done a good bit of research over the summer, and answered many of our questions.

I cannot get enough of Moodle this year! My students are turning in projects on Monday on Moodle so that all I have to do to open their presentations is click on each one! I am excited that they will be all in one place this year!!!

Weebly

This afternoon I led a session on Weebly. This one actually took quite some time because of setting up the account, and then, playing around with all of the features. I planned on giving a lot of time so that teachers could actually get their websites up. The session lasted an hour and a half even with just five teachers! I am actually thankful that there were not more teachers there because they all had so many different questions and I was busy jumping from person to person to help them with their unique questions.

The overall presentation of information went well, and I felt like it was smooth. This time, I offered an incentive to come...a wireless Mac mouse. I thought in offering that, that I would get more participants, but I did find out that many teachers in the science department are already using Weebly as a class website. Others are also committed to the end of the quarter grading/report cards or are busy coaching the end of the fall sports season.

We talked about how Weebly can be a teacher website, a teacher/student presentational tool, and a way to organize information for taking students to the computer lab. The teachers that came today were mainly looking for the class website aspect of this site, but everyone was surprised how easy it was.

Tomorrow, we have a professional day without students, so I offered to provide follow-up if anyone needs help. Most of the attendees said that they were going to go home to play with their new sites some more, and would come with questions/problems tomorrow. We'll see if anyone takes me up on the offer. Everyone was so thankful and seemed really excited. I have been excited seeing others this way about technology, especially since people are not this way with ASPEN.

The one discouraging thing about today was the Internet access. Our building is supposed to have wireless everywhere, but the wireless access in my room was SO slow during the session. People were enthused by the drag and drop nature of Weebly, but the drop portion was taking forever to load. I may hold the next session in the media center if it continues.

Next Monday, I will lead the final session on ASPEN with my department. This one should be an easy one, but I am certain that there will still be numerous questions!!! Here's to almost finishing my internship!