The design and development of Moodle is guided by a “social constructionist pedagogy”. With the five guiding points below, I thought that maybe using M-101 to share our best practices in Moodle with more than just our subject-alike colleagues could help with the curriculum development of Master Courses.
- All of us are potential teachers as well as learners - in a true collaborative environment we are both.
- We learn particularly well from the act of creating or expressing something for others to see.
- We learn a lot by just observing the activity of our peers.
- By understanding the contexts of others, we can teach in a more transformational way (constructivism)
- A learning environment needs to be flexible and adaptable, so that it can quickly respond to the needs of the participants within it.
So you have selected to be a member of this Virtual PLC because of one of these two reasons. You are currently using Moodle with students or are a TIER 2 English teacher. I can see from the list of members that some of you using Moodle with students have been doing it going on three years, so please share your expertise. While the English teachers with their new netbooks may not even be ready to jump in yet, but may be interested in the benefits of using Moodle. Hopefully this experience will help everyone get ideas from their peers on better ways to utilize Moodle more than a website.
The heart of Moodle is courses that contain activities and resources. Moodle is a curriculum/instructional/assessment tool, unlike a website. So it is more important that you understand curriculum design instead of website design. There are about 20 different types of activities available (forums, glossaries, wikis, assignments, quizzes, choices, databases etc) and each can be customized quite a lot. The main power of this activity-based model comes in combining the activities into sequences and groups, which can help you guide students through learning.
You are encourage to follow along (lurk), however I may ask some of you to show-n-tell some of the examples of what I see happening in Student Moodle. The first example in the Show-N-Tell is the Welcome to Moodle 101. I have the good fortune to have the opportunity when working in Moodle to see a lot of excellent uses of Moodle with students. Therefore, we will use this M101 to share what our peers are doing and for you to ask any questions you have about Moodle.
Happy Moodling…
PS – if you know of anyone else that may be interested please let me know through email. We will add members throughout the year…