Moodle Project Paper - Jensen

Administrative Functions
A couple of the administrative functions that I like best in Moodle are the different levels of access privileges and the the grade book. I find that assigning students and adults different access privileges is useful and necessary, but I also like to make my Moodle site public, allowing parents to have guest access so they can keep up to date with work their son or daughter is doing in class. While this does allow guests to do things like access files, view links, and check the class calendar, Moodle does not allow them into any areas where student identities are displayed, such as a forum or chat. If used on a limited scale, the grade book is also very useful, especially for assignments like quizzes that can be automatically scored by Moodle. When students take this type of assessment, their scores are automatically added into the grade book, saving the teacher time and giving the student automatic feedback.

Course Creation
Moodle offers two ways to organize a course, by week or by topic. We chose to organize our course by topic because our lessons were not all one week long. Organizing by topic allowed us to provide all the necessary support files, links, and assignments in one centralized location. Within each week or topic block, Moodle offers resources and activities to add to the course. The resource menu allows the editor to add things like links to files or directories, and compose webpages. The activity menu allows the editor to create assignments, forums, wikis, chats, as well as several other choices. Our group used the quiz, wiki, and lesson functions in the activity menu when creating our course.

Editing Functionality
Course editing can be done by pressing the 'turn editing on' button. After doing this, many options are available throughout the homepage of the course. The instructor can make topics (or weeks) visible or invisible to students, he can add resources and activities, and change the overall course settings. Overall, I found editing easy, I knew my way around. Many of the course options are buried deep within the 'settings' menu and it took some trial and error to make the changes I wanted.

Pros and Cons
I have had lots of experience using Moodle with my algebra classes. It has lots of different tools to use with students, and the grade book feature is really helpful. My only complaint is that it is not very user-friendly. It takes a while to learn where to find everything, and even when you do, the changes don't always post like you wanted them to. Sometimes it takes several tries before the size of some text will change on the live site.

Quadratics and Vertical Motion
Our course is designed for algebra students at the middle to high school level who are in need of some review and enrichment with the quadratic formula and graphing parabolas. Our first two lessons cover graphing parabolas and solving the quadratic formula. We used lesson activities and a quiz and forum to help teach and assess these concepts. Our third lesson in a group project about vertical motion. Students work together in groups to solve for the time it takes an object to hit the ground after being thrown or dropped. Groups work to solve and graph their problem in a wiki posted on the Moodle page.

Course Evaluation
My partner, Brian Campbell, tested our course with his high school level summer school students. Most of these students are ELL's and they struggle in math. This course was meant to be taught in a blended learning format with the students and teacher working together in person as well as completing work and interacting online. Overall, students found the course to be fun and engaging. They liked the lessons in the first two topics and enjoyed taking a quiz online (I don't think they had done that before). Several students remarked that they liked taking the quiz online because they received instant feedback. Many of them struggled with the forums which could be due to the fact that they are ELL's or to a lack of experience expressing themselves in writing in a math class. As a whole, students struggled with the vertical motion project. They found the wiki difficult to navigate and the content was hard for them also. In hindsight, I don't think we should have used the wiki function in Moodle. As I was creating it, I found it very difficult to use, but I was hoping that if I set up all the pages for students to use and included liks to easily navigate between pages, they would be able to focus on the math and not so much on technical challenges. I really liked the quiz and lesson features. They are easy to use and very customizable. I would definitely use those again.

VDILS
To make the course easy to understand for our students, we followed the VDILS principles. Each assignment had defined due dates, deliverables were specified within each lesson, and objectives were outlined clearly in the course syllabus. In addition, we created a forum titled, 'Help Me!' for students to use whenever they had a question about the course content or about how to use Moodle. Anyone could reply to posts in this forum, but a student must post questions there before asking the teacher. This way, students can get used to interacting with one another online and they can take greater responsibility for their own learning.

Contributions
I working closely with my partner Brian to create this course. I wrote the first draft of the syllabus, and created the Vertical Motion Project lesson. I was also responsible for editing the Moodle page itself and setting the administrative features. Brian created the two PowerPoint presentations for the first two lessons and I posted them on the site. Brian also created the quiz for lesson one and I set up the 'Help Me!' and 'Quadratic Solutions' forums. Brian completed all of the testing for our group and shared the student responses with me.