Moodle Reflection - Aldworth

Moodle Reflection Paper – Aldworth, 6/30/2010

I had a relatively easy time using the Moodle editing function. It was decently enjoyable too. Coming in I was intimidated for a number of reasons. Over the past two years in the San Diego St. EDTEC COMET cohort, many of the courses I have taken have been laid out in the Moodle format. These courses were highly involved with numerous discussion board threads, multiple week entries each with a half a dozen links to various attachments. It was intimidating to say the least. In all, the ease in the functionality of the administrative tools, the type of course we created and the reviews of the course from the “live testing” made using Moodle for the first time a positive experience for me.

The course we created in Moodle took advantage of many of the administrative tools offered by the interface. Even the ones that we did not use, we played around with and by the end of the creation process our comfort level was quite high. Upon first starting, I decided to edit the settings on the Moodle to reduce the number of weeks shown. I adjusted this to three. I then used the text tool and added an introduction/syllabus to the top page of the Moodle. Next, I decided to add a couple forum postings for the students to add to. This was not as intimidating as I thought it would be. I linked the forums to the main page and the first week module was complete. For the second module, we decided to upload a number of political cartoons to a discussion thread. Students would respond to these and then they would have to upload their own. Using the discussion board again was a breeze. Lastly, we decided to use a wiki on module three. I tried using the built-in wiki function from Moodle, but soon realized that I didn't like the way the tool worked. We therefore decided to use www.wikispaces.com instead of using the Moodle wiki. We decided to create a link to the wikispace page. In all, we made use of many of the administrative tools, and I liked most of them. I was not too pleased with the wiki tool, but feel that wikispaces was a suitable alternative.

We created a course in Moodle that included three modules from a semester of United States History. This is an eleventh grade course and we designed three modules from a semester that would have about 12. We chose to develop at three different times of the semester of study. For our first module, we had students work on memorizing the locations of the states of the union. Through watching a video, and interacting with each other on a discussion board, students are expected to memorize the exact locations of the states. The second module had students analyze and create political cartoons. They would analyze US imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. As a deliverable for this module students would create their own political cartoon and then evaluate their peers cartoons. Lastly, students would complete a WebQuest and a wiki linked from the Moodle page dealing with the Great Depression.

We faced a bit of a challenge finding a group of students to test our project. Ultimately we found a class of about 30 students. In general they found the course “doable” and responded positively to the modules we created. Overall, students enjoyed being able to analyze and comment on each others political cartoons. They also enjoyed using the wiki. They didn't have any trouble navigating the Moodle after some initial help. I think we would probably need to better give direction as how to navigate through the Moodle interface. High school students tend to need lots of direction, and at the beginning they were a bit confused. Given the fact they had never used an learning management system, this was understandable. In all, we were happy with the results of the group beta testing.

In all, if I were to use the Moodle interface, I don't think I would change too much about this course. I do think it can be confusing to use especially for high school students. Personally I do not think administrating Moodle is intuitive enough, so if I were to run an LMS, I would opt for Blackboard or even Google sites.