real time... moodle on the wall

How to use a teachers page on moodle in a real time classroom... quick and dirty.
How to add a bit of techno-snap to a lesson in 15 minutes.

Imagine I am teaching from Straight Forward Advanced – Chapter 5

I need some supplementary material and I know I have a room with a projector (maybe even an IWB)

What do I do?

Step 1 - Create a warmer.

• The teachers book suggests writing 4 names on the boar... YAWN!
• I copy and paste 4 pictures into a moodle page an Bob's your uncle... you have 4 pictures on the wall of you classroom!
  
  
  
  
  

Step 2  - The next activity in the book is a snarly reading activity with some fairly tricky words in it, even for me, so I can create a glossary in Moodle which can have many functions.

1. Acts as a vocabulary box but without the need for cutting up little pieces of paper. Teachers after all should not be allowed to use scissors unsupervised.
2. Students can be involved in making the definitions – they learn while making life much easier for you. 
3. Words can be added to throughout the week so by your review session on Friday you have an awesome bank of words and you can....
4. ...create a hangman game with. Then sit back and watch your students play happily while you take a na... mark their home work. 
5. You can also share the glossaries with your colleagues (making you very popular) so you get the benefit of several classes worth of extra vocab feeding into one dynamic beast. Multiply this by every chapter of every course book and Moodle glossaries may take over the world. Use with caution.
   
   
   

Step 3 is the grammar... no one likes it but there it is!

1. Instead of copying 12 pages from murphy – come on everyone does it – you can add a link to a page from the British Council. Stick it on the wall, explain it, write over it and then do the nice little exercise at the end.
2. It is embedded in Moodle so even the British council site is all nice and branded – suits you sir!
3. You could also find some more links to on-line activities which students can do on the board or you can write your own worksheet to hand out and then put it on Moodle for next time.

Because yes there will always be a next time!

Friendly moodle - signposts

In my attempts to make moodle more friendly, particularly for foreign students I have been thinking a lot about sign posting. Not in the traditional sense of arrows which point one way or the other but more about providing a platform that is easy for students to navigate by using links and icons.

To an extent I think I had some success in this area with the LTC moodle and the beautifully designed icons which were both visually striking and containing relevant information. In my IELTS course I am slightly restricted by the confines of the course layout so there is no possibility for big icons as such.

What I started with was a set of bullet points directing students to activities which they should complete before starting on their course. 

It is clear that this set of instructions was lacking in some way when a student asked why there was no practice test to ascertain level built into the course.

What I did to improve this situation was to rewrite the section into as set of points each of which including a link which takes students straight to the item they need to read or complete. This has the effect of removing at least one stage of the process and giving students a more straightforward link to the information you need them to have.

Moodle friendly: friendly moodle

In an earlier post I was pondering how to make classroom materials moodle friendly so that an IELTS course could be delivered through the platform as a distance course. I believe I have been largely successful in that task although time and students will be the judge of that. However a piece of feedback from one of the initial students to use the course was that the course was unsuitable because it was missing certain elements. Elements which I had put into the course because as the student quite rightly pointed out they are quite important for the study of IELTS. It can them be assumed that the problem is not the course content but moodle navigation. After some discussions with colleagues it seems the problem is the inverse to the initial one of making moodle friendly courses in as much as we need to make moodle courses friendly to the user.

I have not yet worked out how to do this but my first step has been to put a link with pictures to the teacher profiles so it is clear how to contact them with an additional skype button so students are made aware that it is, not only ok but, encouraged to use skype as a means of communication. To me this is just a cosmetic difference but may indeed make students feel more welcome on the site the larger task will be to make the site easily navigable for students whose native language is not English. Perhaps in this case the tab settings to reduce scroll of death are not helpful and should be removed to make way for visible (and larger) icons.

… to be continued

Creating the quiz chain.

1. Create all of your quiz files in hot potatoes.
2. Use the hot potatoes masher to create a unit or chain. (click here for a masher tutorial)
3. If you want to edit your index.htm do it now. I used Kompozer, free and relatively easy to use for the novice. 
4. Go back to your quiz files and set the 'next exercise URL' 
5. Set the 'next exercise URL' for your final quiz to index.htm (assuming you haven't changed the name from the masher default)
6. Make sure that all of the files are in 1 folder. Create a .zip file with that folder ready to upload it to moodle (you can do it by uploading single files but that will take much longer)
7. In moodle turn editing on and then go to add an activity - Hot Potatoes Quiz
8. Select choose or upload file
9. Upload your .zip file and click on 'unzip'
10. You will then need to select the file for the 1st quiz in your chain (not the .jms or the .htm) select choose. 
11. Make sure you change 'add quiz chain' to YES and 'show next quiz' to YES
12. All of the other options will depend on your course and your moodle
13. Click save and fingers crossed you will have a chain of quizzes!

Mashing in moodle - or a quiz chain

In moodle you can upload a single hot potato file as an activity. You should also be able to upload multiple hot potato files and create a quiz chain whereby students are led from one to the next in an order specified by the course creator. I know this is possible because I have done it using instructions from the moodle forum here.

As you can see the  End of unit quiz has been listed here in 4 sections but the little closed eye shows that students would only see quiz 1. I am in the process of trying to create the same kind of chain again with different files for the next unit and, although I am 99% certain I am doing exactly the same as before, I cannot get it to work.







Today, when I follow the instructions from the forum above I got the first file in the chain but not the others. After a considerable amount of messing around I have discovered a few things. The most important of which is that if start the chain with the second file it works fine so the problem must be in the link between exercise 1 and exercise 2.

The problem was indeed the link between exercises 1 and 2, the important thing here, it seems, is making sure you have all of the links set up correctly. In your quiz file under: options - configure output - buttons. You need to set the next exercise URL using the .htm files you created when you used the masher. This seems to have solved my problem anyway.

This is also the solution to the problem I had with my 1st quiz chain which was the error message "sorry the requested file could not be found" after the last quiz in the chain. If you set the next exercise URL to be index.htm you will send your students to the contents page created when you built the masher unit in hot potatoes. The best thing about this is that I was able to make a simple edit of that page so it looked something like this.

Including the hyperlink which takes you back to the moodle course also solves the problem that I could find no obvious way of making the quizzes open in a new window.

I will follow this post with step by step instructions for creating a quiz chain.

the potential student benefits

Some thoughts that came up during the London meeting regarding how the different aspects of the Moodle can be utilized to most benefit students and teachers.
 
Grammar
The grammar section to my mind works most effectively in class as a resources that allows teachers to spend individual time with each student. In the computer room teachers can deliver a review lesson without having to select one grammar topic that most students have an issue with. By virtue of the fact that moodle provides both grammatical explanations and exercises students can be directed by their teacher to the topic that they most need to practice (this is not restricted to grammar by any means but I see grammar as the most likely subject for individual in class learning). In essence what this does is allows each individual student to practice what they need to and the teacher can circulate the class and answer questions as required. The only way to achieve such individual attention in a non-virtual class would be for the teacher to copy materials for each student. This may be achievable in a class of 3 but would be extremely impractical for 12 students.

Reading and Listening
Both passive language skills that students need to and should work on out side of class. There are numerous possibilities for these resources to be used by teachers in class however having a platform, much like a library, where students can access reading and listening material at their level means that they can easily get to it. In the future i see this as being more and more functional as students can use it on mobile devices while travelling or at home in the evenings. This is an infinitely more practical and cost effective way of encouraging listening and reading outside of school that lending books and tapes to students who may or may not return them.

Vocabulary
The vocabulary section of moodle is something that I see as growing and developing as students and teachers use it more. There is huge possibilities for class lists, for levels, for textbooks, for exams, the list really is endless and moodle allows you to merge lists, tag lists and upload and download them meaning that teachers can do a variety of things with them from having their own online vocabulary box which can be used to create games, to a constantly growing set of word lists from textbooks and courses which can be manipulated in many ways.

Hiatus or terminus

Due to contractual reasons that are not to be gone into here, I have finished work (hopefully temporarily) on the LTC moodle but it is in a good place. There are three courses up and running with really nice content in them and we managed to, more or less satisfactorily, create the bridge between moodle and MEC. This involved a little screenshot video which shows students and teachers how to navigate the somewhat murky waters of the MEC log-in system. The branding of the site looks awesome, with a little html help from the web team the buttons re-organise themselves when you make the screen size change, not so important on the computer but a must for the tablets. Then there is all the things I want to do in the future... so fingers crossed they will have me back.

The upgrade

I can't not mention the upgrade. In the process of branding the site we also upgraded from moodle 1.9 to moodle 2.3. In theory this was a brilliant thing and in the long run will make my life much easier but at the time there may have been quiet tears, sneakily shed into my pillow when awake at three in the morning dreaming about html editors, csv files and LTC branded buttons.
Moodle 2.3 has much enhanced usability and a lot more time saving features allowing me to do some cool stuff that I couldn't do on 1.9. Unfortunately the reverse was also true and I had to spend a week relearning how to do some admin tasks and fixing some of the problems created in the upgrade. Although the sense of achievement when it was finally all fixed up and working was quite pleasing.

Intermediate and the re-design

After battling with scroll of death and some long conversations with some nerds about a good user interface we came up with this.



The idea being that each skill (there is one more to come - functions) has its own button, designed by the LTC designers. This means that every course page not only looks the same but, from a student point of view, all of the information they want to see is on screen with no scrolling.
Practically how this works is of course by using a scroll of death which is only seen by admin users so all of the pages can be accessed and edited by moodle admin. Behind each skills button is a contents page which looks very similar to the course page. The side bar blocks have been set to appear in the same place on every page so they eye is not distracted by different information.
The contents page looks a bit like this.


Then after the contents page students can navigate to their grammar point, pronunciation point or reading topic of choice. The grammar page needs to contain some more information about what each topic contains. Some are fairly self explanatory, and if being used in a teacher directed environment it doesn't matter so much but for self access purposes you cannot always expect students to know what a modal verb is.
The final page of the sequence is much the same as it was in version one but of course has been branded and has a slightly nicer lay out (in my humble opinion anyway)



So there you have the structure of the intermediate course. The rest of the site will be made it its image!
A massive thank you must be said to the designers and the web team for the buttons, the branding and the upgrade!!
Oh and Anthony for listening to me whinge....

Pre-intermediate - my first moodle course

How I did it!

I created a drop down unit for each skill. I did this using the collapsed topics plug-in to help with scroll of death issues.
Scroll of death can be hidden from students! This seems to work fine and all of the students navigated around it with no problems.

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Inside each of the topics there are buttons which are hyperlinked to pages within scroll of death.
The names of the buttons and how they describe what is behind them was a challenge. I wanted to make buttons that will continue through each level but that causes problems with how to describe grammar such as 'discourse markers' which is not necessarily a phrase which students know at pre-intermediate level but i think it is important to have continuity through the levels.

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Under the topic buttons are moodle pages which live in scroll of death and can be edited to hold the content that is required.
As the idea of the site is to create a self access environment of external resources for students to practice their language the moodle pages mostly consist of links to other sites. Some of them have explanations others do not.
Feedback from one student suggested that the links came with some kind of description of what the link will be to help students navigate to what they want to study and the type of material they want to use.
This could be done by tagging each link with a few basic comments or by listing them under different sub-headings such as 'interactive grammar', 'grammar games', 'matching exercises', 'grammar information' etc.
Visually I also think that the pages of links need to be broken up in some way. Even if just by putting small visuals relating to the sites they come from so students can build up an idea of preferences.
It was also suggested that there was a list of resources available for teachers so they could direct students towards specific things. This would have to be built up from the start of a course and formatting and labelling would be important.

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Having listened to the feedback from students I re-worked the pages, particularly in the grammar section to give them all headings and descriptions of what the link will take you to. I tested this again on a couple of students with good feedback. Having the page split into exercises and explanations also seemed to help. It gives more structure to the page so if the students need to find out information while they are completing exercises they now know where to look. The reading and writing pages still need to be re-designed in someway but i am unsure how to do this other than just putting headings at the top of the page.

Scroll of Death

Moodle does not allow you to have sub-headings under topics which creates the problem of scroll of death. i.e a very long list of resources which students may find it difficult to navigate through. I solved this by creating buttons (monster buttons with crazy html code) which are hyperlinked to other pages within the moodle site. In that way you can create sub-topics within the site. All the moodle pages that go into the buttons as hyperlinks however still need to go somewhere so I created an extra topic heading called scroll of death which can be hidden from the students but contains all of the resources for that course.

Pre-intermediate scroll of death is very messy however. In future i think it is necessary to build all the pages first in a logical order in scroll of death and then go back and add the content into them later.

LTC virtual learning

The LTC - moodle is in theory an on-line self access environment comprising of links to external content organised in a way that is functional and accessible for the students of LTC before during and after their course. These external links will be housed within a moodle that has been branded to look and feel like an extension of the school website. It will also be linked with Macmillan English Campus in such a way that the content of the moodle mirrors the content of the MEC package.
Is it for students to use at home?
Is it for teachers to use in class?
Can it and will it function as both?


EAQUALS - Is the British Council core curriculum of what each student should know at each level. The content of each course is based around this curriculum and the headings of the webpages more or less correlate with the grammar and lexis headings of the EAQUALS booklet.

MEC

MEC has been made in way to mirror the moodle site but it seems to me that there is currently no reason for students to click on the MEC button because they don't know what it is. They need to be shown or told to go there. But how and by who?