Telling your learning story makes you a better learner and a teacher.
It is my hope that within this course you are not only getting the bare bones understanding of how to construct a Moodle course and of Moodle’s capabilities, but also that you are able to tell your learning story to others who may run into similar obstacles. It is important that we tell these stories in order to preserve for our students and for one another that it was not a light bulb that we turned on one day when we decided to use Moodle.
I would like you to think through your experience from yesterday and your experience last night in editing your first Moodle course. I would like you to tell the story of that experience within our backchannel. Remember, the phone number to text is 3037206269 and just make sure you put #4learning in the text somewhere. Or you can login to twitter and post with the same hashtag.
Grade less, create more is what I value in online learning.
It is difficult for me to find many things that I would actually want to stick a grade on and call students to account for their contributions. The reason for this is that I am more interested in the process of creating content and sharing information than I am in affixing a letter to that process.
If we are simply responsible or putting up our assignments online and letting them “grade themselves” we are doing ourselves and our students a disservice. We need to think about what requires a grade and what only requires a check. We need to think about what we are resourcing and what we are collecting. Accountability is not the same as obsessive marking things off of a checklist.
- In all of the things that you collect, what can you stop grading?
- What can you let be a learning experience and not an assessment experience?
- What assignments do you need to keep track of exactly who contributed and which ones can remain anonymous?
Expertise is relative.
Everyone can become an expert on at least one thing in Moodle. While I asked you to become an expert in embed codes, I knew that many of you would struggle with this idea until you saw how it all worked (and perhaps even afterward).
An expert is someone that knows the inside and out of a given idea and may be able to even provide help to others who are looking for an expert in your area. I would like you to claim an area of expertise that you think you might be able to tackle today. This does not mean that you will have to be right each and every time someone comes to you, but it does mean that you will have to sit down with the question asker and figure it out together.
Please use the spreadsheet from yesterday to claim your area of expertise and we will continue to add things that require experts: http://bit.ly/4learningresources
Thanks again for coming on this journey. Let’s dive back in.
