Our Project Page in Moode

Here is the Project Page in Moodle – private link

Here is my IT page in Moodle – again private link

Motivations
The main focus of our project group was to increase the student/staff usage of Moodle tools across the 2 campuses. To do this we ran 4 official workshop times, with a smattering of ’sandpit’ time thrown in.
Topics we explored in our group were:
* What kids like about online technologies
* How we might use the web to cater for different learning styles
* Using Rich media in Moodle
* Show and Tell session – still to come
General discussion showed that teachers understood and saw the benefit of online tools.
What people seemed to struggle with was finding the time to explore and put into practice what we talked about in our workshops.
Teacher example

Project member sample page

Personal Examples – Reflections on my own practice
Decided to jazz up a tired unit using videos from youtube. These were generally IT related ads and other funny stuff.
I setup a wiki where the students posted a response to a number of leading questions
Student Example

Struggles
Found that in a large number of cases, the students struggled with the open-endedness of the task.
Students are used to set questions with a specific answer, rather than a personal response to a stimulus.

In a wider sense, we are discovering that students have to ‘learn’ to adapt their thinking to work effectively with the new tools web2.0 is providing.
In future, I would ‘chip away’ at these tools throughout the year, perhaps setting up a similar activity early on with ‘right and wrong’ answers.
As the year progresses students can then adapt their process to include higher order thinking as the tasks become more open-ended.

Final Reflections
So really, from both a curriculum and student learning perspective, we have taken some small steps, but lots of walking yet to do.
Discoveries:
* At Flinders, we are now moving from just posting resources online, to introducing more widely tools where students are required to work collaboratively and think more independantly on a given topic.
* Teachers require time to work new ideas into their classroom processes
* A whole school approach probably works best – mandated change rather than ‘have a try at this’
* Students also need clear guidelines as to what is expected of them