(Learning Technology) ²

I recently joined a colleague and her Year 7 students during a lunchtime detention that she imposed to make up for a lesson ‘lost’ in her absence. While she was away, she had expected her students to access the well-documented instructions and excellent resources that she had posted to her Moodle course. Instead they complained to the substitute teacher that they didn’t know what to do. There are, no doubt, a number of factors contributing to the students’ helplessness. The question I’d like to explore here is; why hadn’t her students explored the contents of her Moodle course and how could we redesign it to make this more likely? Read more…

In the March/April 2009 (not May as stated in the screen cast below) issue of Learning & Leading with Technology is an article explaining how to create custom RSS feeds using a tool called Feed2JS. This screen cast demonstrates how to use Feed2JS to create a ‘library’ of RSS feeds using the Moodle Book (non-standard) module.

[flv]http://jimhagen.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Feed2JS.flv[/flv]

One in a series of mini-tutorials originally emailed to busy colleagues.

• All courses in Moodle have a News Forum.
• Only the teacher can post news and announcements in a course’s News Forum.
• All students enrolled in a course are automatically ‘subscribed’ to the course’s News Forum.
• Anyone who is subscribed to a Forum automatically is sent an email of any posting to the Forum.
• You can learn more about the News Forum here: 
  http://docs.moodle.org/en/News_forum

One in a series of mini-tutorials originally emailed to busy colleagues.

• Each Moodle course has its own calendar and the teacher can record events in the calendar.
• When a teacher creates various activities (e.g. an assignment where students upload work), the deadline for that activity is automatically entered into the course calendar.
• When a student logs on to Moodle, the calendar automatically merges every event recorded by every teacher in every course the student is enrolled in (and a teacher’s calendar does the same for all the courses taught).
• Upcoming events in the calendar are also highlighted in the ‘Upcoming Events’ block.
• You can learn more about the calendar here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Calendar

• You can modify the ‘blocks’ that appear on the left and right sides of your Moodle course/s (e.g. the calendar block).
• You can move blocks up and down or left and right by clicking the arrow   icons (or clicking and dragging for Ajax enabled interfaces).
• You can hide blocks from students by clicking the eye  icon.
• You can remove blocks from the front page of your course/s by clicking the delete  icon.
• You can’t actually ‘delete’ a block; rather, it is simply returned to a blocks repository.
• There are many blocks that you can add to your course simply by selecting them from the blocks repository that always appears (when editing is turned on) as the bottom block on the right side of your course.
• You can learn more about blocks here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Blocks