scholar @ jklmelton

Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques is the next logical step for someone who knows his way around the Moodle LMS. While Rice’s first book gives a good overview on getting started with moodle, this book helps users to create many interesting learning activities. The chapters are based on some of Moodle’s included modules. If you’re looking at a blank moodle course page and having trouble figuring out what to do, this book can take you through adding an activity and tweaking the settings to create learning tasks for your students.

There is a complete run-down of how forums can be used to open up dialogues with individual students or bring students together in relevant course discussions. Chats, extremely processor-intensive in my own experience, can be used to bring a ‘guest speaker’ to a course or help students with course questions. Quizzes can be used for self-assessment of course material or checking learning under timed conditions. Lessons can introduce new content, check understanding, and provide remediation. Wikis can be created and uploaded before class time with course outlines which students can then augment with their own notes, a process Rice calls “guided note taking.” Several other modules are discussed and each one has at least one clever approach to the teaching/learning issue. All in all, this could be a very useful book for someone who needs some ideas for their moodle installation. Check it out.

Tags: book, learning, LMS, moodle, open source, review, teaching, technology

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 6:10 pm and is filed under LMS, moodle, open source, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.