Makoto Rich has an interesting article on how reading has changed and is changing. Questions to consider as you read:
Posts Tagged ‘learning’
Reading print vs. digitally: Let the debate begin
Monday, July 28th, 2008Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? @ TED
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Do you have kids? Have you ever thought about what they’re (not) learning? Sir Ken Robinson has a few thoughts on the matter. This one is highly recommended whether you have children or not.
moodle and (Extensive) Reading
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Are you using moodle with your English students? Do your students read books as a part of their program? If you can answer yes to both of those questions, then I have put together a database module (free registration required) for moodle that allows students to keep track of their reading. You can get it by clicking here.
Currently, students will need to input their own student ID number, so you can search by student, but there is a fix in the works to have searchable student information added from moodle’s own database. Film at eleven. Thanks go to Tom Robb for giving me lots of helpful advice. 
Book Review: Using Moodle
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Jason Cole and Helen Foster have written the second edition of their book Using Moodle
Cole and Foster start off with an explanation of what moodle is and the philosophy behind both its software development and its educational design. The book moves on to setting up moodle accounts and courses; then it adds information on adding course content and managing a moodle course. The major modules are discussed, most of these have their own chapters with detailed information on setting them up and creating effective activities. Unlike the Rice volumes, however, Cole and Foster include separate chapters for the assignment, blog, and database modules.
If I had to choose one out of the three books (obviously I didn’t have to 
), I would get this one. It has a good balance of the basic for new users and solid suggestions for more advanced users to create useful activities. Unfortunately, with last week’s release of 1.9, it’s time for a third edition of Using Moodle.
Book Review: Moodle Teaching Techniques
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques
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.
Book Review: Moodle
Sunday, March 9th, 2008I’ve been using the learning management system (LMS) moodle since 2003. I’ve created some of my own ways to work with students in blended- or hybrid-course formats, and I’ve been peeking in on presentations at various conferences. Since I started down that road, at least three books on moodle have been written. This post is the first of three reviews.
Rice’s Moodle
The rest of the book is a fairly thorough run-down of setting up courses of different kinds, adding course content relevant for your courses, creating activities that are appropriate for the types of learning you seek, and accessing user and evaluation data from courses as they progress. The final chapter has an overview of adding modules and plug-ins to enhance moodle’s features; it also runs through some of the essential maintenance tasks that will keep your data safe in cases of trouble or moving on to the next school term.
Overall, if you have access to this book at a library or on a colleague’s desk, this book will go a long way towards getting you up and running with your own moodle system. Moodle is currently at version 1.9, and the version used in the book is moodle 1.4. The upgrade in features and changes in several moodle components require a major revision in the book. If you need to buy something, you might do better with the Cole and Foster book (review on the way), although this latter volume does not include the installation information of the Rice book. As always, the Moodle Documentation and online help forums may help with any questions you may have along the way.
Get the Moodle “Buzz”
Friday, February 29th, 2008I have been using the LMS moodle since late 2003. The moodle.org site has a wealth of information and help forums at free support (free registration required). To tell you the truth, the forums and the download area (free, as in beer) are the two places I use most often. Recently I have been exploring the moodle database module for helping my students to keep track of their reading (that will have to be another post).
In that exploration, I discovered the moodle “buzz” area, which uses moodle’s database module. Go check it out. If you know of some new information or research on moodle, you can add it to the database. In that way, you can keep us up to date with the latest and get a feel for this quite useful module.
JALTCALL 2007: moodle Remains King of the Open Source LMS
Thursday, June 7th, 2007Since I was away from teaching and researching in Japan for a year, I have missed out on seeing what’s new with the learning management system (LMS) moodle (most tertiary institutions in the U.S. have a commercial LMS like Blackboard already in place; no need for people to look for their own solutions). JALTCALL 2007 was able to fill my moodle jones in a positive way.
There were three moodle workshops on Saturday and a moodle reader presentation on Sunday, and I’ll try my best to do them justice here. The morning workshop was put together by William (Bill) Burgos of manabu3, a moodle partner. He talked about adding multimedia files to moodle’s quizzes (the quiz function is one of the modules in moodle). Bill described some of the basics for file sizes and manipulation, and recommended some freeware and/or open source applications to help out. He demonstrated uploading multimedia files of various kinds and showed us how to link to them for particular questions in quizzes. He showed a nifty trick by adding a space character so the file is embedded into the question itself. This trick is on my list of things to try out. We were all able to log into a sample course and try some things out for ourselves. We were also provided with a helpful handout and a CD chock full of material. Thanks for the cool workshop, Bill!
The afternoon session started off with a great workshop on adding to/modifying/tweaking moodle for your own purposes. This was a fast-paced workshop, so my notes (and often the handout) do not include a name for an attribution. At one level, modules can be added, deleted, and modified to suit users’ needs. Some of the modules with an English-teacher-in-Japan background include Hot Potatoes, lecture feedback, project, and self-study. I do not understand why a Hot Potatoes (HP) module has been created. HP restricts users to quizzes which are open to the public only; why bother with this when the moodle quiz module works fine? Paul Daniels talked about his development of several modules. The presentation module allows teachers to convert their PowerPoint presentations to Flash for easy viewing. The media blog module adds voice recording and other media support to the blog modules. He also talked about seating chart and freemail modules. I believe none of these are quite ready for primetime, but they are well on their way. Gordon Bateson then took the floor to show off some of his very, very cool tweaks. How many times have you spent teaching your students to register with moodle using a capital letter for the first letter of both first and last names and ended up with all small case or all large case? Gordon’s cool tweak not only changes it to the proper format, but it also eliminates the long vowels that are unnecessary in romanized Japanese. Gordon got a big oooohhh during the workshop for that one. He also had a tweak for unique cell phone addresses that is a kind of override for moodle’s email address check. To be honest, at this point, my head was spinning from all I had seen in this workshop, and my notes come to an abrupt end. But if you want to see some of this stuff, the workshop materials are available at: http://englishforum.sgu.ac.jp/downloads/jaltcall2007/. I have to conclude this section with a two thumbs up on this presentation, as it was the first that I saw that went far beyond the “moodle has forums, and quizzes, and…” so typical of recent JALTCALL conferences. At the party on Saturday, I put in a request to the JALTCALL powers-that-be to have more of these higher level presentations and workshops. I am always ready to take my skills to the next level. The future indeed looks bright for the moodle platform.
The final moodle workshop of the day was by Peter Ruthven-Stuart on how to get moodling. We got two handouts on moodle and one for a reading activity, and lots of hands-on time with moodle; my notes are sparse on Peter’s presentation for that reason. The first handout (sorry, I cannot find a link to it) describes in clear detail (without the technical parts) what one should do to get a moodle installation up and running. If you don’t know how to do this, you might want to contact him to get his handout. The second handout walked everyone through logging into a moodle course that was already set up. Peter set up accounts beforehand with user names, passwords (that were the same as the user names), and some fake names. For anyone setting up their own workshop, this seemed to be a great way to do it. Once users logged in, they could change both their fake names and their passwords. I’m guessing these were all created in a text or spreadsheet file and uploaded later. We were then led through some of the many activities that were set up for us: various pre-reading activities for a short article, vocabulary-building activities, quizzes, and many others. All in all, it was a great workshop, jam-packed with lots of hands-on activities.
On Sunday, Tom Robb, of Kyoto Sangyo University, talked about the development of his moodle reader module. This module, not yet ready for prime time, is designed to help students keep track of what they have read as well as give teachers a way to check students’ progress. Students will be able to use the module to choose the book they read and take a quiz on the book’s content. Students scoring more than 60% will receive credit and be awarded points based on the level of the book. Tom is working with publishers to use the tests that publishers have already created. This module could go a long towards helping students and teachers keep an eye on reading progress.
Whew! I guess that’s about all I have on moodle for now…
JALTCALL 2007: Second Life in the Language Classroom
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007The second workshop I chose was by Forrest Nelson who talked about using the virtual world Second Life (SL) for learning languages. We were given an overview of what it is and how it works. We got an idea of the technology necessary to run the simulation, and what to expect in the future. Forrest stressed that the language of the simulation is important to know, and we were quizzed on some of the terms used and the nuances important to know in order to survive and thrive in that huge world.
Forrest then showed us some of the user-created videos describing SL and talked about some of the famous people and companies using SL for promotion. We learned that even the political parties of France are using SL, not only for promotion, but also to lob virtual rockets at each other. Forrest moved onto buying space and creating such objects as microphones, buildings, and even guitars. He finished up by talking about some of the implications for using SL in the classroom to teach languages and showed us a video he created of a group of students he took on a virtual class. He noted that privacy could be a concern, but that teachers can use SL’s privacy settings and create a space for friends-only.
SL looks a bit overwhelming and appears to have a steep learning curve. Maybe I’m getting old, but I would need to do a lot more research before I step out there with some students. I hope to see more of what Forrest is doing in the future.
JALTCALL 2007: MASLE
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007The conference kicked off Friday evening with six workshops held in two computer labs in the very modern Building 8. For the first one, I choose Brian Teaman’s machine-aided spoken language evaluation (MASLE) presentation. The system is designed so that students can record their voices on their computers according to some predefined texts. Then the results can be evaluated in one or two ways: by hand by the teacher or other evaluator, or by machine. Brian has added a speech recognition engine to check student recordings. Evaluating with the group at the presentation, the sample of ten recordings took us just under 5 minutes to do ‘by hand.’ The machine evaluation took about 2 seconds! The output still needs to be massaged into a readable form, and the machine’s results should use more of the available range (most of these results came out either .01 or .97, with nothing in between). However, once these are taken care of, the time factor of evaluating hundreds of your students’ speaking tests could be reduced greatly.
We were then given a chance to try the system ourselves. There were some technical difficulties because of the university’s network/firewall/gremlins. We were able to record our voices using the system, but we were not able to upload the files for a machine evaluation.
Interesting work, Brian! Keep us posted.
