Twenty Ten

Having read Tomaz Lasic’s blog post on ‘Grow a moodle‘  I decided to have a go myself with Year 12 students who are back in school preparing to start their Y13 Applied ICT course.  However, due to the fact that I didn’t think my kids would leap at the chance to teach teachers straight away  I decided to adopt a slightly different tactic.

The students are following the OCR Applied ICT course and will be doing the Publishing Unit, the Web Design unit and the compulsory Working to a Brief unit.  Due to a cut in teaching time this year I had decided to combine the Web design and Brief units. The students, were slightly aprehensive and also seem to have a ‘fear’ of web design.  This is due to the fact that their experience of web design so far has been a tad hit and miss and their knowledge of the mechanics behind webpages was lacking. (As ICT Coordinator, I hold my hands up and admit that this shouldn’t have been the case!).  

I therefore needed a way to get the students understanding of web design, xhtml and css up to a higher enough standard to enable them to confidently complete the course.  They also needed to learn how to use Openmind BE (matchwares fantastic project management software).  So I decided to set them a task that would meet all their needs.

The task I devised was quite simple:

‘You need to design a course(topic) in moodle for year 7 students to show them how to create a website using html.

You will need to do the following:

1. understand moodle (youtube has loads of tutorials)
2. understand html (there are loads of great websites)
3. Project manage this task
   1. mind map
   2. gantt chart
4. create course
5. test course
6. evaluate course

You are in the ideal position to create a course that will work as you experience lots of different types of lessons….

Have fun, enjoy yourself and don’t be afraid to experiment.‘

Once the task was introduced I gave them all teacher status in a moodle course. They were then all told that they had control of one topic box and were shown some of the basics in moodle – how to turn editing on, the resources and the activities menus.  (Handy tip – assign the topic boxes to students first before they overwrite each others and my topic box).  Once they get over the joy of typing silly comments in their own box and re-ordering their postion within the course, they then started to have a play.

Their next lesson, then needed them to start mind mapping what they actually were going to do.  This included research, planning, designing, creating etc.  They have now completed a mind map and are in the process of preparing their gantt chart.  They have been very enthusiastic about the whole process and I think they like the fact that they have been given ‘control’ of part of moodle.  At the end of lesson 2 I also mentioned that once they have got to grips with moodle they will then be used to teach other teachers how to use moodle.  I was quietly pleased with their positive response. 

Now I have to wait and see how creative they become with moodle and also whether this has also meant that their confidence for web design has increased and that they can be up and running when I give them the ‘brief’ in September.

I would like to say that I will update as this develops, but I am rather useless as setting time aside to write up posts so it maybe a tad hit and miss.

misterel Teaching & Learning ICT, KS5, moodle, students, teaching, training, VLE