During our synchronous class time this past week, we shared the shells of our online prototype courses, including one full module of content. I was blown away by the quality and variety of courses, platforms, lessons and assessments created by my classmates! I was in a group with Christina, Jocelyn, Leah and Darcy, who have all done such amazing work with their courses. I was grateful for the discussion we had, and comparisons we made about the way different platforms are laid out.
As discussed in a previous blog post, my course prototype, Mathématiques 8 is designed to offer gap-filling content for middle years math students in the Fransaskois system. For the first deadline, I had created lessons and activities for one learning outcome in the Patterns and Relations strand, 8RR.1. My course is housed in Moodle, hosted by my friend and colleague Daniel. This platform has far more features than I have utilized at this point, and I am continuing to research ways to improve the student and teacher experiences in this LMS. After sharing my progress this week, I will focus on the following aspects over the next month of development:
I have some reservations about working in Moodle, after seeing the Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams courses that my classmates have designed. I use Teams in my school, and I appreciate how the courses I saw are fully housed within the platform, including meetings, communication, lessons, activities, and assessment and gradebook. From a teacher standpoint, it is easier to have everything in one place, especially when it comes to reporting. Students in this age group and their parents are able to navigate it easily. I also prefer the colourful social media look of those platforms, easy customization with image, emoji and GIF options. I know that Moodle is customizable, but I do not have the coding knowledge and skill required to do so at this time. Despite these minor qualms, I will continue to build my course in Moodle because I feel a great sense of ownership over this material. I have never created content like this before and I am proud of what I have learned and accomplished so far. I am motivated to increase the quality of my course content, and to learn more about the functions available in Moodle for assessment, record keeping and reporting.
2 Comments
First off, I love your honest feedback. I like how you talked about using your COVID isolation time to create some wonderful things, and I also appreciated towards the end when you discussed questioning your choice of LMS and if it works for you. The best advice I can give you, is if you feel like the shoe doesn't quite fit, then don't risk getting a bunion over a shoe that you don't really even like. Don't get me wrong, it may be a lot of work to do, but if you plan to use this course in your own teaching and want it to function better for you, then it may be worth it.
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Daniel D
3/1/2021 08:12:05 pm
Heidi, I too find it challenging to build a course using different outside tools and keeping track of everything. As more tools/websites/systems are used, more I find things get discombobulated and difficult to track. In addition, I find the use of multiple tools tends to introduce friction in the student experience. If well integrated, I'm sure many of these challenges can be minimized.
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A note from Heidi:I adore teaching and learning, irl. I'm up for the challenge of designing effective virtual learning spaces for my students! Please follow my uphill journey with educational technology here. Archives |