Author: Troy (Page 38 of 42)

Educator, Thinker, Moodler, Podcaster, Open-source advocate. Check out the world's longest running middle school focused podcast at https://middleschoolmatters.com

Teaching Day One

July 20, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

China Teaching Day One

The day started off with a large group presentation. The students were welcomed and provided with an overview of the program. This was all done in Chinese. Thus, I’m not sure exactly what was said, but I did spend time reading the body language of the teachers. I would propose that if you recorded just about any opening of Professional Development, and turned off the sound, they would all look the same. The vast majority of teachers were paying attention and focused on the presentation. A few of the teachers appeared to be off task (I use appeared very deliberately). There was plenty of laughter and body language indicated that the teachers were engaged.

Due to the number of rooms available and the number of teachers, most of us are now paired up to teach. I’m paired with the wonderful Mr. Shawn McGirr. Shawn has been in China for the previous session as well as this one. This is a big advantage as he has the structure for working with the Chinese teachers. However, unsurprisingly, these teachers are very different than the previous teachers.

We started out with an ice breaker activity. We had the teachers line up in alphabetical order based their English name. They needed to accomplish this without talking. We had them complete the task again using their birthday, then by using the last four numbers of their ID. They are a good group who completed the tasks well. They processed the idea of different ways of communicating well. They also observed the different roles that participants take on.

We talked about the professional role of teachers as well. Their schedule is very different than the schedule that Americans traditional teach. For example, they teach two classes a day. However, they have lots of other meetings and duties to which to attend. The students have about seven classes a day. Also, the students stay in the same room. The teachers rotate rooms to go to the students.

We had the teachers work on an Insight Inventory. Here they identified their own learning styles. Once they had done so, they also imagined a student and identified the characteristics of that student on the Insight Inventory. They shared their story with each other.

We had the teachers complete a KWL activity revolving around their learning throughout the day. This was their Exit slip for the day.

At several points today, we had the teachers work on Table Talk. This was a new concept for most of them. We had them talk to the person across from them, talk to the person on their right, etc.

China -Sight Seeing & Planning

July 19, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

July 19th – Sight Seeing Day 2 & Planning

Today we had our second sight seeing day. We headed off to the see the Great Wall. There are three sections of the Great Wall still in tact. It is a common myth that the Great Wall is the only man made object that can been seen from space with the naked eye. The parts that we were on were very impressive (especially for their time), but the road ways that we build now are wider. Thus, the new roadways would be easier to see from space.

We went to the section that is closest to Beijing. This was an impressive experience. After we arrived, we were given a couple of hours to explore the Wall. Some of us decided to climb the Wall. The steps are step and very inconsistent in height. This made walking up the Wall quite a challenge. The first section was very crowded (like all of Beijing). The higher were climbed, the less crowded the Wall became. A group of us went to the highest point of the Wall. It was quite the climb. We didn’t have time to circle around the other side (just in front of the highest point, Beacon Tower 13, is a fork in the Wall. This allows one to continue on the Wall around the mountain.

After that, we had a quick visit to the Olympic Stadium area. I didn’t spend much time there as I was hungry and ate lunch. We did walk down to see the Bird’s Nest. Interestingly, we have had to run our bags through a scanner when entering certain national monument areas, but they’ve never checked our pockets or had us walk through a scanner.

Next up was the transition to the new hotel and planning. Using the knowledge of the first round of training in another area, the group has made some adjustments to the schedule. We got the daily schedule set. One of the decisions was to interview the participants and ask some basic questions in order to group them efficiently. The idea is largely to group them based on what they are teaching next year.

I had the opportunity to interview six teachers. This was a terrific experience. It seems to be pretty universal that teachers are some of the best people in the world. There was a mix of students with varied English abilities. The group consisted of teachers of third grade up to the teachers of high school. Unfortunately, not all of the participants showed up for the interviews. Thus, we pulled back together for a planning session again. We made some quick adjustments as to how we would conduct the interviews. We tweaked the daily schedule (from lessons learned from the first group) and worked out our nightly teaching schedule.

I was completely exhausted by the time. I headed off to sleep.

China – Sight Seeing Day 1

July 18, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

July 18th – Sight Seeing Day 1

Today we had a sight seeing day. We went to Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Pearl Market and an acrobatic show.

The day started with a breakfast buffet. The buffet was very different than an American breakfast, but the food was good. There were hard boiled eggs, which was a positive, along with lots of dumpling type items. There was juice, but no coffee. Bummer for me since I usually have cup of coffee in the morning.

Next we were off to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City was previously the Emperor’s Palace. Tiananmen Square is massive. It is nearly impossible to convey the scale of the Tiananmen Square. Forbidden City was beautiful. There are three rings in the Forbidden City. The common area, the outer ring and the inner ring. The outer area was where the Emperor would meet visitors. The inner area was where the Emperor lived and worked. The beauty of this area is tough to relate. We learned that the court area of the inner ring has no trees in it due to the idea that there should be nothing above the head of the Emperor.

Next we went over to the Pearl Market. This is essentially an indoor shopping mall. Instead of being filled with large name brand stores, the entire building is populated with booths of various sellers. We started on the fourth floor. First up was a view of a Taoist Temple. Next, the stores on the fourth floor. These are the most authentic. These include stores to buy real ocean pearls (which are apparently very expensive). We were free to roam after that. It was explained to us that the third floor was more pearls, but a lot less expensive (thus, lower quality). The second floor was filled with watches, handbags and wallets. It is very widely acknowledged that the materials aren’t genuine. The first floor is filled with electronics and toys.

Lastely, we headed over to see an acrobatic show. The show was incredible. The amount of power, balance and movement was extremely impressive. I lost count of the number of times the audience audibly gasped. The show was so good that it kept me awake even though I was sitting in a comfortable chair in a dark room.

China – Arrival

July 17, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

China July 17th – Arrival

The plane trip was in two sections. The first was a flight from Detroit to Boston. There was a long layover in Boston. A five hour layover that gave us time to chat and have lunch. The flight was over 13 hours long. I had a middle seat, so sleeping was very difficult . The airline provided warm towels, which really felt good.

We made it through the passport lane, picked up our luggage and then went to Customs. We were waved through Customs, so that was one concern that was unwarranted. I had heard tales of things being confiscated in Customs.

There was a nice young lady waiting with a sign for us. She was also waiting for another person (who turned out to be on our plane as well). After lots of chatting with a taxi driver, Andy and I were put into a Taxi and sent on our way. We got just a little bit nervous when the driver seemed to stop and ask for directions, but ultimately we ended up in the correct place.

Moodle Offers Cloud hosting

July 16, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

I love that Moodle allows users to install and customize the program as needed. I enjoy fiddling with settings and installing the software. I like the feeling of successfully meeting those challenges. Not all teachers do though. I certainly understand that.

Moodle now offers free cloud hosting for all teachers. Moodle will take care of the installation and updates. They will provide free use for teacher’s individual classes ( up to 50 users).

Key features include:

Free hosting (supported by advertising)
Instant signup via mobile phone
ull version of Moodle with minimal limitations
Up to 200 MB disk space
Unlimited courses, unlimited database size
Integrated with BigBlueButton for free videoconferencing (supports up to 6 users with full video, audio, whiteboarding and presentation capabilities)
Ability to personalize and customize a Moodle site
Available in more than 100 languages with multilingual capability
Full support enabled for the Moodle Mobile app.

This is terrific news for teachers wanting to get started with blended learning but lacking support or the interest in the technology.

Find out more or sign up for your free account over at the Moodle Cloud site.

ISTE 2015 Day 2

June 30, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

ISTE continues to be an overwhelming and wonderful experience. I have been to several sessions that were just packed with information. One of the sessions that was absolutely packed with learning focused on using Google as an assessment tool. The session was called: Authentic Publishing: Add-Ons and Scripts Case Studies by John Calvert. (You can check out his site at http://edtechtofu.blogspot.com.) This was a wonderful session that presented some strategies for using Google Forms to have students write Tweets that demonstrate their reflection on the lesson of the day. The forms are then moderated by the teacher. Once the teacher moderates the Tweet, it is automatically posted to Twitter. By encouraging the parents to follow the Twitter account, parents now have a discussion starter when the kids get home. The session also presented a way to create a timeline from Google forms. The timelines look wonderful. There are a couple of options for creating the Timeline: students can create them individually, students can create them as a group, or the teacher can create them. I’ll need to dig into the specifics to truly understand the process and each of the tools used. I’m looking forward to it.

ISTE 2015

June 29, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

I’m currently at ISTE 2015. I was lucky enough to bring a group of people – there are five of us in total. For the rest of the group, this is their first ISTE experience. ISTE is an overwhelming but content rich conference. The entire day is spent either walking to a session or soaking up wonderful information.

The first session that I tried to attend (notice the tried) was closed by the time that I got there. I had hoped to attend a session on Blended Learning, but, apparently, so did a whole lot of other people. I was able to find another session, which was filled with some good stuff. This is probably pretty indicative of how the conference will go.

Moodle Thoughts

May 31, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

One of the biggest roadblocks to using Moodle is the overwhelming number of options that are available. While this power is great, it is also a detriment to getting teachers to use Moodle in real ways. Due largely to this situation, Mr. Chris Kenniburg was involved in developing the SocialWall format. This attacks the usability issue by making Moodle by making Moodle function much more like a social networking site. This means that teachers are more familiar with how to use the tools and site. However, it isn’t as pretty as other sites. Pretty counts.

I’ve worked with a variety of web sites. One of things that I think would be easier for teachers, would be if there were a couple of set options that could easily be invoked. Then, instead of being presented with a ton of options, the teacher could fill out just the required fields. This would have several advantages:

It would not be a major rewrite of Moodle or a theme.
The full power of Moodle would still be available.
This would greatly streamline the process of creating new assignments.
The cognitive load would be greatly reduced.
Teachers could be “walked through” the important aspects of creating an assignment without the distractions of possibilities.
A much lower learning experience.

We headed over to the white board to draw up what this would look like. We quickly came up with the following as model:

We needed to have some additional conversations though. Which activities/resources should be link to? After some good conversation, we came up with the following:

Assignment
Forum
Quiz
URL/Link
Page

Why those five? We considered several options, but wanted to make sure that we chose activities/resources that were part of the core and the most popular uses for teachers.

Assignment seemed an obvious choice. However, the big difference with presenting the Assignment would be in just providing the Title, Description, and Due date. This will take all of the other defaults. That means that this would be an on-line submission (which is what our installation defaults to – yours may default to File submission), Feedback Comments would be available, the Assignment would be worth 100 points (again, this is our default), and the students could manually mark the assignment as completed. All of these settings could be changed later.
Forum also seemed obvious as this is a way to get students to write. Forums allow students to write in real world ways. Again, instead of presenting every option, the teacher would just need to a forum name. Thus, the Forum becomes entering a name and clicking “Save”.
Quiz was a lot more discussion. Quizzes are really powerful, but also confusing for teachers. Teachers don’t usually think in terms of creating a test question bank and then pulling those questions into a quiz. Generally, teachers want to just create the questions. This wouldn’t complete automate that process, but it would certainly streamline the process of creating the first part of the quiz. The teacher would just enter a name for the Quiz, and then click on “Save and Display” to go to where they can create Quiz questions. We may see if we can add in additional prompts to write questions in the future. *URL/Link was another easy one. Many teachers start by creating several links to other sites. This would make is so that the teacher just enters the Name and the External URL. That’s it. No other options for distraction.
Page fell into the same category as URL/Link. We just felt that teachers could easily incorporate this into their lessons.

So those are the five that we picked. The underlying concept is to streamline the entry to only those fields that are absolutely required. By removing all of the options that are available, the hope is to make using Moodle easier, quicker and more efficient.

This would also leave the current editing options and Add Activities/Resources buttons available. That way, teachers can always go back and adjust things as they need to. When teachers are ready for more control or when they wonder if Moodle can do that, the step is pretty small.

One of the things that I like about this potential development, is that I think that will make entering information faster even if one is comfortable with Moodle. I think that I would use these quick buttons to get things done quickly.

Here are some further notes:

Creating a Fillable “Worksheet” in Moodle

May 3, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

I was asked to create a fillable “worksheet” in Moodle by a wonderful teacher. I am frequently asked how to do things in Moodle, but I always try to have teachers consider what they want to accomplish rather than how. My intent is to keep the focus on learning and good instructional design instead of just the technology. This is hopefully a short term issue and once educators become comfortable with what the technology can do, they can start to design lessons that move into new educational strategy territory.

I had the teacher create the assignment as usual. Since this is a teacher that is working with students who struggle, graphics and visuals are important. Thus, the teacher created a chart for the students to complete. The chart asks students to identify direct and indirect characterizations from a story. The chart looks like this:

Character’s Trait	Evidence or quote from the story	Type of Charactization
lazy	…not much enthusiasm for steady work	direct
__	__	_
__	__	_
__	__	_
__	__	_

Thus, the fillable worksheet has several lines that the student needs to fill in. In this case, the student identifies a trait from a specific character, the evidence that reveals that trait, and whether the author has used direct or indirect characterization.

So how to create this in Moodle? The first question that I asked the teacher was whether this was a graded activity or not. This is important, because I can see two different ways of accomplishing this task. The teacher responded that this was a graded activity. Since this is a graded activity, it is time to break out a quiz. Why a quiz? Well, quiz allows for response templates. The means that we can put all of the directions in the quiz question, including the definitions of Direct Characterization and Indirect Characterization and then add in the chart (this is actually a table) into the Response template section. The students will have chart to fill.

What if no grade was needed?

If no grade was going to be needed, I probably would’ve suggested the Questionnaire Module. This is very easy to set up and would provide overall charting of responses. In fact, since the teacher has a variety of activities in the course, some of them are questionnaires and some are quizzes using the Response template. It all depends on how the question is being used.

Questionnaire:

Does the teacher want to do a quick check for understanding?
Does the teacher want an overall look at how the class is responding?
Does the teacher want to include a wide variety of questions?
Is the intent to gather group data?

Quiz:

Does the teacher want individual student accountability?
Does the teacher want an individual grade?
Does the teacher want to include a wide variety of question types?

In the end, we were able to recreate what the teacher wanted. This keeps the development of the course instructionally sound while increasing the skills of the teacher.

Moodle vs Classroom Update

April 22, 2015 / Troy / 0 Comments

The last post pointed out some of the differences between Moodle and Google Classroom. Of course, Google being Google, they updated Google Classroom the next day.

The update addressed a couple of major concerns: multiple teachers and the ability to delay posts (create drafts). These are two very welcome upgrades. It demonstrates one of the advantages of Google’s iteration scheme. A weakness was discovered and addressed. Much joy in Mudville.

On the flip side, note that the teacher that is invited to edit the classroom has all of the same rights as the originating teacher – with the exception that the invited teacher can’t delete the course. In Moodle, a teacher has much more fine grain permissions that can be granted. The originating teacher in Moodle can give the co-teacher the right to just grade but not to change the content of the course OR to have the same rights OR just about anything that the teacher wants. Of course, this means planning and training. This is a great feature in the real world. Teachers who work together sometimes have different ways of accomplishing goals. Sometimes they have different understandings. A teacher knowing for sure that their content is safe and can’t be changed can be very reassuring. Also, this helps prevent accidental changes. I know many co-teachers who are working with two or three lead teachers. Keeping things organized is paramount. Accidental mistakes can happen.

Moodle contains many ways to prepare content ahead of time and schedule the delivery of content, activities and resources. Theoretically, one could schedule an entire year ahead of time (bad pedagogy for a classroom that meets physically though).

Also note that students can move/delete files from the Classroom folder. This breaks the connection between those files and Classroom. Hopefully, Google will resolve this issue soon as well.

The recent updates are a nice snapshot of the advantage and disadvantage of Google Classroom. It is still regularly updated. The updates address needs that users have. However, Google is not coming at this from a true educational perspective. They are still not addressing the underlying issues of pedagogy. They are focused on the S in the SAMR model.

Moodle is also frequently updated (every six months an updated version is released). Moodle also addresses teacher concerns. Moodle is also built on the concepts of good educational practice. However, Moodle is also more complex and needs more of a training commitment.

Neither tool is the right tool. Both have their place. Thankfully, teachers have options.