April 2008 — Web 2.0
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Got Moodle?
Orwin continues to provide all training to the district's teachers, who attend one-day summer workshops for an overview of Moodle and to build Moodle pages they'll use to provide information to students and parents. During the school year, teachers attend voluntary, 90-minute after-school meetings where specific modules or tasks are addressed. Meetings include hands-on instruction and discussions of K-12 instructional applications. An online forum is used to capture ideas and serves as a resource for later reference.
Implementation of Moodle is optional, according to Orwin, and use ranges from very limited to classrooms where the system plays a significant role in supporting teaching and learning.
ByteSize
Read "Implementation Study #3: Moodle," a Consortium for School Networking report, here.
Breaking Up the Bottleneck
Meanwhile, at Empire Union School District, Bill Click reviewed a variety of commercial, web-based testing solutions, but found that Moodle couldn't be beaten for features and flexibility. And because the software is housed on a district server, not a remote sever, that daily afternoon network bottleneck would no longer impede classroom activity.
Click's recommendation that Moodle replace his schools' online testing service received qualified support: The district agreed to a pilot installation at Glick Middle School, launched in September 2004. Approval to launch the tool at Teel Middle School wouldn't come until a year later.
Time was set aside that first year during every teacher inservice day for Click to work with faculty and staff. "Our immediate challenge was to solve the testing problem," Click says. "But once we got started, we realized there were many tools we could use with students."
Carla Cottrell teaches a variety of seventh- and eighth-grade classes at Glick, including Life Skills. With Click's encouragement, she initially decided to upload her Life Skills vocabulary tests and chapter quizzes into Moodle. "I wanted a way students could go to the lab on their own time to take quizzes," she says. "Moodle scores the quizzes, which I can enter into my gradebook without having to deal with mounds of paperwork."
Cottrell has since expanded her use of Moodle in all the courses she teaches. For example, her students now have online access to assignments and tutorials using Moodle's Assignment module. And students in her Multimedia class, who write and produce a daily school-news broadcast, use the Journal feature to keep daily logs of their work on the show's development.
In September 2005, Moodle finally became available to teachers at Teel. Using the system to great advantage is Greg Diebold, a seventh-grade history teacher. Click recommended that Diebold explore Moodle's various features to identify ways his students could become actively engaged in class activities.
