Moodle Moves My Teaching into Cyberspace

I started using Moodle in my classroom last year. Moodle is an open source course management system. My school district uploaded it on to our servers and has made it easy to access. Any teacher can get a virtual Moodle classroom, even if they do not have a server, just by going to sqooltools.net.

Moodle allows me to create an online course that compliments my teaching. Moodle allows me to communicate with parents, post daily homework, and offer extra activities for home practice. In the classroom, Moodle is used to give quizzes, check student understanding of content, supply safe links to online resources, and even display student work. Moodle looks and feels like a website, but has privacy protection for students. Only those enrolled in the Moodle course have access to the content.

My students love many of Moodle’s features. Their favorite module is the chat. Students chat in small groups to collaborate on projects. Collaborating in Moodle’s chat allows for great conversations, while not adding to the classroom noise level. The chats are also great for deepening a students understanding of a topic. Book chats allow those quite and shy students to have a voice. One of my students will not talk in front of others during a class discussion, but chats up a storm. She posts many high quality questions to keep us thinking. I have even heard of a teacher who has used chat in the evening to help student prepare for a test. She would post questions to the different students in the chat. Students took turns answering her questions. All the students who participated in the chat did very well on the test the next day.

Another useful feature on Moodle is the quiz module. Quizzes are great for assessing vocabulary as well as students’ comprehension of a novel. The possibilities are endless and the students seem to enjoy the paperless tests. I like the quizzes because for the most part they are self scoring. You create the question and the answer and once the student answers the question Moodle then records the score. The only questions you have grade are the essay questions. I do review all quizzes to see what I need to reteach, but the self-scoring is a real timesaver. By setting the quiz module to a setting that allows students retake quizzes, student can repeat quizzes until they understand the material.

The last feature I want to share is key for the students that I work with throughout the week. I teach gifted education students. Often they complete their regular classroom work quickly. They need alterative activities to keep them engaged and out of trouble. Adding activities to Moodle for these students can provide alternative learning greatly needed by these students. These enrichment activities can be password protected just for a particular student. My students can safely explore and area of interest even when they are not in the gifted classroom. The regular education teachers appreciate the ease in which Moodle helps them to challenge the gifted students.