I am facilitating a 8th Studies unit on the rise of big business after the Civil War. The unit includes data analysis and graph making in Excel, creating queries using a huge railroad construction database (MS Access), inquiry & research based on the data, and finally creating an interactive timeline with PowerPoint. It's all on Moodle and ALL 8th graders will do this project (about 1200 students). The 8th grade SS teachers have been fantastic to work with - enthusiastic and open to this new delivery of instruction. We had some "issues" on the first day. The server couldn't handle so many students hitting it at once and it was a bust. However, our tech dept understood the importance of having the technology work for this project, and the whole thing was moved to a new server last night. Today, it worked great! The students love it and the teachers do, too. Grading is a snap and the ability to offer prompt feedback is invaluable. Our district uses this project as a performance assessment to determine if our 8th grade students are "tech proficient," something each Michigan district reports to the state at the end of the schoolyear. I love Moodle!
I have to agree, Moodle is awesome. I introduced it to our school district this school year and while we did have to build a server to run it, we recouped the costs of it in the first year alone in saved Blackboard.com subscriptions. We only have 3 teachers using it right now, kind of as a pilot program. We will be showing all our teachers the system come our fall Academies. We'll see how many take to it then.
ReplyDeleteIs your site open to guests? I would love to peruse your setup and activities!
Also, have you heard of Dim dim? I have a post about it on my blog (www.edtecher.com). They recently released the Dimdim-Moodle integration. I have not had a chance to install it on my test Moodle yet, but I'm excited about the possibilites.
Hi Brian,
ReplyDeleteMy Moodle project continues to go well. It is not open for guest access - students log in with their Novell username/password. I'll ask about whether I can set up a guest account. I have not heard of Dim dim... I'll go to your blog and read about it. Thanks for the tip!