Archive for the ‘Workshops’ Category

• Facilitator Post – David Hooper

  Date: 2010.04.20 | Category: Workshops | Response: 1

  

  MoodleMoot Workshops

  I would certainly echo Martin Sepion’s comments about the opening presentations from Professor Geoffrey Crossick  and Professor Sugata Mitra being good – they kicked off the Moot with a buzz that lasted the whole conference.  I facilitated the Moodle in Schools workshop which was equally inspiring; children in year 2 upwards were using moodle with a variety of colourful themes (one memorably based around creepy crawly bugs!) which had been purchased by the LEA and offered to the schools.  Parents seemed to welcome the involvement by using Moodle at home with the children’s schooling.  Interestingly it was also used to help with the transition between years by introducing new teachers and classes via Moodle ahead of time.

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• Facilitating at MoodleMoot 2010

  Date: 2010.04.20 | Category: Workshops | Response: 1

  Last week I had the pleasure of facilitating four workshops at MoodleMoot 2010 held at University of London Senate House which was very convenient for me as all I had to do was go upstairs to attend.

  

  Nitin Parmar, University of Bath

  The event had a real energy throughout the two days, which was kick started by a visionary speech from the incoming Vice Chancellor of University of London, Professor Geoffrey Crossick.  He impressed me with his knowledge of IT and its potential to enhance learning, which I hadn’t expected from a university Vice Chancellor.  Next was the charismatic and very thought-provoking Professor Sugata Mitra.  I have heard Professor Mitra speak several times before and he has always stolen the show.  Everyone was talking about his presentation throughout the conference.   His brilliant presentation was based on his work in exploring how to use technology to educate children who do not have access to English speaking teachers or computers.  He showed the power of the social constructivist model where, in his experiments, children are able to learn through social interaction with a computer without the active in-put of a teacher.  The role he takes with children is more that of a facilitator.  He sets children puzzles in an informal setting and gets incredible results.

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• When Technical meet Educational

  Date: 2010.04.12 | Category: Workshops | Response: 0

  Moodle success needs both teachers and IT staff to sing from the same hymnsheet. First you must get them to the same church. We will present some possible directions for your consideration.

• Moodlenomics – what is it?

  Date: 2010.04.09 | Category: Workshops | Response: 0

  Unfortunately a lot of the description for the moodlenomics session seems to have gone astray, so I thought I would provide this as a summary, so that people can decide if it sounds interesting.

  Open source projects like Moodle are not a case of someone programming in their spare bedroom after work any more.  In order to survive and grow, they have to have a robust management structure and funding model.

  In “The anatomy of a major open source project”, we are not talking about how the programming and/or designing is arranged, or anything like that, we are going to be talking about how the Moodle organisation itself is supported – where the funding comes from in order to pay people, what those people do, and how the moodle model compares with funding models used by other major open-source projects such as Sakai and Apache.

  So if you are interested in how such a large project survives, please come along.

  Submitted by Sean M Keogh

• Moodle supporting 14-19 diploma delivery

  Date: 2010.04.08 | Category: Workshops | Response: 0

  The 14-19 education reforms mean we need to work more collaboratively sharing resources, approaches and provision. As a rural county geography gets in the way so the idea of subject based Moodle communities seemed like a perfect solution. We now have fourteen covering each 14-19 vocational area.

  Setting them up and getting resources on has been the easy bit. On the whole teachers and other colleagues involved in 14-19 education like the subject Moodles and agree with the principle of shared subject communities.

  The hard bit has been getting them to incorporate this into the way they communicate and the way they teach. We’ve learned a lot over the last few years. My aim is to share that learning with you via my workshop at the Moot. Look forward to seeing you there

• Moodling from Down Under

  Date: 2010.03.31 | Category: Workshops | Response: 5

  Boss: I think you should go to the UK Moot this year.

  Me: Um, ok.

  And so started my adventure of coming from the small town of Adelaide, South Australia, to London for the 2010 UK Moodle Moot.

  As opening day for the Moot approaches and I start to think seriously about my first trip ever to the UK, I have also been lucky enough to be asked to contribute to the Moot blog to share some thoughts and ideas about why I’m heading over.

  Firstly, there will be three of us heading over from Adelaide – myself, James Strong and Allan Christie – we’ll be the funny sounding ones, probably with jetlag. Stop us and say hello if you get the chance. Or at least stop me and say hello – as the least well travelled of my companions (and a small town boy at heart) I’ll be the one looking like, well, a small town boy wandering around one of the largest cities in the world…

  But why come over in the first place?

  

  Working for the largest Moodle Partner in the Southern Hemisphere is great and has taken me to lots of places around Australia, but it is also quite isolated in regard to meeting some of the ‘big names’ from the North. In particular I’m looking forward to (hopefully) meeting some people from the Open University, which is still considered by many as the ‘holy grail’ of campus-wide University implementations, so if you are at the Moot from the Open Uni then please come and say hello – we’d love to hear your experiences.

  Then there is the presentation I’ll be co-delivering with James Strong, which will be all about the people, processes and platforms required to run an Enterprise Moodle environment.

  I’m also keen to see how significant the regional differences are in the Moodle communities (if there are any), to meet people I’ve interacted with online, and really just to experience a Moot on the other side of the globe. Then there’s the little matter of seeing how many ideas I can ‘borrow’ for the Australian Moot I’m helping organise in July – I have been watching the Moot UK team work their way through the various challenges of organising an event like this and getting just a little nervous about the amount of effort involved… And of course I, like most, will be keeping an eye out for any presentations on Moodle 2.0 as we draw ever nearer to the beta release.

  Whatever the case, I can’t wait to get over there and experience at least a little bit of London, see what I hope will be some innovative and thought-provoking presentations and meet as many people in the global Moodle community as I can.

  Roll on the 13th!

• Maintaining Momentum with Moodle

  Date: 2010.03.30 | Category: Workshops | Response: 1

  Hello fellow Moot goers!

  I am really looking forward to the MoodleMoot in a couple of weeks – my second Moot!  I am also pleased to be presenting a little something whilst I am there.

  I work at South Devon College where I am responsible for the use of Moodle to support learning.  Moodle is a major system at the college and used by learners everyday.  As you would expect, it is used for lessons but it is also used to support the college experience.  It is part of the whole college culture and driven by learners, staff and managers (including senior managers) – always with the learner experience at the heart of it.   However, if you want to know more or  want to know how we did it – you will have to come along to my presentation!  I don’t want to spoil it by giving it all away here!!!  We have a few hints and tips on how you can get your Moodle used as an everyday tool on all courses.

  We are continuing to develop our Moodle and finding new ways of engaging and supporting learners by using it (I hope we never stop developing – there is always a new way to engage the learners or manage learning).  The next major thing for us is how we can use it to support tracking and porfolio building and we are currently trying out Mahara.

  I can’t wait to get ‘mooting’ and learning lots of new ways of using Moodle and sharing ideas with other Mooters!

  See you soon!

  Becky

• Moodle: Where are the Teachers?

  Date: 2010.03.19 | Category: Workshops | Response: 3

  I’m looking forward to presenting on “Moodling with the Primaries“ in a few weeks’ time.  I am glad that,  like the imoot model, there are strands for Teachers as well as other users of Moodle. I intend highlighting some of the good  Moodle activities our local primaries have been doing, sharing my school’s primary liaison work and talking in general about my experiences helping primary teachers develop their Moodles.  (Incidentally – apart from interviewing  a few keen pupils from Reception up to year 6  I haven’t actually planned the workshop yet, so please if you have any special requests, get in touch!)

  I’ve found Primary Moodling to be very varied – if you just take my own city, there are some (as you’ll see) doing fantastic stuff and some (as you won’t see) finding it hard even to remember the log in to their Moodle. I have a feeling that  a large number of primary school teachers with Moodle are struggling. Not because they are unwilling to Moodle (though some are) but because they are uneasy.  I’ll go into more details at the Moot but it seems to me on my travels that more often than not, teachers in primaries with Moodle find it harder to justify its use (my kids can’t even read yet – how could they use Moodle?) or get suitably proficient ( I have so many other jobs to do; there just isn’t time) or even understand how to manage it (how do the children get onto it?).

  Yet at the same time,  I know from online communities that country-wide teachers and their local authorities are forging ahead with Moodle in KS2 and KS1. So will the twain ever meet? And how do we bring them together? When I spoke to a colleague about my Moodling with the Primaries workshop, he was sceptical: That’s all well and good, he said; but most of the people there will already know all about Moodling and the teachers you really want to get to won’t even have heard of the Moodle Moot – and if they had, they wouldn’t come because it’s in the school holidays. Fair point, and one that reminds me of the Twitter Experience.

  Anyone established on Twitter gets to hear of online developments the minute they occur and at the same time as their friends – and we tend to forget there are lots of people out there who (if they have heard of Twitter at all) don’t use it and don’t know the latest ICT  ideas.  Australian Moodler Tomaz Lasic has just set up a long-needed course on moodle.org specifically for Teaching and Learning with Moodle. But how many primary school teachers in Garstang will be checking it out for ideas? We need to get people on board -we need to Spread the Word! MoodleFairy’s on a mission!  Ok; I’m asking the question, rather than offering any answers, but I would be very interested to know how many “regular” teachers will be at the Moot – especially from primary schools.

  Regards

  Mary