Moodle

Week 20

This weeks readings:

Cooch, M. (2012) Moodle 2 for teaching 7-14 year olds Packt Publishing.

This was a very interesting read. Cooch demonstrates how to create a fun-filled learning enviroment and that children should be exposed to a range of different recourses. Cooch states that “we want Moodle to occupy our students usefully, mark their work, and record their scores so we don’t have to!” She is trying to provide a learning enviroment which is pedagogically effective for children yet also creates a learning space which is time effective for teachers. This book is excellent if you need information on creating recourses in Moodle.

 

Moodle (acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is a free software e-learning platform, also known as a Learning Management System. As of June 2013^[update] it had a user base of 83,008 registered and verified sites, serving 70,696,570 users in 7.5+ million courses with 1.2+ million teachers.(This information has been extracted from Wikepedia)

Moodle owes what it is to Martin Dougiamas, who was the founder of Moodle.

Moodle is an open source software, you can download  edit which makes it much easier for people to extend its functionality  as they are able to customise and fit it around their own courses. This idea is supported by Cooch who says that the learning enviroment needs to be adaptable(Cooch, 2012). This is dissimilar to other learning platforms such as Frog, which does not allow the user to edit any of its functions.

The guiding principles for Moodle:

• We learn particularly well from making things for others, which is why creating a Moodle course and website is beneficial for not only the learner but also the creator.
• We learn by observing the work of others, which is why blogging is so important.

Moodle offers different extremes to the learning for example (as discussed in the previous blog) the learner can have information which is presented to them in a linear style which is one thing after another or in contrast everything is learner centered and they can explore everything for themselves. It is completed up to the user on which learning approach they use.

This picture demonstrates the Moodle’s hierarchy;

For the purposes of this course I have been granted with teacher settings which means that I can edit my course.  I plan to include wiki, discussion and survey tools, because I feel that it is important for my learners to have a say in what they are learning. I also plan to embed media and include interactive elements.