- Communication
Communication
Interactive activities are the key to making a course engaging and effective. Learn more about forums, assignments, groups and other useful course activities here. In the VATL-community user can create a connection with other members of the community.
What means a connection in the VATL-community? This is something like friendship in social networks.
How can we communicate?
- Here a teacher asks a question and specifies a choice of multiple responses.
All of these activities are standard in Moodle.
NOTE: Numbering each of the items below makes it easier for course participants to track where they are and where they are going. It also makes it easier to identify an item they need to know more about—which makes it easier for you to answer their questions!
1.0 Forums
"Project Management at the Movies" is one of my favorite discussion forums—my students get really creative with their responses!This is an example of linking a dynamic Google doc to a web site to engage course participants. When I am using a shared doc synchronously in a training session, I add a table with rows like this to make it easier for people to know where to write. Otherwise, it's really chaotic!
Ideas for different kinds of forums to engage your students and how to balance involvement in forums.
Many instructors would like to set open and close dates for discussions, but there isn't a good way to do that yet (as far as I know!). We had hopes for discussion "locking," but it doesn't work the way we thought it would. See this page if you'd like to learn more.2.0 Assignments
- Assignments enable teachers to grade and give comments on uploaded files and assignments created on and off line.
We often get requests from instructors for help with enabling their students to share work with their classmates. Depending on your needs, creating a forum or adjusting the permissions for a folder might do the trick.Check out what it looks like when you go to grade submissions!
I also love Moodle's offline activity assignment capacity. It took me a long time to get my head around the idea of creating a link for a non-digital assignment, but then I figured out how incredibly helpful it could be and I've never looked back! Open this link to read more.......Here's an easy way to make sure that due dates are correct for all your assignments (and other activities).
3.0 Groups
"Choices" are great for facilitating group sign-ups—no more passing around a sheet of paper and having students write their names down for the project they want to work on!
You can limit a group to a particular number and group size can vary. Once a group fills, it still appears in the list, but can no longer be selected. As of Moodle 2.8, students may choose more than one option if you wish to give them that opportunity. With version 3.2, instructors can now assign a choice to a student.Tired of circulating group sign-up sheets — how would you like to have Moodle enroll students in a group based on their choosing the topic? With the "Group Choice" plug-in, you can!