I’ve been working on my faculty Moodle course this past week at my high school, and wanted to share some of what we are doing in English. I’d love some critique, and ideas for what has worked well in other English faculties specifically.
I have set our faculty area of the Moodle up with the following courses:
- Year 7 English
- Year 8 English
- Year 9 English
- Year 10 English
- Standard English Prelim
- Advanced English Prelim
- Standard English HSC
- Advanced English HSC
- English Extension 1 Prelim
- English Extension 1 HSC
- English Extension 2 HSC
- Fundamentals of English (Years 11-12)
Each course is set to topics view, and begins with 2-4 topics that are relevant to the entire course. For example, in the Year 10 course:
Underneath the general course information topics, each class has been given a topic area – individual teachers will maintain their own class topic area, adding information and resources throughout the year. Here is an example of one Year 7 teacher’s class information:
Am I on the right track here? I didn’t want to make a whole course for each class – too cumbersome. And I’m setting up class ‘groups’ in each course now. Has anyone else had experience with this? Any advice?
Kelli McGraw 
#1 by kmcg2375 on February 3, 2010 - 10:32 am
Interestingly, Science have not split anything into class groups, but have allocated a grade to each course and then put all info on topics covered up there eg topic 5 for all of Year 9 is:
9.5 Kitchen Chemistry
Resources:
Acids Word document
Bases Word document
Scientific Method Resource
Interesting…in English we all approach the program in such different ways/orders that a one-size-fits all approach didn’t work for us. Is it a KLA thing? Or should we be aiming for more common, shared, streamlined content?
#2 by Troy on February 3, 2010 - 2:49 pm
I like the break down, we have the same, but only for Year 9 and Year 10. I am tempted to create more, but I am trying to share the load. I’ve left all the courses I’ve created as open to all, whereas the other two teachers using moodle at the moment have named the courses after their classes. That might be a problem for continuity, as the courses set up can be reflected upon and used the next with the same year group or by classes with new or other teachers. Other members of staff need to know how easy it is to create a course. Sometimes I feel a little worried about the interface. We really need to grab the students with the look. Yours is much much more visually appealling!
Now, is it about PR for you? Getting it used in some classes or all? We have the MUG’s meeting from next week: Moodle Users’ Group.
I would love to share what you have, you can have any of our courses and vice versa??
#3 by kmcg2375 on February 5, 2010 - 5:18 pm
Would be happy to share 🙂 but how do you ‘share a course’? Is there a way to save the whole kit-and-kaboodle, or do you mean just sharing files uploaded, link recommended etc?
There is a big push in our school now to integrate computer use and online teaching tools into all classes across the school, in particular years 9 and 10 who will all have laptops this year. In our faculty all of the English classes 7-12 have a Moodle presence (brief overview of semester program at a minimum), and I am expecting that I’ll see about half of the teachers use it actively with more than one class, and just 1-2 using it actively for all their classes.
I agree the interface is a bit dull – and the backend a bit unfriendly to non-tech teachers. I’ve tried to keep my formatting to a minimum inside the English courses – normal text and black or coloured headings in Heading 1 style.