Bread Crumbs

When Hansel and Gretel went into the forest, they left a trail of breadcrumbs so that they could find their way back. That is what I intend to do, but not in order to find my way back. Rather, it is for other teachers and people interested in doing what I am doing to use as a way to follow my lead and to get where I am... until such time as they no longer needed my guidance. --In fact, this set of bread crumbs comes with the ability for them to question and comment on my journey into the deep dark forest of tech. While I don't pretend to know all the answers ( certainly not! ) I may, however, be in a position to point them in the right direction(s). I have recently signed up to give a (potential) presentation at this year's (2013) RASCALS in June to be entitled E-literacy in Education: How to Get There from Here that is meant to be a beginner's "How To" guide and introduction to technology for teachers who don't know where to start (but secretly want to) from the point of view of a self-taught digital immigrant (me) who needs to teach to up-and-coming digital natives (my students) in the way in which they have become accustomed to learning. In this presentation, I intend to leave the participants with addresses, links, examples and a blog that will allow them to begin the journey (well-armed)... when they are ready. As well, I intend to show them what I have done and how I have done it. I want to explain to them why they need to connect with tech and how to do it step by step. I will touch on programs and concepts like Facebook, Twitter, PLN's, MOOC's, crowd-sourcing,and others, in a general way and MOST IMPORTANTLY, leave participants with a list of links of useful applications and games they they can use. I will show them what I do with them in my classroom and ALSO where they can go for most answers -- in the event that they did not understand all the first time (because they are suffering from information overload and jargonitis. ---In other words, I would like the presentation at RASCALS to be the beginning of their journey and not the end of their involvement with ed-tech. There will be a question and answer session at the end of the presentation.

Back again-with a vengence

I have been away for a long time, but not idle. At school they have changed from Moodle 1.9 ( which caused me some frustrations) to Moodle 2.2.3 I have had to re-learn some of the things that I thought I knew... All in all, though, it has been a good experience. Since my last post I have done many things. 1. I have put together an Google sites page that features grammar with explanations and links to screencasts and videos and then I have reworked it to make it more visual and easier to use. This site plugs into Moodle and allows me to feature content that I will not have to redo every time I change classes. 2. I have made my Moodle front page and homework pages much more visual and standard so that the students won't get too confused from week to week. 3. I have discovered how to make a short answer self-correcting quiz in Moodle that I am very proud of. It took me a day and a half of talking to teachers, watching YouTube How To videos and the reading Moodle docs on moodle.org to figure it out. I am anxious to include some visuals of what I have done as a record and for you to see the reslults of my work. I will do so in the next post. I am also looking at some new programs that will allow me to screencast with no time limit and that will also allow me to use my web cam in this endeavour... More later.

New Sight.

I have decided to include a web site in my Moodle where I will stock all the PowerPoints, Help sheets, and web links that I come across. Subsequently I will reorganize and label the links and other to be more helpful to the students. I like the layout options that I get with GOOGLE SITES. Here is a link to my site. https://sites.google.com/site/intunebasicenglishgrammarhelp/

Booo!

I made a quiz on Engrade and discovered that I could not get an embed code and put it into Moodle. Disappointed. The search continues.

Quizzical

I have wanted to put some self-correcting quizzes on my site but until now I have not found a satisfactory program or app that will easlily allow me to do that. I recently came across a site called ENGRADE which bills itself as a competitor to Moodle that contains a quiz-making program that I can easily master and then it offers me an embed code that | can use to put it into my Moodle page. I will go ahead and do that and blog about it later. Prior to that I tried a Powerpoint add-on program called i-Spring Quizmaker which looked great but there were two problems. 1- the free trial program left a big watermark on the quiz and 2- the program costs 288$ on special! Untouchable for me right now. Engrade bears more investigation as it has other interesting features and it is free! The site called EDMODO is another site that promises to offer Moodle-like features. More on this later. Soldiering on!

Show Me!

So, I think pictures speak louder than words. Here is what one of my Moodle pages looks like and what I can do with it. Comments welcome!

More...

I am starting to feel more comfortable with Moodle. I have been able to simulate coloured backgrounds and give my pages a better look due to PowerPoint 2010. It allows me to take text boxes, add a background colour and then put pictures on top. If I use the "group" feature it turns into a single entity. Then I can save as picture and upload it to Moodle. I can create many interesting visual effects using this feature. It gives the page a more polished look. I also found some nice pre-made PowerPoint templates on some e-learning sites that allow me to give my page a modern look. Audioboo allows me to record short messages and embed them in the page. I found a program called Photobabble which will allow me to make pictures "talk", but have not used it yet... More later....