Moodle is a free Course Management System (CMS)that many teachers are using to create online courses for their classes. With the outcome features students can complete tasks on Moodle and receive a grade that the teacher can then use in their grade book. This is good for students as well because they can easily monitor their progress as they complete various activities and desired outcomes. These outcomes can be grades or statements of completion, something students can think of as a list and check them off as they go.
Hot Potatoes is another great freeware tool for teachers to use. You can create “interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises” for the internet.
Hot potatoes home page. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
Outcomes. (2010, May 11). Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Outcomes
Nice work Amanda! I enjoyed looking over Moodle as well. I think that it is a convenient system with many tools incorporated to help the teacher and student interface with the subject matter. In the past I worked with Blackboard.com and found it to be a great system. In many ways I see a similarity between the functions of these systems. I also downloaded Hot Potato. I think that the cool thing about this course is all the available information that we have been linked to in such a relatively short amount of time.
ReplyDeleteThanks Amanda for the info. I am always looking for free usable stuff on the web. It is great to get these sites from my classmates!
ReplyDeleteHarris_Sharon_ WK3_Response to Amanda Beery_10
ReplyDeleteMy response to Amanda Beery
This is a great synopsis of Moodle laid out in such a fashion that it is interactive for teachers and students. Due to the facts stated it sounds like it would be a great tool to the teachers toolbox for the classroom. Great job!
Harris_Sharon_ WK3_Response to Amanda Beery_10
ReplyDeleteMy response to Amanda Beery
This is a great synopsis of Moodle laid out in such a fashion that it is interactive for teachers and students. Due to the facts stated it sounds like it would be a great tool to the teachers toolbox for the classroom. Great job!
Great job, Amanda! Moodle and Hot Potatoes are certainly helping to change the face of education. The updated teacher can use these CMS systems to make planning, delivery of certain content, and grading easier to manage. "Free" is also a term that all teachers love! Thanks for the information!
ReplyDeleteWhile looking at this week reading and doing some online searching, I came across a complete Moodle Package called “Moodle-in-a-Box.”
ReplyDeletehttp://education.ncsa.illinois.edu/resources/software_tools/moodlebx.html
As you can tell by the link, this product has been packaged by the University of Illinois and contains Moodle and all the required supporting software such as Apache server, mySQL data base and other features.
If you’re interest check out the link there are step by step instructions for setup and use.
Though I didn’t get very deep, I actually installed this in my classroom and it ran on an older Pentium 4 machine. With just a little time reading, installing, and setting up, I now have a Moodle server in my classroom.
Amanda, this system described here reminds me of the Accelerated Reading (AR) tests that my children used to take when they finished certain books they read. The tests would evaluate whether the student’s comprehension of the book was sufficient enough to continue to another book. Whatever grades the student received would be the grade entered into the teacher’s grade book.
ReplyDeleteI know that I am happy tools such as this exist because it will help me to create lesson plans in the future when I become an instructor. I definitely like the idea of the Hot Potatoes tool as it seems very versatile and I’m sure there is a feature that allows one to print out the exercises, crosswords, etc. created.
My school uses Moodle and Im just getting into all the things it has to offer. I don't really prefer the way it is organized, but it's free, so thats why our district likes it. Im going to invest more time into Hot Potatoes. It sounds great! Thanks for the new ideas.
ReplyDeleteAR is an expensive program for districts to maintain. You have to have a license for use per each student, and the tests are purchased individually, and the books have to be available for the students as well. In my district there was great debate on the program because some teachers were using as grades, taking away form the original concept that it was a way for teachers to check for comprehension on books of student choice. It was taking the enjoyment out of reading books of choice, and making students look for books at certain point levels.
Also, Moodle works on MCs and MACS, which is another great feature: flexibility, accessibility, and diversity.
I am currently working on making a tutorial in Moodle for teachers. I would be using this tool to also check for completion. What I also like is that you can check to see how many times the users logged in if they did at all. Really good resource. I looked at the resource you shared and I will be adding it to my list. Thank you....
ReplyDeleteMoodle is such a great and efficient way for students to get instant feedback on work that they do. I never heard of Moodle until I took this class! I was looking at the hot potatoes application also. This one is great because it is free! As teachers we can always appreciate something that is free!
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