Day 2

The opening session on Tuesday was a panel session discussing 'the future of online learning'

Martin Dougiamas view is there is a future for online learning but we will always need a teacher, even though we have a lot of social media out there these days he believes there will always be a place in the world for moodle. One quote he said during this session was "before we had moocs we had books" (A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aiming at large-scale participation and open access via the web)

Other panelists had their own points of view, the audience also joined in with questions and comments.

First session of the day was with Gavin Henrick - Using files in moodle 2 - how it helps...
I loved the way you can now drag and drop files straight into moodle and not only does it put it straight into the course area it also gives you a choice of whether you want to embed the file or just add a file link, fantastic.....I need 2.4, not just files can be dragged in but whole directories as well. Another fab thing is as well as dragging straight into the course topic area, moodle uses the file name as the link name but you can change the name without having to go into edit settings, a lot less clicks, which my teachers will love! When you drag in a zip file it gives you the options to unzip and create folder, create file resource or add as scorm file. With the central repository you can upload a file to one area and you can create a link to the file from another course as long as you are a teacher on all the courses.

Chris Meadows was taking the next session I was keen to go to as I was hoping to find a solution to allow our students to upload their online assignments from skydrive, unfortunately Manchester Metropolitan Uni don't seem to use it this way.  All their students have Live@Edu accounts, so within skydrive as I understand it, there are folders set up for each curriculum area and permissions are given via moodle to the cloud storage so some teachers can edit files but most just read, students have read only access as well. This allows the staff to upload various documents, including individual feedback forms for the students, to the folders via their iPads or by emailing and adding tags to ensure it gets into a specific folder.  Students can access the folder where the feedback form has been sent to from the gradebook within moodle.  Students can take pictures or videos on their mobiles and upload to Facebook but when tagged will go into the relevant skydrive folder.  MMU use a block on the moodle page which allows documents to be downloaded and then uploaded again.  They also embed documents from skydrive so the students don't have a need to download or wait for it to open.  How I see MMU using skydrive is as a shared drive as only certain people have certain access to certain folders, not really the sort of solution I was looking for, we need skydrive to be one of the repositories in the file picker.

The next session was of interest to me because of my role in helping people understand how to use moodle, both staff and students.  Lilian Buus from ELSA, the eLearning unit at Aalborg University, was showing us how they have introduced a support concept based on the philosophy of people helping to help themselves.  They have got screencasts and guides within moodle and depending where you are in moodle and what role you have depends on what help you can see at that particular time and in that particular area of moodle.  The challenges they are having at the moment, or going to have is the upgrade to 2.4

Catherine Wasiuk from Manchester Metropolitan University - Using the activities in moodle to present difficult concepts and new vocabulary - eLearningathollings blog - I was hoping to see a new innovative way in which we could offer these concepts to our FE students, but the glossaries are being used the same way in which I explain to our teachers how to use them here at Gloscol, put words or acronyms into the glossary with the definitions, use autolink so when they see the word elsewhere in the course page they will be able to click on it and moodle will take them to the specific entry in the glossary.  They are using quizzes, small quick quizzes that can be done numerous times, to check the students have understood what they have read in the glossary.  Forums are being used as well so students can share ideas for each topic area.  The example Catherine showed us was a course for the student to learn how to do their research for their uni course.

Vegetable soup and sarnies for lunch......no cheesecake!! :-(

The afternoon session began with Pecha Kucha, lots of interesting subjects.  Pecha Kucha is a method of presenting in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each, therefore the presentation doesn't run for longer than 6 mins, fantastic if you have lots of presentations to get through, they all did fantastic, although a few did seem out of puff at the end!!  Some of the presentations that were of interest to me were Helen Foster's 10 useful things a teacher can do with roles, give students rights to create questions for a quiz, let them grade assignments - peer to peer assessment, but what I really loved was the idea of a naughty student role, if a student abuses the privilege of extra access and rights, they have them taken off them for a certain time.  Next was Wiris.com showing us how we can add questions into moodle for Maths equations etc, but unfortunately not free, I know a teacher that would have loved it!  Mid kent showed us how they use their PLP with flight plans so the student can have a visual of their targets and successes.  Unfortunately the 2 presentations I was really looking forward to didn't seem to happen, the auto linking: not just for glossaries and ePortfolio option for Moodle.

We then had another panel session using a new 'fishbowl' concept, talking about achieving efficiencies through the use of moodle, four chairs with four people sat on them, they start talking between each other, there is a spare chair so anybody from the audience can join the panel and the conversation, when a 6th person wants to come up to talk someone has to leave.

Happy New Year with moodle was the next session, again I was hoping to find a solution for our end of year tidy up of moodle courses, but it seems we have the same issue of teachers wanting clean courses to start a new academic year without any students in from last year, and who can blame them.  However, we need to keep the data for the next x amount of years!  We back the courses up individually with student data, move them into an archive area then restore as a clean course, no user data, into the original 'curriculum' category, then problem with this is if students have populated a glossary the data will be lost, so we will need to export and import the glossary, we tried to get the teachers to backup and restore last year but not wholly successful, so this year I think we will do it for them.

What a fab day.....quick bus ride back to my hotel for a quick freshen up then off to the Gala dinner at Clontarf Castle Hotel, couple of glasses of wine, a lovely 3 course dinner and lots of dancing to Spring Break  - Europe's 1980's supergroup.....allegedly! A good night was had by all.  Sorry no pics, phone ran out of battery :-(

Day 1

The first day was based on 4 separate workshops under the headings of Admin, Teaching with Moodle, Assessment and Developer.

I decided that I would go to the Assessment workshops as I went to Michelle Moore's sessions on Glossary and Database last year, although I would liked to have see the Workshop activity again. The new assignment was being showed in both sessions at sometime during the day.

So off I went to see the @moodlefairy aka Mary Cooch and @BBarrington aka Becky Barrington to find out in more depth about the Gradebook, I was keen to see how rating or grading of databases, forums and glossaries was going to work and how they go into the Gradebook.

So Mary introduced us to her Celebrity Flat Share and explained how we were going to use the various activities mentioned above, add a post to the forum and add an entry to the database and then we would rate them, we also rated the celebrities that were held in a database and the top two with the most ratings would be the celebrities who would be in the flat with two of us 'students'. We all added a forum post saying why we should go into the flat and then added a recipe as an entry into a glossary, we then went onto rate other people's recipes saying whether they were tasty or very tasty, loved having hands on, learning how to use these tools in a different way than I'm used to.

Learnt about using categories in the Gradebook and how the grade can be set to zero if you are doing activities for fun and don't want it to be added to the final course grade, the category could be called just for fun and all activities that don't need to be graded can be put into this category.

We looked at outcomes within moodle and how it can be used for competency, goal setting, criteria and standards. Look at http://tinyurl.com/moodleoutcomes for more help on outcomes.

Quizzes in 2.5 condenses the options in MCQs so there is no need to scroll and will only have the HTML editing if the button is clicked to show it. Mary gave us a quiz to do within Moolde and depending on how you rated yourself on how certain you were depended how many points you got for the answer you gave. This is known as CBM - certainty based marked Eg. You get the answer correct and you ticked the box that you were very sure you had the correct answer the you got 3 points, for a wrong answer that you were certain you had it right you got -2 points......I ended up with -1/10, must try harder next time!!!

Mary then went on to show us various other quiz types that can be added into moodle as a plugin from moodle.org, also have a look www.jamiep.org for an interactive tour of the moodle quiz

Assignments has changed greatly in 2.4, they are now all under one assignment and you choose your type of assignment when you are editing the settings. There is also a cut off date in assignments now, I'm guessing this is the final final date of late submissions, you can also extend individual student's deadlines, this maybe used if the student was off ill and missed the deadline submission date for genuine reason. Students can submit assignments in groups, this is great for collaborative work. Students can have individual grades or one grade for whole group, and can set so all student HAVE to upload or add something. Have a look at groupings for student groups here for extra help. http://tinyurl.com/groupingstudentgroups. In assignment we can now mark blind, the identifier is totally random - one issue could be students name their file with their name, the activities block will show who has upload assignment. Once the assignment has been marked you can reveal who was who in the marking area/gradebook. Rubrics is criteria based marking and you need to make the assignment before you add the rubric, the marking guide is another feature to be used in assignments, this shows the students how their work will be graded and also shows all the teachers in the course the marking guide so they all mark to the same criteria, frequently used comments can be added and used repeatedly in the future.

They chose the 2 flat mates that were going to flat share with Stephen Fry, Martin Dougiamas, Einstein and Winnie the Pooh. Jedward were a definite no!!! These results came from the voting in the database we did earlier in the day.

If you want to practice anything in 2.4 you can go to school.demo.moodle.net and login either as a student, teacher or manager, the course automatically get cleaned every hour on the hour!! Happy Moodling !!

All in all a fab day so far.....

Met Martin Dougiamas, Becky and I spoke to him and had our piccy taken with him at the drinks reception before the quiz evening. I wasn't on the team that came last but not far off.

On my way.....

Got on my way to Bristol Airport to meet up with @danjatm and catch our flight to Dublin for Moodle Moot 2013.

The journey was to begin, Dan's bag was too fat so with a little bit swapping to my suitcase sorted that, he also lost his bottle of vodka at security because he'd read the label wrong, 75cl is not the same as 100ml it equals 200ml...doh!!

Flight was delayed by half hour but we finally landed, rather roughly about 10.40, shuttle bus to the hotels made life a lot easier.

I'm stopping in the Carlton, lovely hotel and very friendly staff.

Before I go....

....it was touch and go whether I was going to get there but on paper and in the ether I'm there!!

This is only the 2nd blog I've ever done and I do believe the 1st one wasn't really read by many.  So bear with me when I get to grips with coming out of my comfort zone and going for it.

#mootie13 is in Dublin again this year and being held at the Crowne Plaza Northwood, the same as last year.  Lovely hotel and conference facilities.  Nice Guinness too.....be rude not to have a little sample!!

Have given up trying to install Moodle 2.4 onto MacBook as I need admin rights and due to it belonging to work I don't have that luxury! Hopefully I'll be able to talk nicely to @shirl24 and we can share, i do believe we are in the same sessions!! ;-)

Monday is workshop day, hence the need for having Moodle 2.4 on my MacBook, I'm going to attend @moodlefairy and +Rebecca Barrington  sessions on assessment in moodle, keen to see what quizzes can do beyond the Multiple choice, True/false and short answer question types.

The new assignment tool will be interesting to see as well, looking forward to having another go at customising the gradebook, I have had a look before using +Rebecca Barrington's book (published by Packt) of which I reviewed for the publishers! (my little claim to fame!!)