Monday 4 April 2011

Moodle tools – and the teaching / learning they support

This quick and concise guide to Moodle tools – from the nicely named Cats Pyjamas blog – has a couple of really lovely features.

First, it’s a chart. You can read through it horizontally or vertically, or you can print it out at poster size and put it on the wall while you’re writing materials, or on the table when you’re working with a group.

Second, it’s pedagogically rich, and just browsing through it sharpens up one’s thinking. For each Moodle tool (including the ultra-basic “Add resource / Upload a file”), it comments on each of the possible teaching / learning uses to which you might put it (Information transfer, Assess learning, Communication and interaction, Co-create content), as well as its affordance in terms of Bloom’s hierarchy and its ease of use.

(Note for Open University staff: as this is a guide to Moodle in general, it doesn’t quite correspond to Moodle as implemented at the Open University. But the differences are minor, and the principles are great.)