St. Mary's Moodle Site
St. Mary’s Launches new online Moodle Virtual Learning Site for students
Jun 12th
www.cbsmullingar.moodle4schools.ie/
Moodle is a V.L.E used in most Universities and Third level colleges in Ireland and Great Britian. Its a Web application that teachers can use to create effective online learning that extends class time and teacher pupil contact beyond school times.
What is Moodle?
The focus of our Moodle project for Colaiste Mhuire is to use it as a platform to augment classes which is known as blended learning.
Operating on a pilot basis during May in a number of clases, the feedback from students is very encouraging and positive
Moodle has many features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students as in universities but we in Colaiste Mhuire have adapted these to suit the needs of our pupils in St. Marys.
Some of these features are as follows
Assignments
- Assignments enable teachers to grade and give comments on uploaded files and assignments created on and off line.
Chats
- The chat module allows participants to have a real-time synchronous discussion via the web.
Choices
- Here a teacher asks a question and specifies a choice of multiple responses.
Databases
- The database module enables participants to create, maintain and search a bank of record entries. eg Image gallery, web links, module documentation etc
Forums
- Forums provide the opportunity for asynchronous discussions.
Glossaries
- The glossary module enables participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary.
Lessons
- A lesson activity presents a series of pages to the student, who is usually asked to make some sort of choice below the content area. A lesson activity allows the teacher to create an adaptive learning experience, without direct teacher interaction.
Quizzes
- This module allows the teacher to design and set quiz tests, consisting of multiple choice, true-false, and short answer questions and more. Each attempt is automatically marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback and/or to show correct answers.
Resources
- Teachers can provide course resources in various formats – pages edited in Moodle, uploaded files or web links., a web page, an image, an mp3 file etc
SCORM packages
- SCORM is a collection of specifications that enable interoperability, accessibility and reusability of web-based learning content.
Surveys
- Teachers can use surveys to gather data from their students that will help them learn about their class and reflect on their own teaching.
Wikis
- A wiki is a collection of web pages that anyone can add to or edit. eg course summary survey
Workshops
The workshop module enables peer assessment.
Many of our students love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a tool to access notes, powerpoint presentations, weblinks, standard SCORM packages while some just enjoy learning via its assignments or quizzes.
Teachers have an up to date and online record of attendances / participation of each pupil in their courses and time spent on each individual element within their subject area.
From September 2011 Moodle will be available to all students in St. Marys and can be accessed from our school website www.cbsmullingar.ie
