NECC Unplugged - Your ticket to this Summer's Hottest Edtech Conference

Steve Hargadon, creator of Classroom 2.0 and educational mastermind (really, he's put on and created some amazing events) is at it again coordinating a huge "un-"conference event alongside the on site presentations and scheduled happenings at NECC09 in Washington DC June 28th through July 1st.

Here's a quick note about it from Steve's blog:

Tomorrow the fun continues with NECC Unplugged. My personal NECC hero, Anita McAnear, got or gave permission for us to run this again after our first try last year. This is something of an extension of EduBloggerCon but it runs the whole three days of NECC (starting tomorrow, June 29th) and anyone who wants to can sign up to present in our area...The presentations slots are 30 minutes, and this year we actually have our own separate area across the hall from the Blogger's Cafe. AND we are "Elluminating" (live-streaming) the sessions so that those who aren't attending NECC have an additional way to tap into the conference "live." (emphasis added)

There are tons of presentations over the next few days that you can watch and listen to online, including:

• Literacy in a Digital World
• Mahara with Sharon Betts
• Research 2.0 (Diigo) with Vicki Davis
• Learning through Alternate Reality Gaming
• Wiki Round table with Adam Frey of Wikispaces
• Teachers without Borders
• Using a Cellphone as a language learning tool
• and that's just some of the events on the 1st day!

All sessions are available to view using Elluminate and there are multiple ways to tune in (through blogs, twitter, etc.). This is the link to the LIVE Room in Elluminate: http://tinyurl.com/neccunplugged but check out the NECC Unplugged Wiki for more (lots more) information.

Free Tool - Babelwith.me

Imagine being able to collaborate learning between two classes that don't speak the same language. Moodle brings students a little closer by providing languages to change when users are in Moodle, but both teachers would have to type content in the language of their students and having conversations between the students would be impossible without a lot of manual translation.

Now imagine that you could coordinate a chat between those same students, allowing them to talk to each other, in real time, in their native languages and each would be able to understand: what you've just imagined is babelwith.me.

It's a easy to use chat client (a lot like Tinychat.com) that allows translation in real time between 45 languages.

If you're coordinating a course with students that don't speak English, don't despair, just give it a try! From within the change you can copy the direct link, share via Twitter, Facebook or via email. It's powered by Google's translating service.

Languages include:

1. English
2. Italian
3. Spanish
4. Chinese
5. Korean
6. Danish
7. German
8. Japanese
9. Thai
10. Croatian
11. and so many more!

Related posts:

• Free Tool - Tinychat.com

50 free courses! - Linux for Education

Open Education News posted a quick note about Linux for Education and their Moodle site which posts over 50 courses available to view, download and utilize to learn how to use open source software in education. (Note: looks like some are from MoodleCommons.org and other sites I've highlighted in the past, but it's a great clearing house of courses nonetheless).

From the site:

We've just launched a pretty decent start for a linux for education portal that should contain hundreds (we already have about 50) totally creative commons or similar free license courses that can be used online directly (guest access to all courses) or downloaded to export into one's own e-learning platform (backups are moodle based.) The site contains howtos, forums, wikipedias and chatrooms, as well as the traditional Moodle courses on a wide array of subjects across the board.

The courses cover nearly every level of education (k through adult education) and every subject under the sun:

• Art and Design
• Information Technology
• Science
• Math
• Music
• Languages
• Humanities
• Teaching
• Technology
• Society
• Study Skills

It's a great list of courses to peruse for ideas or even to download the courses to restore somewhere else. Interestingly, a course I created for a program in Vermont is included!

Grab a course, restore it to GlobalClassroom and enjoy!

Linux for Education Release

Linux for Education Moodle site

Related:

• Backing up courses: Youtube | MoodleTutorials
• Restoring courses: Youtube | MoodleTutorials
• Importing resources and activities: Youtube | MoodleTutorials

5 Ways to use your Moodle Classroom to Support Homework

These 5 ways come from a great post from "Changing the Game", a blog I've been following for a while now. Here they are paraphrased, check out the original post for a much better and very useful synopsis of how each might work:

1. Set up offline assignments to make a comprehensive homework diary
2. Set up a Quiz with opening & closing times as a homework
3. Assess contributions to a Forum
4. Build a glossary together as a class
5. Hand in homework online
   

Five ways to use your VLE to support homework.

Each is a great way to utilize Moodle (and not just the assignment module) to work homework into your online classroom. I'm personally very fond of the glossary and think it's a great way even to introduce teachers to Moodle and how it can work.

Peruse "Changing the Game" for more great Moodle tidbits.

Unenroll from Courses

As you explore GlobalClassroom and the many, various courses on it you may find yourself enrolled into a course that you no longer wish to be a part of, that has ended or that you no longer find useful. If this is the case feel free to unenroll!

As of today, June 23rd users with the student role in any course can unenroll themselves by clicking that option in the Administration block (below grades). This will remove your account from the course.

Please use your discretion with this option (as teachers may have changed course passwords after you enrolled originally and you may find that if you unenroll in error that you cannot get back into the course).

Additionally, if you are a teacher of younger students, please make sure your students understand the implications of clicking on the unenroll option.

Related Posts:

• Some free courses on GC
• Free course round up

Moodle Magazine

Tomaz Lasic and his students recently put together a great Moodle Magazine which he shared on his blog. I recommend the read (at either location) and commend them for their work in putting a great resource like this together on 1 page.

Easy to read, and a great resource for beginning teachers or students in Moodle. The online magazine covers assignments, blogs in Moodle, popular things to do/try with Moodle and more:

eBCC Moodle - eBCC Moodle Magazine

Constructing a Course? Start with your Syllabus

Here's a great blog post about how you can utilize your syllabus as the basis of your road map for course construction in Moodle from Instructional Systems Design (id.MaryParke.com). As the summer months approach, it's a great time to catch up on Moodle best practices and put some effort into creating and modifying your digital classroom to flow better during the school year. Effort now might be efficiency later.

So, if you're embarking on your first Moodle course this summer, here's a great place to start: Your Course Syllabus. This is a road map for your online classroom. Not all of the information needs to be presented in the Moodle classroom, but schedules of activities (assignments), important due dates, topics, projects and other relevant information all might find a useful and easy to find place in your online classroom for students.

Your syllabus – your first tool in your toolbox
Okay, so look at your syllabus. How do you naturally organize your course? By weeks or by topics? By weeks with topics? By projects? Do you scaffold your learning throughout the semester, or do you cover one topic and move on to the next – a skills mastery type of learning?

Let’s introduce concept mapping: look at your course, how you chunk your information, and the assignments you associate with each “chunk”. Map it out – break out a blank piece of paper and either “cluster” chart your info or flowchart it.
Why? Your course structure is the first building block in creating your course. You’ve a decision to make – how you chunk your content information for delivery.

As the post goes on to point out, choosing your course layout based on your syllabus is an easy way to help you organize your course. Starting here will let you build content in a very organized fashion later (so there are no jumbled topics or weeks that confuse your students).

Further along in the post the author points out the easy to use features such as the forum, chat and assignments and how they can be easily translated from your syllabus to your digital classroom.

While you're there, check out another great post: Enhance your Face to Face (f2f) Instruction

Enjoy the post (and your summer).

More Creative Commons Courses

UPDATE 8/23/09: the Coloodle has moved http://moodle.tcea.org/coloodle/

Introducing the Coloodle (Collaborative Moodle) which is a site down in Texas designed to share content and provide a space for teachers to collaborate. On the site you'll find examples of courses at several levels (many of the courses you can access just with guest access) and a good many creative commons courses that you can download, restore and utilize on another Moodle site.

Check out the site and register if you're looking for a chance to collaborate with a teacher from another state (TX). Here's a link to learn more about the purpose of the Coloodle.

If you'd like to find a collaborator through another network, try checking out Moodlemeet.ning.com where you can meet with Moodlers from around the world who might be able to connect you to willing participants.

In the meantime, check out the Coloodle and the various courses it makes available:

Take a look at our eSchool video

If you're a school teacher, administrator, business person or consultant (or anyone else) that would benefit from their own Moodle installation but would rather not worry about the issues involved with being an administrator, installing the software or upgrading, etc. then check out our new video about the GlobalClassroom eSchool. GlobalClassroom can help you

• engage students
• utilize the web for education
• deliver content digitally
• make trainings more efficient

Click the image for the jump.

Moodle Stories from Moodle.org

I found this link on the great Moodlerific.org blog, which posts helpful Moodle tips, links, tricks and how-to's on a regular basis. The link is to a discussion forum at Moodle.org that highlights Moodle stories, or requests for specific stories that help to illustrate the means to various ends and how Moodle can be used effectively to accomplish it.

Their are a bunch of great stories (and it grows daily) but one of my favorites is a topic titled "MOODLE CREATES SUCCESS!" (note that you need a username and password to access the site, but it's free and the resources available at Moodle.org are well worth the cost of an additional username and password to remember, especially since they do no email solicitations or campaigns). The post comes from Mary Kaplan who is a Moodle user in SC. She used it to created a blended learning experience for her students in foreign languages and it brought the number of failing students to zero in just a short time.

I teach French in a secondary school in Aiken, South Carolina. This year I have taught courses in 2nd and 4th year French. Every year, I have had at least a couple of students fail to meet the standards, usually in first or second year.

This year, I have NO, repeat NO students failing. NONE AT ALL! And I have a couple who would have failed in previous years, who came to me with very low marks from French 1. On the French National Exam, written by the American Association of Teachers of French, I had extraordinary results as well, with my top students.

For the greater part of the second semester, I have been using moodle to provide additional practice opportunities for my students, and it has paid off incredibly. I only realized this yesterday when I received a printout of my grades from guidance. I had already checked for unsuccessful graduating seniors, but not all my students.

I have not changed how I teach. As a matter of fact I have covered more material that I ever have. I have not been grading less stringently. Nothing has changed except that I have provided an opportunity for students to practice and review on moodle.

I cannot imagine a class where this resource would not be beneficial. If you have doubts, come talk to me about it.

Martin, you cannot imagine how grateful I am!

--Mary

I think it's a great story about the possibilities of Moodle, especially in high school. Sign into Moodle.org and ask questions of Mary or the other contributors to learn more about Moodle. We'll continue posting illustrations here, but in the meantime you can get a lot of great information from perusing the 1000s of pages of Moodle.org.

Free Course - Digital Photography

I found a great course in the Moodle.org exchange which is the clearing house of free resources you can use in your own Moodle classroom.

They have databases, glossaries, full courses, SCORM, and all sorts of other good stuff.

In the course is a new discussion forum (3/09) where sites can post their ready to download courses to share. Within that I found GoMHC.com/Moodle's great digital photography course, which could be a GREAT starting point for any high school to college or adult education course on the topic.

It covers:

• online hosting,
• camera selection,
• fair use guidelines and photographer's rights,
• photo editing software like GIMP,
• usage
• presets
• and then launches into a few great assignments that might just unleash the photographer in you.

Here's a screen shot of some of the assignments:

Click here for the download or here to visit the site.

Get Going with Groups

Around the Corner (A blog that often posts about Moodle) has a FANTASTIC post about using groups to help simplify course management. Specifically it helps to answer this question:

I've just started using Moodle, and I'm finding it a bit tiresome to backup and restore a course every time I want to setup a new course for learners to participate in. Not only is it time-consuming, but sometimes, the backup of the course doesn't work because the files (e.g. course files including video and audio) are so big that the backup operation times out. What can I do to skip the backup and restore process?

Miguel does a great job of showing how you can set up groups and have users join those groups automatically using group specific enrollment keys.

Access the full post here, it's a great read.

This is a serious time saver if you're using 1 set of resources for many sections of a course (or many iterations of the same course overtime).

(above image from Around the Corner)

A quick note: assignment dates are static for users, so if you want quizzes and homework to be available from X to X and that varies across groups this isn't the best solution. It's best to leave assignments without dates (or change them only after classes have ended if you're scheduling groups that don't overlap). Note that turned in work will be time stamped so seeing who is late and who is not won't be that hard to monitor.

Here are some more posts about groups:

• Managing Multiple Classes from One Online Classroom
• Viewing select groups in the Grade book
• Automatic Assignment of Class Groups (from the Moodleman)
• Introducing Groupings

Online Teaching Conference - free to attend virtually!

Here's a great chance to check out some summer conference presentations from the comfort of your home/office/classroom.

The Online Teaching Conference is next Thursday and Friday (June 11th and 12th) and is hosted at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA. The conference keynote will be provided by Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow (http://www.tomorrow.org) at 9am PST (Noon EST).

As an east coaster, if you can't make the trip, you can still tune in to many of the conference sessions for free! You do have to register though, just go to this page (http://www.onlineteachingconference.org/register.html) and click "Register me as a virtual attendee". Only 1/4 of the sessions will be available online, but there are still some great ones listed for virtual attendees:

• The keynote: Tomorrow’s Students, Today’s K-12 Digital Learners: Are You Ready for Them?
• Online Collaborative Groups: how to make them work
• Copy and Paste Generation: Promoting Academic Integrity
• Increase Student Success by Retaining Learners Interest, Interaction and Enthusiasm

Looks like some great content is being made available at no charge (what a deal!). So go register!