NECC Day 1 (Saturday June 28)

Prelude…
Well, after getting in to town ok, I poked around San Antonio Friday afternoon: Convention Center, River Walk, Hemisphere park, Tower of the Americas, some of downtown. Found a great family mexican restaurant (Mexican Manhatan) celebrating their 50th year of family owned operation. Good food, great folks, clients were mostly local residents (unlike the Riverwalk which seemed to be mostly visitors).
Got back to the hotel and started catching up on email and looking at info online – ended up staying up until 2 am – set my alarm and promptly overslept. Woke with a start at 9am! My First session on Moodle and more was at 8:30, so I knew was late. By the time I got dressed, walked over and got my registration materials it was almost 10 am when I walked into the session (it was an 8:30-11:30 session).

Act 1:
The session was run by Carmalita Bieniek and Jeanne Myers. Even though I was late, the nice thing was that since they were using moodle to teach the sessions their entire outline and resources were within the moodle course they had set up.

Sections I missed but I will be able to go back to in their site:

What is online learning?
Some nice resources here – youtube video on What it means http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a32eDsxDfjY
They then had participants participate in a forum they posted asking for reflections on the video, participants could respond to other’s postings.
Had a link to reserach study by Babson and Olin College “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006” I have that resource now.

What do teachers need?
Link to outside questionairre: http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/olfac.html#lecturers
Link to teaching style survey: http://www.longleaf.net/teachingstyle.html
Online learing: Do you have what it takes?
http://members.shaw.ca/mdde615/index.htm
Quiz: do you have what it takes?
http://www.emporia.edu/lifelong/geninfo/newskills.htm
They then had participats get into groups for a chat about teacher readiness

This Where I came in at 10 am

What is moodle anyway?
One nice link is the moodle plugins and modules:
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009

We need to look this over some more to see what things we might be missing from our current moodle use. The version we were using in the workshop was v 1.9.1 but our current classroom revolution version is 1.8.4. I need to find out why we haven’t upgraded to v 1.9.1 yet. here were some nice additions to layout and design in te newest version.

Using Delicious
This was a very cool section – even though I have used delicious for years, I really hadn’t realized i have only scratched the surface of this – both as a standalone web 2.0 app, as well as how to use it wthin moodle.

This was the most powerful thing I got out of our time in the session – that it is important to bring Web 2.0 tools into your moodle site.

We spent some time using delicious, including how to use well. One of th things I had not done much is utilize the tag features in delicious – now I get it! Once you accrue hundreds of websites, you absolutely need to use tags, as these allow sorting by tags. For instance, if you use the tag distancelearning then when you want to see your distae learning sites, you just select that tag and only those sites will show. Powerful!
I uploaded all my bookmarks from Safari into my new site I made (del.icio.us/mehines) and now I have a delicious site with 1234 sites. Of course, they are not tagged well, but it is a start.

The cool thing is that in the settings of delicious, you can create both tag clouds and tag rolls and these can be imbedded into moodle – both into a specific section or on the side windows. Since this is a dynamic feature, when you update your delicious site, it will update in the moodle window! Here is an example of a tag roll for delicious for my necc2008 sites:


necc2008 link roll

They also showed a nice youtube on delicious that is worth sharing from the folks that make ***in plain english
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

We also talked a bit about how twitter can be imbedded into moodle as well

The last 30 minutes was spent letting us play with a class they set up for us. A few of their recommendations:

If you require passwords and don’t allow guests, then you are covered by fair use legislation for your class. teachers can post and use resources the same as regular classroom.

First thing when setting up a new course is to turn off all the windows other an the administrative window. Then only turn on the windows you want to have. Just because they come in by default doesn’t mean you want them.

The most important thing I got out of the workshop was that I should be using moodle for my next generation pueo web server for teachers. Because Moodle has great built in resources (discussions, forums, wikis, blogs, etc) and allows sorting by topics, it should be a natural fit for my needs for our teachers.

The rest of the day, I volunteered as a greeter for 3 hours – got to meet a bunch of great folks. I was greeting with a woman Elizabeth from Puerto Rico. I need to find her – I didn’t get her contact info, but she was interested in linking up with a Hawaiian school for a classroom blogging project, or maybe ivc as well.

Enough for now…