Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology

Overview of this book

Educators use the Moodle web application to create effective online learning sites. Creating such learning environments that suit Design and Technology subjects requires understanding and implementation of both basic and advanced Moodle features.This book takes a detailed look at Moodle features with examples of how to fully support the Design and Technology curricula using Moodle. It will guide you to incorporate specific modules and blocks to enhance learning as well as allow detailed tracking of performance by using formative and summative assessment tools with ease.We start with setting up a very basic Moodle course for Design and Technology, and then set up some basic resources and some interactive material. You will customize your own courses and create a course for each of the key areas of the DT subjects and add material to them. We will create some basic reporting and assessment tools and enhance the look of the course. We will use Moodle's detailed and sophisticated gradebook to assess your student s ' learning progress in activities from an assignment to an offline activity. Then we will support students in designing a product or trying a new recipe in food technology in market research to find out exactly what the public wants in relation to their product, by designing a questionnaire. We will allow product design or resistant material students use the HTML features of the questionnaire module to incorporate images into the questions to make it clearer to respondents what it is they are trying to make and sell.We will allow students in construction to gather and organize their research material in a great deal of detail and also allow them to better understand their target market and the materials used in their construction through detailed questioning. We will allow food technology students to discuss and receive constructive feedback on food products that contribute to health issues that will enable them to make informed decisions and therefore better quality products. Then we explore several components within Moodle's core functionality and some third-party sources to display the progress of the student's work and development. We then have an overview of the different design portfolios available. Finally we look at additional ways to enhance the teaching and learning of D ' T with Moodle using third-party modules and add-ons.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Assessing student progress


As students interact with your course materials, join in with discussions, and take various quizzes, they build up some marks in the gradebook that we will look at in detail in Chapter 9. Some of these marks will be automatically assigned, as with quizzes and peer assessed forums, but others will require a mark from staff and some feedback.

Note

Please note that an over reliance on automated grading may not be as effective as a teaching method, so it needs to be used in conjunction with more hands-on methods of feedback and encouragement.

Depending on how the gradebook is set up, the students will be able to see their grades when they log in and staff or teachers enrolled on that course will be able to see all their students' grades.

Gradually, as you can see in the previous screenshot, you can build up a clear picture of how your students are doing and can spot problems to intervene as quickly as possible. You can also give detailed feedback on assignments and posts to forums in order to guide your students and create an effective framework for their learning in the subject. The gradebook itself, as we shall see in Chapter 9, can also be divided into categories of marks such as coursework or extra credit; so, it could be a useful guide for students' ability in all areas of their learning. It can be used to track homework assignments that might be a fast and effective way of gauging areas where students are having difficulties with your material. Information here would therefore allow you to modify your resources or discuss with the students other strategies that they could employ.