Moodle and Me

Towards the end of last year our school completed the installation of Moodle.  This year is the integration of Moodle into our teaching and learning.  To begin with, we are encouraged to start using it as a content management tool. The initial steps outlined for all teachers are to change the school template for your courses by uploading an appropriate image, upload your assessment tasks and add the tasks to the Moodle calendar.

In many ways, this was a clever move, as it was such a small thing to ask of people and easy to do, so that there was really no excuse to not be Moodling.  Having said that, some of my staff were still quite challenged and required extra instructions and two special faculty meetings devoted to Moodle in order to have the courses for Year 7 and Year 10 English completed by Term 1.

When those who were willing and enthusiastic then wanted to go further, they were inclined to see Moodle more as a content management tool than anything else. Therefore, their next, unguided, steps were to add a welcome message, add information to the topics in the way of topic descriptions and to upload photos and handouts for students. Those brave few that have continued further have added video and content for learning – seeming to understand e-learning as being about providing content and information digitally and furthering their use of Moodle as a content management tool.  This seems to me to be the tip of the Moodle iceberg.

Conscious of my role as leader of the faculty, I too first followed this path, and added much content to my own Moodle courses. Being an avid promoter of Web 2.0 interactive technologies for teaching and learning, this soon felt restrictive and two-dimensional.  I then started to explore how I could use Moodle to provide Web 2.0 experiences for my students.  I am by no means there yet, but have certainly begun the process.  The next step is to get my staff walking along the same path.

My challenge is to now shift the mentality of my faculty, from Moodle as a content management tool to Moodle as an interactive teaching and learning tool. First step I guess is the same as always – do it first as a model to show them the way. Inspire, invigorate, demonstrate, teach, provide, revise, repeat.