Moodle Teaching Techniques

• Using forums to motivate students and give them one-on-one attention
• Keeping forum discussions on track
• Managing chat sessions
• Using quizzes for student self assessment
• Adding immediate feedback, time limits, and location restrictions to quizzes
• Making creative use of lessons
• Using wikis for individual and group activities
• Making creative use of glossaries
• Using choices for quick reviews, surveys, and reminders
• Organizing courses
• Building better courses with blocks
• Making expectations clear with workshops

The learning solutions are based on proven, accepted instructional principles and traditional classroom activities, such as Distributed Practice, Self Monitoring, Pre-correction, and more. This book will help you to motivate team work in your students.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 1 tells you who this book is for and the approach the book will take to creating learning solutions, and briefly describes the educational principles and practices upon which the techniques are based.

Chapter 2: Forum Solutions
This chapter offers you solutions for managing your forums. The first two sections focus on making the best use of forums. The last two sections focus on managing your forums.

Chapter 3: Chat Solutions
The key to making the best use of Moodle's”or any LMS's”chat function is to use chat in a way that takes advantage of its unique strengths, instead of trying to make it act like a face-to-face meeting. In this chapter, we explore the questions “What is chat good for?” and “How can I achieve success in an online chat?” Because Moodle's chat function is similar to most other chat software, the answers to these questions apply more widely than just to Moodle.

Chapter 4: Quiz Solutions
A quiz can be more than just a test. At its best, a quiz can also become a learning experience. Moodle offers features that help you to accomplish that. This chapter gives you five ways to use Moodle quizzes for more than testing.

Chapter 5: Lesson Solutions
A Moodle lesson can be a powerful combination of instruction and assessment. Lessons offer the flexibility of a web page, the interactivity of a quiz, and branching capabilities.

Chapter 6: Wiki Solutions
We usually think of a wiki as a group activity that students engage in on their own schedule. A wiki is a powerful tool for collaboration, and it does enable students to participate in a group activity from anywhere at any time. However, a wiki can also be a powerful tool for individualized learning. This principle is called “differential learning”. It means that the learning experience should be customized for each student. With individual wikis, you can differentiate the learning experience for your students.

Chapter 7: Glossary Solutions
Most people think of glossaries as nothing more than special-purpose, online dictionaries. But a glossary can also be a fun collaborative activity for your class, and a teaching tool. Let' look at the capabilities of the Glossary module first, and then ideas for using glossaries for more than just vocabulary building.

Chapter 8: The Choice Activity
Moodle's Choice is the simplest type of activity. You can use a choice to: Take a quick poll, ask students to choose sides in a debate, confirm the students' understanding of an agreement, and gather consent.

Chapter 9: Course Solutions
In this chapter, the solutions are focused on making your course easier to navigate. The goal of all these solutions is to reduce the time and effort your students spend figuring out what to do next, so they can get on with the learning. Sometimes, just slightly reducing the effort students spend on navigating through your course requires a great effort on your part. But almost anything you can do to help your students navigate easily through your course is worth the effort. The result is less time spent wondering what to do next, and more time spent on your course content.

Chapter 10: Workshop Solution
Moodle's Workshop module is one of the most complex, and powerful, activities. This chapter takes you through the process of creating a full-featured workshop. It focuses on helping you to make decisions that create the kind of workshop experience you want for your students.

Moodle is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle is designed to help educators and trainers create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. It is the world's most popular online learning system. It has many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit.

Visit Moodle Teaching Techniques' Free Online Edition http://moodlesolutions.packtpub.com

This book has a friendly approach and even experienced trainers will benefit a lot from it. It uses copious screenshots, for you to get a feel of the course site even while you are learning by building the solutions.

If you are a teacher or a corporate trainer with a desire to design effective and innovative Moodle courses, then this book is your best choice. The book assumes that you have a basic understanding of Moodle, but it does not need any programming knowledge. It's all about teaching and not programming. If you are new to Moodle, start with Moodle E-Learning Course Development by the same author.

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