Finally...Success with Moodle!

I'm not going to lie to you. I have used Moodle for two years and recently had one of my first real successes. My site has all sorts of bells and whistles and is a record of just about everything I have ever done in my classroom. If a student was sick they would be able to get just about everything they need to get caught up, but they don't! If someone has difficulty taking tests...they could take a pretest from home and practice, but very few do. Why do I put hours into it? I'm not sure.

I guess I am looking for the hook. When do they buy in and when can we really start making progress? Apparently, it is when you give them a chance to take control and stop the top-down approach. I recently created a forum where the students got to post their own content and they went bonkers. Here is the prompt...














At last count when I closed the forum after two weeks or so there were 46 posts. Every post happened outside of the school day and I got around to responding to about half. All the forum posts related to how the class connected to the students' lives. Granite counters, eclipse, sunsets, lava, vacations, the earth exploding....

Here is a sample.

















In my opinion, the kids are not so engaged until they have a stake in it. When you give them a chance to produce they jump on it. I think Myspace would be boring if they just got to look at it. Luckily, they can customize it so they are engaged. We are just learning that. Because of the web, we can connect with our students beyond the classroom and so we should. If we bother, they will respond.