Today was the third and final half-day training session for the current cohort of primary schools who are venturing forth into using a VLE (Moodle) with their children.
The focus of today’s session was on creating three different activities – a choice, a forum and a quiz. It doesn’t sound a lot to cover in two-and-a-half hours but the time seemed to whiz by. We did manage to cover more with the afternoon group though, which was probably down to them getting less distracted than the morning group.
I must say I am impressed at how well many of the teachers have taken to what we’ve covered in the last three sessions. Although a few need some direction still to get their VLE going, most have some ideas of what they want to do and I’m sure it won’t be long before they’ve got some of their own content to use alongside the content that other schools have shared with them. It’s also great to see the Infant schools getting into this. I had my doubts on how they would get on with Moodle and the relevance of a VLE to young children. Their enthusiasm and ideas is making me think twice – maybe VLEs can be of some use to Infant children after all.
There’s still a lot to do with these schools yet. Ian Usher did mention metacourses and how the use of these would save them having to enrol pupils time and again into each new course. We didn’t expect them to fully take this in and I’m sure we’ll have to tackle this again with many of the schools once they’ve developed several courses. There are other activities that haven’t been touched on – assignment, chat, database, wiki to name but a few. To some extent we’ve only just touched the surface of what Moodle can do and we’ve just given them enough to get started.
As the schools will need continued support, the plan is to arrange for after-school workshop sessions each term for teachers to come along to (unfortunately there just isn’t enough funding to continue to pay them for supply cover for half day sessions). The agenda for these meetings will be set by them in the Moodle Users’ Support Area on the BucksGfL website. We can then come prepared to the meetings and, where necessary, create some Adobe Captivate movies on how to do some of these things (not that I have Adobe Captivate yet, it can’t be ordered until the new financial year).
One other thing we need to convince the schools to do is to post their problems in the forums in the Moodle Users’ Support Area and to subscribe to them. I suspect that many don’t use forums elsewhere and are yet to discover the benefits of using them rather than an email to an individual. Once they can see that using the forums will open up their query to a larger group of people, that an answer is likely to come more quickly and that they’ll see others posting queries that they also have and can see them being answered, I think we’ll be well away. We’ll then have a community of Moodle users who are helping and supporting each other. Now that will be good stuff. 
Tags: Adobe Captivate, assignment, BucksGfL, chat, choice, database, forum, Ian Usher, metacourses, Moodle, quiz, VLE, VLEs, wiki
