Once logged in, go to your Moodle course.

Step 1.

As the teacher, the first thing you want to do is to turn the editing mode on. This is not visible to your students.

Step 2.

You can add either a “resource” or an “activity” to your page. For now, we want to add a forum. Go ahead and click on Add an Activity and scroll down to Forum.

Step 3.

Assign a name to your forum. This is Week 5 so let’s name this one Forum 5. You can, of course, be more creative and descriptive.  Write a brief introduction or any specific instructions that you may have.

Step 4.

You want to have each student enrolled in the course to be automatically subscribed to the forum, so click Yes, forever or Yes, Initially. This means that they will automatically receive emails of new posts. It’s also practical to turn on the forum reading tracker so that the system will highlight unread forum posts. Students can attach files to their posts. You want to limit the maximum size of their attachments. A 3-page document file does not usually exceed 20 KB.

Posts can be rated by the teacher (and by the students, to be discussed in my future posts here). In this example, I’m choosing the highest rating to be 10/10. It can be 100/100. Any ratings given in the forum are recorded in the gradebook.

Step 5.

Now you’re ready to add a new topic. You can have more than one topic or thread going on in a week.

Step 6.

Give your new thread a title and an introduction.

Step 7.

Your students are now ready to click away.

One more thing: be sure your activity or resource is visible to your students. You can control this with the eye icon. Intuitively, a closed eye means it’s set invisible to your students. This means you can map everything out for the whole 8-week course, upload everything, but restrict or allow visibility and access one week at a time. It’s your call.

Have fun moodling.

Coming up next… Quizzes on Moodle. Not very fun to make but it will save you time grading papers.

Thanks to:

Dr. Leni Casimiro, my Instructional Media professor.

Aldwin Tapeceira and Mel Hutabarat of the Division of Online Learning, for the technical assistance. Special thanks to Mr. Raimond Luntungan for mentoring even outside the four walls of the classroom.

Dr. Prema Gaikwad, for introducing to me the power of Moodle forums.

Mr. Blaine Dunzweiler, English Center Director, for supporting me in my Transition Class–the first web-enhanced Moodle-based course of AIIAS English Center.

I have been following this site since 2007 and have seen them grow from their amateur videos to their recently TOEFL ETS-sponsored productions during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

Here’s a recent video posting of English, Baby~!

PinoyTESOL votes:

By converting video to AVI file, you can edit your video content in computer software, like Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, or Adobe After Effects. <For a basic Adobe After Effects tutorial by Hanky, click here.>

Remember Parany Razafimahafaly‘s PowerPoint project? I had never thought PowerPoint could be used in making such a thing. So when I saw it the first time, I was like, “Cool genius~!”

It’s a randomizer which can be used in choosing random questions for quiz or any classroom activity, or whatever reason you would need random numbers for (from 1 to 10). It’s a PowerPoint Show with either a .pps or .ppsx extension for MS Office 2003 and 2007 respectively. When you click on the file, it will automatically run a show. That means, you won’t be able to edit it.

Unless… you follow these steps:

1. Open Powerpoint. Select Click Open> to open browse to the pps or ppsx file.

2. Then hit Save As>  You can leave ‘File name’ as is, but change ‘Save as type:’ to ‘Powerpoint Presentation’ or ‘Powerpoint 97-2003 Presentation’.

Now you can do some editions. Good luck~!

Copyright vs. the Right to Copy

Some of the issues discussed in class were fair use and copyright. Plagiarism is very much part of it. It’s a bold cause every graduate student should uphold. Well, everyone for that matter. Everyone. Sadly, we shouldn’t have waited up towards the end of the term to discuss this. If only the professor was closely monitoring the students’ blogs and religiously giving feedback on each one that was required, as promised and agreed, a student would definitely think twice before resorting to copying and pasting articles after articles and posting them on their blogs–even if they reference them. In fact, even after that discussion, there are still new posts which are definitely copied from existing sites. I asked them why they did that. The answer was just a naive ‘I didn’t know we shouldn’t’.  The ends don’t justify the means here.

So, how can we help them? I guess deducting points is the easy fix here. Is it fair? Maybe not. Again, they should have been warned right in the beginning. Seriously.

Fair Use

You’ve got to ask yourself these questions, by Educators and Librarians, as cited in Lever-Duffy and McDonald (2008):

1. What is your purpose in using a copyrighted material? Is it educational in nature? Noncommercial?
2. What type of work is it?
3. How much of the work do you intend to use?
4. Would the use negatively affect the market potential of the original?

By asking these questions, our students, or even we ourselves, can have a guide on how to avoid copyright infringement.

Privacy

Note: Permission to print or to publish had been duly obtained back in 2006 from the parents of the Korean ESL pupils pictured and used for the banner of this blog. Yehey!

We have to protect our students’ privacy, especially the minors. The right to privacy is one of the most significant issues in the Digital Age (Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2008, p. 401). We have to educate our students to be wary sites or online games prompting them to complete a form before having an access. Some sites may use these information which include but not limited to email addresses, passwords, and even data about their families.

Reference:

Lever-Duffy, J. & McDonald, J. (2008). Teaching and learning with technology (3rd ed.).  Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

In this video, we are introducing basic English phrases that Japanese and Chinese EFL learners can use when telephoning someone in a business setting.

Leveraging the video capabilities of even the simplest desktop computer can do wonders in the classroom. I say it’s a must for education technologists–a must for us.

To learn how this video was edited, click here.

This is therefore a challenge to teachers, to education technologists: to benefit from this technological advancement by bringing forth our pedagogies in a different dimension or though a not-so-new media–up on the world wide web.

Our students learn fast. Information is everywhere, available 24/7, with just a few clicks of a button.  Creative Teaching aptly calls this the tsunami of information. They’re right. Information can be overwhelming. You want to leave the student on their own? They’ll most likely be lost. Think about your competition. Education is never the most googled word. <See the 2007 list here by Google as reported by Daily Telegraph> Therefore, the guidance of a skillful teacher is indeed very important.

The skills shared to the class by Mr. Raymond Luntungan help a lot to kickstart our group project which is to develop a website for educational purposes. The lecture was very dynamic, informative, down-to-earth, and motivating. Credits should also be given to our professor for inviting resource speakers to class and for doing everything so we can all learn how to learn. Thank you very much.

Thanks. Thanks.

Our homepage. Babel of Languages, a teach-yourself-a-language website. In the future, we would want to put all the languages spoken at AIIAS up on the tower.

Common phrases used in meeting someone for the first time. Hover over the phrase and listen to an audio recorded by a native speaker. More survival phrases and target vocabs when this site gets published.

Tracking the Winter Olympics 2010? RSS feeds is the fastest way to go.  These are web feeds of summarized or full text of frequently updated words such as news headlines, audio, video, blogs, etc. You don’t have to search, you don’t have to wait. You get updates as soon as they happen.

When you bookmark a site in your computer at home, it is saved in your bookmarks folder. Neat. But when you go to school or work, you get frustrated because you can’t easily access your bookmarks. That’s why you need RSS feeds. They deliver you the updates as long as you have internet access–even mobile phones!

These feeds come with a .xml or .rss extensions. To read them, you will need a program that reads XML (extensible markup language).  Don’t worry. Most probably you  already have them because many email programs and browsers include such.

Publishers benefit from RSS feeds because they make content syndication very easy for them–automatically. These feeds benefit readers by providing them updates on favored topics. Readers can collect and categorize many feeds from several sites and put them into one place where they can easily access them.

References:

EducationWorld

Wikipedia

Alex the cameraman. Zubaid the director. Porosh, Hanky, and Jin the talents. Something is wrong with this picture, hmmm.

The use of video undeniably enhances an ESL/EFL classroom. However, as to how much video exposure is necessary to make a significant difference in the learning process, research is still probing for empirical explanations. What has been clearly established in research is that using videos in classroom results to better comprehension and retention than just using still pictures or just listening to a cassette recorder or CD.

Our take on a 30-second promotional video of AIIAS. One of the highlights of our class projects. Thanks, Dr. Leni Casimiro and Mr. Marcus Frey.

Videos provide the students life-like virtual models they can imitate for role-play. Whether a teacher is producing an original video or just editing existing ones, lessons come to fuller life for the learner’s benefit.

AIIAS Instructional Media Class 2010. Video Prod with Marcus Frey

Reference:

Canning-Wilson, C. (n.d.).  Practical aspects of using videos in the foreign language classrooms. Retrieved from http://dianahacker.com/pdfs/Hacker-Mira-APA-Ref.pdf

Excel basically does two things:  calculation and data analysis. The right formula on a cell that computes the data on some referenced cells does the trick. With the right working formula in place, you don’t have to repeat the calculations every time a value on a particular referenced cell is changed. Excel does it automatically.

Sorting scores is one way a teacher can analyze the data. Do you want to see who got the higher score down to the lowest one in a particular quiz? You can do that in a few clicks with Excel.

Another advantage of Excel is that it has almost inexhaustible number of cells. My high school teachers’ record booklets didn’t last for two years. One who gave too many quizzes had to buy a new one shortly after the middle of the school year.

Trivia from Answers.com: In Microsoft office 2003, there are 16,777,216 cells. There are 256 columns (across) and 65,536 rows (down). 256 x 65536 = 16,777,216 . In Microsoft Office 2007 there are 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows. 16,384 x 1,048,576 = 17,179,869,184 cells.

Imagine that.

Well, I guess even Bill Gates himself hasn’t used up ALL of those cells in one spreadsheet for a single legitimate task.  Prove me wrong.

Thanks to some classmates who knew better and were willing to educate others.

Here’s a video tutorial about one very important function of Excel, the VLOOKUP.  I just hope the instructional media department of AIIAS will come up with its own sets of video tutorials.

For now, this will suffice.

Here’s the 143-page  Excel 2007 Is Fun! eBook by Michael Girvin.

Don’t forget to check out the final page–a list of keyboard shortcuts all in one neat page!