This month we gathered at Gymea Technology High School, in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, to hear about their implementation of Moodle, as well as the usual social aspects of our meetings. Around 20 people attended and everyone was in good moods as they shared stories and picked up the odd new skill.
Moodle was first introduced at Gymea after witnessing it in action at another school. It was originally thrown together on an old machine but has grown from there.
A big factor in the growth was a new deputy principal that really pushed Information and Communication technologies in the school. The Digital Education Revolution (DER) has also been a big motivation to use Moodle more. [see video at bottom of this page for more details about the DER]
Some details from the presentation:
Moodle's meta course feature is used for core subjects so that students are automatically enrolled in necessary courses
One of the Gymea Visual Art teachers talked about her use of Moodle. She was particularly fond of Moodle's ability to handle assignment submissions. Others also agreed that assignment submission made their lives easier.
The host presenter from Gymea, Philip Woolett, commented that when he was away on long service leave he could still be contactable on Moodle to provide guidance to students when necessary. This was a great feature of moving courses to online, at least for some of the work students have to do.
We moved on to general discussion. We started off with a general creativity game.
The floor was then opened up to questions.
One question asked was the removing of assessment submissions to free space on the server. When courses roll over they will free space on the server. The file limits used in Moodle also ensure that submissions aren't unreasonable in size.
Another question was to do with odd formatting on course listing page. This was fixed by looking at the code for the headings of topics and fixing minor differences in the code.
We looked at different ways for organising course pages, including hiding topics and having a table at the top that links to each topic. This way students can easily click through the pages.
We discussed consistency in terms of formatting and ways this could be achieved.
Another need that arose was activity ideas. People are using the normal activities in general ways and comfortable with this. They now want to branch out and start experimenting with more elaborate classes. This could be a potential area to discuss in future meetings.
Overall, people found value in the sharing of ideas and found it worthwhile.
