Tag: Teaching

Rita

At first glance Rita might not seem to be the sort of teacher you would want for your child and yet she probably is that teacher. Despite evident character faults it is hard not to like and even admire her. Start watching and you probably will not stop.

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Muddling in Moodle

Those of us involved with developing and teaching courses hear a lot about the desirability of consistency which sometimes seems to be interpreted as just short of uniformity. Historically that is based on student responses to a survey conducted a few years ago which was interpreted as students wanting to see the same features in the same locations in different courses....

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Muddling through Moodle books

I want to be a good corporate citizen but that can be difficult when the tools (like a web server) that enable you to do your job are withdrawn. Still that impulse got me thinking about using Moodle books to present study material. If that could be made to work, without subverting the quality of presentation of materials, it would get material in-house and offer advantages of being easily printed or downloaded as eBooks for use on computer, tablet or smartphone.

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It’s time to MELLO

For one thing I’m about to go on annual leave for 3 weeks and plan to mellow out a little after I’ve dealt with a couple of tasks that just didn’t make it to the top this week despite my plans. For another, and the real point of this post, we are beginning our publicity push to recruit participants in...

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The second coming of coding: Will it bring rapture or rejection?

Coding, aka computer programming, made it into the headlines earlier this year when Federal Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, asked Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, whether he would “support coding being taught in every primary and secondary school.” The Prime Minister initially derided the idea with a comment about kids going to work as coders at age 11 but later confirmed that...

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Down and up the greasy pole

It seems there is no constant but change. I was feeling pleased with myself over my success with a Greasemonkey script to produce simple statistics for comparing results from multiple markers in the Moodle assignment system. My infrequent forays into coding had made that process a bit like climbing a greasy pole but I’d eventually succeeded in reaching the top...

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Greasing the wheels of progress

For the past eight years we have been dealing with assignments submitted online through a locally developed system, EASE (Electronic Assignment Submission Environment), which was originally planned in response to perceived deficiencies in WebCT Vista, our LMS from 2003 until around 2008. By the time EASE was ready we were in transition to Moodle as our LMS but EASE offered enough that...

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Can I walk the walk? Project-based design challenge in EDP4130

With interruptions it has taken longer than I’d hoped to revise the assessment package for the 2015 offer of EDP4130 Technologies Curriculum and Pedagogy. I do now have what I think is a complete draft sitting on my own site for testing and review. I still need to think about how to integrate that into the LMS and tie in...

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Assessing some options

A bit more than a week into the new year and the beginning of semester is inching closer. It’s time to get some work done on the courses I’ll be teaching. Content will need to be updated but I tend to begin most times by thinking about assessment and how that will enable students to demonstrate (or not) their learning....

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Tantalising Turnitin toolset for assessment

As is usual at this time of year I’m ‘spring cleaning’ and ‘renovating’ the course(s) that I will be teaching in Semester 1 (begins 2 March). I’ve been working on the assessment for EDP4130 and hope to say more about that soon but, in the process, I was thinking about submission, marking, and managing results using our new systems. That’s my...

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