MOODLE MOOT VIRTUAL CONFERENCE ON LINE 2015: MOODLE AS A DIGITAL BOOK

8th August 2015

Moodle as a Digital Book

 

Eduardo Lina (http://eduardolina.blogspot.co.il/) made an interesting presentation on line by providing interesting ideas about the best way for working on line while teaching in a different way last weekend. 

The interesting LMS he uses is MOODLE  ( https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Main_page) which is a learning platform that enables teachers to do courses on line for their professional development and which is now  widely used in many universities and educational institutions all over the world.
I  used  Moodle for my  professional development on line in Italy this year and I really enjoyed working on the platoform in two courses: the tutors  presented a lot of  interesting activities with WEB 2.0 tools and  I  could imagine that  this environment could be  a good  platform also for teaching  young  learners and enhancing  learning.


The presentation by Eduardo  was provided on line thanks to Nellie Deutsch
( https://www.wiziq.com/nelliedeutsch) who worked hard to organize the three day on line conference   together with other teachers  from all over the world and wiziq.com.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L2K9gyo3gnyKayDkVVxguZ1D3toB5aedSJvAdq6xJR0/edit#heading=h.1xvvcz8blxm8

I have seen some of the presentations on line and I am going to see more in the next  days.
I have decided to focus on this part of the  conference on line  by Eduardo Lima as I got entrapped into the ideas  he shared with us. We are now moving into a new age for learning and most of the activities  we plan should   engage our  learners while they can choose how to work and decide also what they are interested in. 
While at school we are still paper-based ,here Eduardo showed a more engaging  Learning  Environment where his students could interact, work on line, carry out  reserches and  reflect. A great point in the presentation was his reference to the digital skills so that our learners can use the new  Technologies while doing their homework from home too.

Eduardo presented his digital book after describing how his country , Israel,  is now pushing teachers into the digital age.  I would add that this is now the  trend everywhere: last spring and this  summer  I did two MOOCs run by the European Schoolnet  Academy - http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/- where more than 3,000 Teachers worked on Tablets and later on Games for learning about new and better ways of teaching in the XXI century.

The digital book Eduardo  has  created  is a great tool, a project which he is going to implement this year, but it is  a tool  that might be interesting  for  any language teacher because  he could choose what videos to embed in the  LMS  and  he could manage to provide students with materials on line which you can choose to upload to the Platform.
What I particularly liked were his ideas about  creating a virtual classroom where students could be  engaged and work on their own , while the teacher  can guide them and check how they interact and what they can do on line thanks to posts and the forums. The teacher monitors the forums and can delete inappropriate posts  or comments.
MOODLE is  a really versitile platform because  you can  add a lot of functions to the structure of your course on line and it is free.
He said that you can use a lot of tools and upload a lot of files, documents, it can work with Google so  it is a great modern  tool that  most  schools  should have for  having online courses or  also blended learning or  flipped classroom.  

Eduardo underlined the best qualities of  Moodle in his presentation  by talking about the integration of Moodle with many  tools.




He also reminded us about the importance of  engagement for learners.
What he described and showed us on line was really a new way for teaching because it was based on the students' interests: he devised activities for writing and presenting themselves by providing  tutorials for the new tools and links. He also thought about blogs to be written on line by the students  by using Blogger. 


Since I am studying about the best ways to implement my teaching I have just  applied to do a Mooc about  using  MOODLE -  https://learn.moodle.net/ . 

We are learning in a new environment now :  I wish to thank Eduardo and all the  Teachers who worked on the  VIRTUAL CONFERENCE  LINE  because I realized that although  education is not financed in the best way in many countries, I have seen that a lot of  teachers are continuing  learning on line to offer better learning content and better and engaging lessons.

Now I have just taken up a Moodle course as a beginner learner on line  and I am  going to try to create a project and see how it might look like.

I have also learnt  that I could set up a new Moodle account  in the cloud:

   https://moodle.com/cloud/

Thanks a lot  to Eduardo and his project which I have just seen  on line.