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.
