We’ll add a competitive element to the project and—just as we have seen on TV—let the children vote for the winner. The tasks we set will involve the students researching, collaborating, and reflecting. They will be working hard, but we’ll have a much easier time now, as all of their responses will be on Moodle for us to view and mark at our convenience—no more carrying heavy books around.
Moodle has an activity, known as Choice, which allows you to present students with a number of options that they can choose from. We’re actually going to use it twice in our project, for two different purposes. Let’s us try and set it up.
The students have posted their suggestions, comments, and views on Moodle. A choice is to be made of the best suggestion. Who better, than the students themselves to choose and vote for the best?
Setting | What it is | Why use it |
Display Mode | Lets you have your buttons go across or down the screen | Use Vertically if you have many options to avoid stretching your screen |
Publish Results | Decide if and when you want students to see what others have put | Choose Do not publish if you want them to tell you their progress privately; if you’re doing a class survey, choose, for example, Always show results |
Privacy of Results | Lets you choose whether to show names or not | Are the results more important than who voted for what? Some students might be wary of responding if they think their names will be shown |
Allow choice to be updated | Lets them change their mind-but they can still vote only once. | Useful, if you are using this to assess progress over a period of time. |
Show column for unanswered | Sets up a column showing those who haven’t yet responded | A clear visual way of knowing who hasn’t done the task |
We’ve set up an area, on our course page, where the students can choose their favorite designs from a number of options, by clicking on the desired option button. On the screen, you will be able to see an icon (usually, a question mark) and some text next to it. If you click on the text next to the icon, the following information will appear:
The students will click on the option button placed next to their choice—in our case, the name of the classmate whose design they prefer.
Remember that we have set up this activity so that our students cannot see the results, in order to avoid peer pressure or bullying. However, we can see the results. Thus, if Mickey votes for himself (even after having been told not to) we will spot it and can reprimand him.
After we’ve gone through all of the effort to set up our project on Moodle, it would be nice to know how well it was received. Why not go off now and set up another Choice option, where the question asks how much did you enjoy planning and designing the campsite? You could give them three simple responses (displayed horizontally) as:
Or you could be more specific, focusing on the individual activities and asking how much they feel they have benefited from, say, the wiki or the forum. Make sure it is set up, so that the students don’t see the results—that way they’re more likely to be truthful.
Here are a few other thoughts on Choice, based on my own experiences:
Well, you could give out the results in the classroom, of course! Alternatively, can encourage them to use Moodle by using the Compose a Webpage resource that we met in the previous article on Adding Worksheets and Resources with Moodle, and adding the information there.
Once a winner has been found, the next task for everyone is to create a cleverly-worded advertisement for this campsite, for which, you could use one of the names suggested in the glossary. This too can be done on Moodle. Why use Moodle and not their exercise books? The first reason is that it will save paper, the second reason is that the students enjoy working on the computer, and the third and final reason is that we can work at our leisure in school, at home, or in any room where there is an Internet connection. We’re not tied to carrying around a pile of heavy books. We don’t even need to manually hand-write the grades into our grade book. Moodle will put the grades that we give our students, into its grade book automatically and alphabetically. Moodle can also send our pupils an email telling them that we’ve graded their task, so that they can check their grades. This might be a different way of working from the one that you are used to, but do give it a try. It will take the pressure off your back and shoulders, if nothing else.
For our advert, we’ll use an Online text assignment.
If you need more space to type in, click on the icon on the far right of the bottom line of the HTML editor. This will enlarge the text box for you. Click it again when you’re done, to return to the editing area.
We’ve just explained to our class what we want them to do, and have also provided them with space in Moodle to do it. We used an Online Text assignment.
If we go up to the top of our course, where the editing button is, you’ll be able to see a very useful feature called Switch role to…. If we choose the Student option, it will allow us to see the tasks as the pupils will see them:
In this case, there’s a rather unfriendly command at the bottom of our assignment. Do you think that your students will know that they need to click here to get to their text box?
Why not ask your Moodle administrator to look at the Language editing settings and change these words to something more child-friendly—such as Click here to type your answer?
I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…
Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…
Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…
Key-takeaways: Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…
While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…
Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…