12 Moodle tools to interact with your students online
Effective elearning requires participation and collaboration from students; and teachers are continuously looking to leverage technology to support their objectives and create an environment conducive to interactive learning.
More and more educationists and teachers worldwide are turning to Moodle for their online education programs. The reasons are simple a) it’s open source b) provides tools that promote active learning, interaction, and collaboration.
The focus of the Moodle project is on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning
From learning logs that aid in reflection on essential questions, sharing and communicating via live chat and forums, creating and giving quizzes, producing book-like content, and teaching via podcasts and virtual classrooms, the use of Moodle for e-learning is exemplary.
12 Moodle tools for better online Interaction- Encourage learning logs, where students reflect on what they’ve learned
- Share and communicate via live chat and forums
- Give and grade quizzes
- Make a lesson for the learners
- Create multi-page content
- Create and revise notes with wikis and podcasts
- Make educational movie trailers or storyboards
- Get vocal with voice thread
- Turn your Moodle course page into a website
- Upload and share notes on Moodle
- Real-time collaboration
- Virtual classroom
Encourage learning logs, where students reflect on what they’ve learned
Use the journal activity in Moodle to have your students create learning logs, which help them to reflect on what they’ve learned. Teachers can access the journals, review their notes and check on their comprehension, offering constructive feedback to correct misunderstandings or prod students toward a deeper understanding, all without hampering the current flow of student’s work and in a totally non-threatening environment.
Share and communicate via live chat and forums
In order for education to happen, communication is paramount. Through Moodle, teachers communicate with their students via forums, live chat, and editing documents, through real-time collaboration. Chat allows teachers and students to communicate about a collaborative task, share ideas, share links, and in general work together on projects. Better yet, the live chats can be recorded and saved for future reference.
Give and grade quizzes
If you install Quiz activity module, you can use Moodle to implement multiple choice quizzes. You can give students several retakes to answer the questions correctly, if desired. Display the resulting grades within the results block, and use the feedback option to discuss the results so they understand where they misunderstood and why.
Make a lesson for the learners
Moodle’s Lesson module allows you to add all sorts of media to lessons, along with adding tests to assess comprehension. You even have the option to send students to a slide containing the right answer for every incorrect answer in these assessments. Essentially, the lesson module self-contained chunks of teaching and learning opportunities, organized to facilitate either independent or collaborative learning.
Create multi-page content
Book-like collections or microsites can be created inside Moodle with the help of the Book module. Create books with chapters, give links to discussion forums within the book, and even include multimedia objects like Flash movies.
Create and review notes with wikis and podcasts
At the end of the course, Moodle creates a wiki to chapters from a text or particular units of study and can then associate a student with each link. The purpose is to assign each learner to summarize a specific content area and then facilitate review and study by all students.
Instead of merely writing quick notes for every chapter or content area, students can write thorough notes in a single area, making for better notes and, more importantly, better retention and understanding. Students can then use the Podcast module to upload podcasts of their notes, and return whenever they need to in order to review them.
Make educational movie trailers or storyboards
Within Moodle, instructors can provide multimedia learning resources to their students, which can be repurposed and remixed for building their own stories. Students take the images and files and upload them into a storyboarding gallery. They can then access the gallery and learn and review concepts in the form of a story of their own creation.
Get vocal with voice thread
Make use of the microphone in laptops and netbooks by embedding a voice thread in various formats, which allows learners to speak and record what they have to say. Use voice threads to let learners tell what they think of a particular topic, and to give input on what their peers are saying. Voice threads bring a fun, personal, and attractive aspect to e-learning and can have broad implications for students with verbal disabilities and impaired writing abilities.
An alternative option is the Nanogong plugin. This module helps the students in recording verbal responses to questions, which can be reviewed by tutors, who then respond with feedback.
Turn your Moodle course page into a website
Increase student engagement and interest by adding gadgets, RSS feeds, and embedding content to make your page look like a website. An increasing number of educational institutions and organizations are using Moodle as a content management system, in addition to an LMS.
Upload and share notes on Moodle
The database activity module allows students to upload their notes or answers and access others’ after they have uploaded two of their own. This feature creates notes or question database and a useful resource for both teaching and learning. Requiring students to upload two first ensures that they’re taking their own notes and doing their own work before turning to someone else’s.
Virtual Classroom
Schedule and launch live class sessions from within Moodle, via WizIQ virtual classroom. Scheduled sessions get listed in the ‘Block,’ and are automatically listed on the Moodle course calendar. Thus, students can easily join their teachers’ live classroom sessions and learn in real-time.
Our whitepaper, 12 Moodle Tools to Interact with Your Students Online, takes a look at a bevy of features that Moodle offers and how teachers can use these tools to make their classes more interactive and fun.
Download this free whitepaper to
-Learn 12 awesome tools for your MOODLE class or course
-Get ideas to increase interactivity in your class
Download this paper now and learn how Moodle is enabling educationalists to maximize on it and build world-class learning experiences.
