Well here we are at the final week already! It’s been a valuable experience for me so far, and I get the impression that it’s also been valuable for many of you. You’ll get the chance later in the week to share your opinions about the course via an evaluation.
Hopefully this week’s activity will round the course off neatly.
HOSTED EVENTS
The main focus for this week will be the 5 hosted events:
- Tuesday, 14/6 at 12.30 in Centra (Trisha D) The Garnaut Report
- Tuesday, 14/6 at 8.00 pm in Centra (Rob Beckett) Reading and Interpreting Plans
- Wednesday, 15/6 at 8.00 pm in Moodle Text Chat (Tania M) Fleas!
- Thursday, 16/6 at 4.00 in Centra. (Shirley E) How to start a Conversation
- Thursday, 16/6 at 8.00 pm in Centra (Peter D) Using the Break Out Tool in Centra
As I wrote before, please do your very best to attend as many of these events as you can. The more participants there are in an event, the more authentic the facilitation experience for event ‘hosts’.
VOLUNTEERS?
Ideally two tasks from last week need to be summarised:
- The wiki discussion on the Critical Factors that influence your blended learning model needs to be condensed into an annotated list of dot points that we can take away as a resource.
- The excellent Facebook discussion needs to be summarised.
Any takers? No one is obliged to do this of course, but you might also like to consider this strategy with students to offer extra credit or bonus marks or some other incentive to take on leadership roles. It may be appropriate for some kinds of courses.
BLOGGING
In the promo for this course it mentioned that you would get some awareness of the issues involved around facilitating blogs. So:
The Moodle Blogging Tool – universal opinion is that it’s a pretty dreadful excuse for a blog. It has two big problems:
- Whatever you write in it can be seen by everyone on this Moodle (ie everyone across TAFE SA)
- It has no comments feature – an essential component of a ‘proper’ blog.
Apparently the blogging tool in Moodle 2.0 will be infinitely better.
In the meantime if you’d like to try it just begin by selecting Add New Entry from the Blog Menu on the right hand site of our Moodle site.
Other Blogs
To get an idea of other blogs you might like to check my average effort at http://mikecogh.blogspot.com/
There are thousands of educational blogs. Some I look at occasionally are:
- http://wodongatafe.wordpress.com/
- http://www.fullcirc.com/
- http://weblogg-ed.com/
- http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/
The easiest place to set up a blog is Blogger (blogger.com) , though many educational bloggers use
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/http://edublogs.org/
Why not have a go at setting one up? If you do be sure to let us know where we can find it.
PORTFOLIOS
Any spare time you have this week can be spent working on your portfolios. (Note: those who host events are not required to submit a portfolio, but are very welcome to if you’d like some feedback on what you’ve learned from the course.)
I won’t repeat everything I wrote in the Announcements forum last week – go there to read information about content and the format of your portfolio. (http://moodle.tafesa.edu.au/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=21893)
EVALUATION
As mentioned above, an evaluation tool will be available towards the end of the week.
Good luck to everyone hosting events this week. See you all in there!
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