Moodle

Snow?

November 30, 2009
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I’m not dead yet. It’s just been a bit busy ’round these parts lately. And I’ve been sleeping in for five days, so I’m still a little dopey. Even most of the kids were quiet today; they looked sort of tattered. “Where’s all the left-over pie I asked for?” “Everybody in my family went eeewww when I asked about rhubarb pie.” (Almost none of the kids knew what I was talking about last week when I asked for rhubarb pie. Did you know that rhubarb leaves are poisonous?) “I see how it is. I’ll settle for pecan.” On the last day before vacation we finally had time to finish the video of “The Monsters are due on Maple Street.” They really like the groovy old cars (Steve has a brand new 1960 Ford station wagon) and the old-school ice-cream man. They also crack up that somebody besides me says, no dice. When Les Goodman first tries to start his car, and Woman 1 asks him if he had any luck getting it started, and he yells, “No dice.” In every class, the kids yelled at the screen (a la Rocky Horror), “Cheese Slice!” “We went to my grampa’s for Thanksgiving,

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Still Here Blogging… (Wiki Wiki)

January 23, 2009
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It’s been a weird week. We had Monday off for MLK. I was on call for jury duty on Tuesday, so I had a sub (sorry, they’re called guest teachers @ Laguna). To make it easy, I had the guest teacher administer the “District Benchmark Exam Part II,” the results of which I’m not sure what to do with. Mostly our English department has been ignoring them, saying the tests don’t really test what they claim to. Also, everyone covers the various standards at various times throughout the year – I don’t do a research paper until the spring, so we haven’t talked much about citing sources – so the idea of testing standards a-g in the beginning of the year, and standards h-m during the middle part, and so forth, just doesn’t work very well. Plus, why do I need to waste three class periods from my precious allotment giving yet another test? Anyway, I had the guest teacher give them the test, and I’ll figure out what to do with the results later. Then we were in the computer lab on Wednesday, to work on the Tom Sawyer Moodle. This is the main reason I’ve been lagging on

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TomWikiSawyerPedia

January 12, 2009
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TomWikiSawyerPedia

A lot of the kids have been having trouble getting through the early chapters of Tom Sawyer. Mostly it’s the vocabulary, though for some it’s the fact that they don’t bother to read it. Once we go over the reading in class, or I explain as we read aloud, they get it, and they like it. Today in class, we’re reading chapter 6 which begins with Tom trying to get out of school by pretending to be sick. “How many of you have ever faked sick to try to get out of school?” Almost every hand goes up. “Nothing changes in 170 years, does it?” They like Mark Twain’s sarcastic sense of humor, and how the goody-goody Sid is obviously a fool in Mark Twain’s eyes too. And they love the pranks. But it’s still tough, especially for the first six or eight chapters. Every year I struggle with how to get them to read it, and get them to get it. This year I’m trying an experiment. Our county office of schools hosts a Moodle server, and I use it a lot in my class. I have a whole Langston Hughes project we do online that includes quizzes and

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Moodle Time.

October 18, 2008
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I usually spend about 8-10 days each year in the computer lab. First, I like to do at least one on-line type project. Most years lately, it’s usually the Langston Hughes WebTrack (through TrackStar, a beauty service I should probably talk about later). And until last year, I usually also got in wikis or a web page of some sort. (Aside/Tip: Web pages and wikis (a type of reader-editable web page) are great ways to get kids to expand and revise their writing. By making them start with a 600 word word essay, and then requiring 5 links of at least 100 words each, I am getting them to add 500 words to their essays, and they hardly notice that they’re now writing over 1000 words. Many do more than 5 link pages. As long as they can also add pictures and graphics, you won’t hear many complaints. More on this later too.) Secondly, I usually try to STAR test their reading at least three times a year. That takes the slowest ones at least 25 minutes or more, not counting log-in issues: “You forgot your password again? You misspelled your name. Your CapsLock key is on. Not your student

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Random Featured Post

“There’s already something on the back of mine.” (Also: Racial Harmony.)

It was our first day back in the classroom after 8 days in the library. We were all glad to be back. “Oh, my clicker…how I’ve missed you.” One of them actually said that. OMG. What a day. Full of action, and laugh after laugh. First there was the video. YouTube is blocked in our district. Our head of IST keeps bleating about CIPA and how YouTube doesn’t filter, and…anyway, we can’t use YouTube. But finally, they created a workaround for us. We have to do things from home rather than from school, but it works OK. We find the YouTube video we want to use, and copy the URL. Then we go to the district’s “safe video portal” and paste it in. Then we can approve our own video, and use the safe portal to show it at school. It’s a bit clunky, but it works fine. Yesterday I added a video. I hadn’t even showed it yet, when I got an e-mail from my principal. I have only added a couple of videos before, but both of them were of the nutty variety, rather than the “educational” sort.  One of them is near the top of the most [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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