Alien Pedagogy

Our school’s IT guru reports that her students often check their online grades for my class during her computer programming class.

The only thing that I’ve done to earn whatever level of student awareness is steady timing in feedback.

I tell students when I plan to mark their assignments, mark them during that time, and immediately post the scores.

The debate team has continued to grow through networking on Moodle. Our committees returned from the winter break still aware of what has been happening and they were able to rapidly establish forums that will allow them to execute their vision.

The trick now will be seeing them use those forums, even though the club only meets once per week.

During our semester review, the Debate Team had a lot to say.

Over two weeks, we categorized three made main categories and then broke into groups designed to work towards meeting those goals. I assigned each group a leader and the other students volunteered to join a category group, which worked very smoothly. Two students volunteered to monitor our Moodle site. After that, we had a team for: Background Knowledge/ Resolutions, Competition, and for Skills.

I asked each group to follow this process:

• Create a Vision / Mission (5 minutes)
• Brainstorm Potential Actions (5 minutes)
• Consider Logistics and Reality as well as how this would happen using Moodle (10 minutes)

On the whole, the groups made solid plans that are realistic.

Still, I was a little disappointed to see myself so rapidly becoming obsolete in their development.

I’ve figured out how to post grades online using Moodle. The program’s clumsy, but online publication of grades is a must for me.

For pedagogical reasons as well as because I hate when students lie to me, I do not dock marks for late assignments. Posting grades online has largely eliminated the need for me to “hound” students for late assignments. Unfortunately, they now hound me for advice on how to improve their scores.

A few of my colleagues have hesitated to use Moodle. Some of these excuses strike me as weak:

• I don’t let students see their grades.
• It’s too much work.
• I can print the grades using the computer program that I’m currently using.

Other excuses are pretty good:

• There are better online programs.
• Moodle’s restart is a crash waiting to happen. Back up!

For the time being, I’m enjoying this online extension of the classroom.

One of my goals this year is to add diversity to my activities and pace to my lessons. Another goal is to develop and incorporate Moodle into my teaching. Unfortunately, I’ve been approaching these as exclusive goals when they could be beneficially considered one.

Only two weeks in, but there’s already a temptation to use Moodle solely as a place where students can catch up.  Ex/ “didn’t catch the objective during our lesson? Go online and check out all these amazing notes and glossaries I’ve provided you with.”

It’s great that I can provide students with a variety of online alternatives to taking notes in class, but the next step for this Moodle user has been bringing a diversity of activities to Moodle.

So far:

• Book recommendations (forum)
• Group problem-solving (forum)
• Sharing knowledge online (wiki)
• Modeling exemplary work produced in the class (posted as resources, actually).

It’s still a work in progress.

Some of these strategies are beginning to work. Others have yet to find a market, but activities remain a better angle than catch-up resources.