Last summer I had installed Moodle on my personal domain, just to see how it works and if there are potentials for its use at school. This year I tried using it with my 14-16 y.o. students. I see the students don't feel bad about it.
Now, getting close to the end of the school year and with the growth of my interest in Web 2.0, I decided to give throttle. So I started two modules in my second classes using Moodle forums. The modules are quite similar, only the theme changes (and not much either, since they both circle around static electricity).
- Introduction in class: visualization of a physical phenomenon (electrization of a pen by friction, attraction of small pieces of paper).
- Formulation of possible explanations by students.
- Formulation of "crucial" questions by the teacher, to allow verification or falsification of explanations.
- Internet quest about the answers to the crucial questions; answers are posted on a specific Moodle forum.
- Organization of the answers by the teacher; the information found are simply gathered and only material repetitions are eliminated.
This is where we reached so far. The amount of information found is impressive. I realized, though, that a tool like a wiki could be more suitable for a work like this. So the following steps could be:
- Personal work on the global information file, so as to have a personal summary for each student.
- Creation of a glossary (or of a wiki) on the basis of the already found information.
- Comparison in the physics lab of other similar phenomena: so what explanation can we give?
- Meta: reflection about the work done, about the tools used, evaluation of the obtained learning.
I'll try to keep the blog updated about the state of the project.
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