Week 5: Goals and Plans

In a way, one could consider me fortunate.  My Moodle-based class has a lot of room for improvement.  So, in that essence, this week's post/assignment of planning goals and changes to my course has low-hanging fruit in terms of obvious needs in my own course. 

The first thing I want to do is clean up and organize the clutter.  Right now I have several sections in my course, and each section has several links, files, activities and documents. 

 To combat the confusion and direct students to the current day's resources, I have used a label, in this case I took a picture of my hand pointing at an activity.  Then I move the label around to point at different daily activities.  I mean, it serves the purpose and all.  But, the page has all several sections that look pretty much like what you see in the above image. 

I want to change the navigation to one where each course section is closed, with just a neat icon on the main page.  Since we skip around a bit in the class, they all will be visible, but the section for the current day will be highlighted.  After opening the section, the hand can still point the way.  The main page will be much shorter and neater, streamlined and organized.

By the way, I have dabbled a bit in the Moodle themes we have available at LKSD and have not quite found what I'm looking for.  Furthermore, I haven't been able to figure out how to add a theme.  If any classmates have any suggestions for a Moodle theme that looks good and can help me accomplish the above, by all means please say so.

The 2nd goal for change is to create a useful and engaging (hopefully fun, it's a junior high class) course navigation video for the students to use.  It will be located right in the "getting started" menu at the top of the page. This will be especially useful as I always have some students who join the class sometime later on in the course, after I have already shown the class how to navigate the webpage.  This way there will always be a guide, on the ready, for any newcomers, or any who might need a review.

These are both goals and things I have not yet done.  My 3rd goal for the course is something I dabbled in last year but didn't gain much traction.  Now that I have a little better understanding of checklists and completion tracking, I want to utilize this tool to a much greater degree.  I'm hoping that it will help me with pacing, my students with keeping themselves current, and the remote site teachers in tracking their students.