September 2009 – Jonesytheteacher's N + 1

Mobile phones and Outdoor Recreation

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Brendan Jones Posted in Uncategorized .

I tried a little experiment with my Year 9 Outdoor Recreation class last week. We are doing a unit on Navigation using maps and compasses initially, and then handheld GPS units. First of all though I wanted them to be able to translate a birds eye view of the school into a hand drawn map, and then use that map to find locations around the school as a part of a treasure hunt for puzzle clues. Find the locations, find the clues, solve the puzzle.
Rather than have me go around and choose spots on the map where I was going to leave the puzzle clues, or mark the spots as waypoints on the GPS, I thought “why not let the kids pick the spots”. Easy enough, but then training the kids to use the GPS efficiently would take time (that I didn’t have), and the chances of getting accurate written descriptions of the locations were not great.
So then it came to me…the majority of the kids had phones with cameras, and the ability to Bluetooth an image to my DERvice. I would get them to photograph something identifiable around the school, and then we would use the visual clues to find the puzzle elements that would be left at the site of the image.
I don’t know why, but the students were initially wary about using their phones for this, but all came back with some “interesting” images. Some needed to be reshot, because they proved to be too obscure, but most were useable. Some kids asked for some more time to pick and shoot their image. Volunteering for homework – whatever next!!

Next lesson the images, inserted on the best hand drawn map of the school, will form the “treasure map” for the kids treasure hunt. I’ll have the worksheet to show here after the lesson.

Now, rather than give out the worksheet on paper, my dream would be to distribute via Bluetooth to phones so the kids could carry it with them! Is this possible? I’ll be trying to find out!

Liven up your Moodle Front Page

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Brendan Jones Posted in Uncategorized .

Rather than having a plain list of courses or categories, why not try to liven up your Moodle front page by having clickable icons that link you to your courses?

Once you know how, its pretty easy.

Go to the Site Admin menu, click on Front Page and then Front Page settings. Find the check box for “Include a topic section” and check it. Save your changes and then go to your front page. Turn editing on, and you’ll see the edit icon at the top of the page, which allows you to creat a topic label, just like on a course page. Click the edit icon, and you’ll see your regular editing options. From the tool bar, find the Table button and create a table. This is where you can insert text and images in a table. Insert your images (they have to be uploaded to your Moodle site first) into one row of the table, and in a row underneath I’d suggest you type in a label for each image. Now you need to link the image to the course page using the hyperlink button. I’d suggest you copy and paste each course address to a Word document, and then cut and paste into the hyperlink box when prompted. Once you have your links working, center your pictures and text labels so they look neater, and there you go! Have a look at my school front page (http://www.hccweb2.org/erina/) as an example.

eLearning with eXe

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Brendan Jones Posted in teacherstuff .

I was researching SCORM modules for Moodle (ie. what are they? How do you use them? How do you create them?) when I came across eXe. This free source program allows you to make simple eLearning modules that can then be uploaded to something like Moodle. Have a look – download is about 25Mb, and it comes with tutorials.

Moodle questions and answers

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Brendan Jones Posted in teacherstuff .

The great thing about my PLN (Personal Learning Network) on Twitter is that I not only find out lots of things, but I also get to answer questions for other people, which also increases my own knowledge by having to find an answer.

One person from my PLN asked if I knew how to make course creation on Moodle easier. Being a course creator on a Moodle site means you can (obviously) create new courses, but for whatever reason Moodle has made the process tricky. To create a new course, the creator has to follow a less defined path through their already created courses to find a button that says “Create new course”

Are you still following?

So they asked “How can I make it so that the course creator can find the “Create a new course” button more easily?”

I did some research in the Moodle forums, and discovered how to do it!

Moodle is arranged in hierachical fashion. Categories are ways to help people find courses more easily. The default setting for categories in Moodle is Miscellaneous. What most people seem to do is create their courses inside this category. When the course creation permission is given to people, the problem I mentioned before occurs (ie. the difficulty in finding the course creation button)
One solution is to create new categories. In a school categories may be things like “Maths”, “English”, “Science” and other subject areas. Then, give the course creators permissions for the categories (not the courses). When these people then log in, and go to the category that they work in, they will see the “Create new course” button at the bottom of the category page. Simple!
They only issue I found was they are allowed to create and work on courses in all categories, but as these people would most likely be trusted and reliable people, you could assume they would probably only work in their intended category anyway. Who knows, it may produce cross curricular collaboration!
If, like me, you already created courses under Miscellaneous, you can still go ahead and create your new categories, and then move your existing courses into them without any problems. Just go through the “Add/Edit courses” menu on the Site Administration area, then look for Categories. Click on Miscellaneous and you’ll see all your courses. Look for the “Move selected courses” menu box. Select the courses that need to be moved, and then select their new destination.

Video of the week – very clever, and a great song

Mobile devices and Bluetooth…the underdeveloped resource?

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Brendan Jones Posted in Uncategorized .

I’ve taken the leap and decided to get an iPhone. While I’m not completely over the practicalities of using a mobile device as a teaching tool, I figured that immersion is the key to understanding.

There’s been quite a lot written lately about mobile devices in schools

Some encouraging like this……

Some discouraging, like this…..

I’ve been interested in what others have done, and there is plenty to contemplate.

Mr Robbo has done something interesting. His work with this bluetooth server deserves some further attention.

And as far as iPhones go there are plenty of ideas here

I’ll be working out how I can use this obvious yet underdeveloped resource in my classes.

Don’t forget the video! This one is a classic – New Order “World” – it looks like it been made in one continuous shot.