communication

Bringing the Community Together with Moodle

When I was a math teacher, one of my favorite assignments at the beginning of the year was called A Million Words or Less. I’m pretty sure that I got the idea from this article on Education World and I’m sure that many of you out there do something similar. I love this assignment so much that I’ve decided to give it to all 380 middle schools students with a twist of technology! One of our tech options at my school is the use of

Moodle, the open source online learning environment for teachers. I’ve been using Moodle for five years and I still like it because it gives teachers and students a secure environment to reflect upon their learning.

My technology goals for this assignment are straightforward and simple:

1. I want each student in my school to know how to use Moodle.
2. I want each teacher in my school to know how to use Moodle and see its benefits.
3. I want each parent to know about Moodle.

Now, beyond technology this is a great assignment because it gives an intimate insight into our student’s lives.

We have 24 advisors in the middle school and I’ve set up a Moodle classroom for each of the advisors. I very simply attached the assignment which is a homework assignment for parents to write about their children in A Million Words are Less. I then created an Assignment activity so that parents can submit their letters to their child’s advisory teacher. I then wrote a post on my school blog which walks each child through the process of creating a Moodle account.

I’m really excited about this assignment and the technology with it. I was pleasantly suprised to have most of my teachers thrilled about having a Moodle classroom. It may be because I did all of the work for them this time in setting up their classes, but I’m betting that many of them will be hooked when all is said and done because of the possible success of this assignment.

Wish me luck! If this goes the way I think it’s going to go, I will have brought the school community together by using Moodle!

Leadership and Communication

All 8th graders started a Leadership Training course today in their respective advisory classes. The first part of the course focused on communication skills and its relationship to leadership. We completed several activities to find out more about active speaking and active listening.

During the first activity, students were paired up and sat back to back. They were told to talk for one minute each about a specific topic. This was followed by the same set of students sitting next to each other talking about a specific topic, but they could not turn their heads and look at each other. The final part of this activity was face to face communication. The students discovered that they all prefer different styles of communication but they did make some generalizations.

Boys tended to like the back and back communication where they didn’t have to look in somebody else’s eye.
Girls tended to like the face to face communication because they fed off their partners feedback and body language.

It will be interesting to see if these attributes are true for the entire 8th grade!

Our second activity had students pair up once again and each student drew a simple drawing without showing it to their partners. Then students sat back to back and one person described their drawing to their partner without the partner asking clarifying questions. The next part of this activity had the students switch roles, but students could now ask clarifying questions.

Students discovered how all of the components of communication work together. They became aware of the skill of effectively listening to another person and discovered the difference between listening and not listening.

Where is all of this going? After the leadership training is complete, all students will choose one of seven leadership groups to be a part of in the 8th grade for the remainder of the year. The leadership groups will be working with all students across all grade levels in Pudong, helping to keep our small community just that!