Moodle

Today, we worked on a lesson to deepen our moodle responses. While we've found a high level of engagement for our moodle site, we are always working to improve the quality and depth of student responses.

Since September, students have been working on weekly moodle forums as a component of ECC. Each week, a new deep thinking question is posed in the following forums: Current Events, Reading Power, Photography and Math.

Today students explored a video prompt and sculpted a response to post on moodle. This year, we are doing our best to provide more talk time prior to moodle posts, so hopefully we see deeper responses.

In addition to the weekly forums, students also participate in Online Literature Circles every week on moodle. Students choose from a variety of books within our theme(this year, it's survival). They join an online conversation on moodle once a week within their book's forum, which is moderated by a teacher. For the first set of books in our theme, each teacher took three books. We begin Lit Circles with book talk week(the best week of the year!). Each teacher sells the book they have chosen, and then they lead a weekly forum on that book, posing a deep thinking question each week. It feels like Christmas when kids see the new book bins arriving!We also have the option of listening to many of the Literature Circle books on class ipods, and this has made more challenging reads accessible to a variety of learners.