In the previous post in this series, I introduced the idea of using videos in Discussion activities. In this post, I will introduce a couple of ways that if you are using YouTube, you can tweak the embed code to either change the appearance or change the behaviour of how the video plays.
This video was recorded in January 2023, note that YouTube is forever changing the way that embed code works and behaves, so at some point in the future these tweaks may not work.
The tweaks that I introduce are:
Adding a border to the video
Changing the ‘suggested videos’ that show at the end
Specifying a start time for the video
Specifying an end time for the video
Applying multiple elements (e.g. doing a combination of the above)
I often run training for organisations on the use of Moodle, and a regular activity that I will introduce is the idea of creating a video based discussion (forum) activity. This for me is one of the best returns on investment (e.g. high educational benefit for minimal time/effort from teacher to set up) and a good ‘quick win’ especially when working with apprehensive or time strapped teachers.
Finding a video related to the topic being taught is relatively easy, and simply sharing a link to that video is again very easy, but there are a few downsides of just doing this:
If the learner follows the link to the video; as well as the video, they will also get the various additional distractions that come with it – e.g. suggested videos, comments on the video (some of which may not be what you want learners easily accessing) and once a learner has been sent to YouTube or Vimeo, there is a risk they won’t come back.
Just watching a video is actually a very passive form of learning.
So to combat the above issues, we do two things:
We embed the video rather than linking to it. This will embed the video into Moodle, so the learners see the video, but not the distractions around the side.
We get the students to do something with the video. This could be asking them to summarise the key point or points, or asking them to critique the video, or asking them to spot the mistake, or something else – just getting them to watch the video with a purpose, makes the process more active than before.
When using the forum activity in Moodle there are many settings and combinations of settings that can be used, and a lot of this will be down to personal preference and trial and error – however, once you have worked out the settings that you want – a really useful trick here, is to create a ‘template’ activity for yourself. This is basically a forum activity set up exactly how you want it. You set this to hidden, and I usually have it located at the very bottom of the course. When I want to add a new activity into a course, I simply duplicate this template, move it into the correct position, change the name and the contents and then make it visible. This is much quicker than creating one from scratch each time – and I don’t have to think about the settings, as these are already set.
The next post in this series will show how you can tweak the embed code if using YouTube.
The Database activity in Moodle, is and has been a core activity type for many years, but is something that is seldom used – which isn’t surprising as it isn’t the simplest activity type to set up – but it can be very powerful if you can work out how to use it.
The database has many uses, but in this example, the basic principle is that you set up a student-based research activity, where each student will research something, and then share their findings with the rest of the group. e.g.
If you were teaching psychology, each student would research a theorist
If studying history, each student would research a different ruler
If studying chemistry, each student would research a different element
When setting up the activity, you specify the fields you want them to populate, e.g. using the chemistry example above, you may ask them to find the following:
Name of element
Atomic Number
Atomic Weight
State at room temperature
Key properties
Uses
The image below shows an entry screen from a database activity set up to research different monarchs.
The idea is that the students get to research one (or more) items, but they get the benefit of also seeing the other student’s findings. There is then an option to allow comments on entries, or ratings (e.g. the students’ rate other students entries), and the teacher can grade the entries (e.g. give the students a grade) – which can be very powerful.
There are 5 steps to setting up a Database Activity:
Add A ‘Database’ activity to the course, and choose the desired settings for the activity.
Add the chosen fields for the activity
Edit and save the templates.
Test that it works by adding an entry.
Edit the templates if necessary.
The following video takes you through this process. In the video, the formatting of the templates is kept very simple. In reality, as you become more proficient in editing content within Moodle, you can spend a lot more time formatting these areas to make them both look and work better for you.
I have received many positive comments from people, who found my ‘Moodle Tricks of the Trade‘ series very useful, and as such, I have been asked to continue the series.
This post looks at the Moodle Plugin called ‘Journal’. This is not a particularly well-known plugin, but is one that I use widely and love, for its simplicity both for teachers and students.
What the plugin allows, is for a teacher to set a single question, which the students answer in a single essay type box – the teacher can then view all the answers from their class or group on a single screen (shown in the image), and give feedback (and grade if necessary) on that same single screen, making it a very quick activity to use. The journal is designed so that the students can update their response at any time, which is attractive in many situations, but does present limitations for other uses – e.g. if using this as part of assessment, it would be possible for the student to change their response after their work has been graded, so you wouldn’t have a full audit trail for verification purposes etc.
I have used this in many ways, sometimes the standard ‘Assignment’ activity is overkill when all you want is a simple response to a simple question, so the journal works better there, I sometimes use this at the end of each topic, where I ask the students to identify the key points from that topic, or to flag up any areas they found tough or want to go over again.
This video goes through the process of setting up a Journal activity.
The template is PowerPoint based, and allows the teacher, to quickly and easily create the Venn diagram with the correct dimensions, and then the required coordinates that Moodle uses to identify the different zones are provided for you, so it is possible to create such an activity in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
The following image shows how the activity looks in Moodle, in this case I have used a chemistry example – the beauty of this type of activity, is that it can be used in any subject area (not just maths).
The template file for this, can be downloaded directly via:
When I worked as a teacher, as well as using technology during the teaching and learning process, I also often used it to create activities that didn’t use technology during the actual session. One such activity that I created is something I have called ‘multi-choice patience’. This is a series of ‘cards’ that are printed out and given to the students. Each card is numbered and contains a multiple choice question, with 4 possible answers (1 correct and 3 wrong). Answering each question directs the learner to the next card. To complete the activity the learners have to create ‘loops’ e.g. if using the 36 card set, the answer to the 6th card, should point back to the 1st card in that loop. If it doesn’t then one of the 6 questions has been incorrectly answered, but the learner doesn’t know which one, so they have to go back and try different options, until they correctly complete the loop. Once a loop is created, they pick another card from the pack and start again trying to create a ‘loop’.
Screenshot of the multi-choice patience activity
I generally used this activity in the last week of term, when the learners were not up for anything too heavy – I would have the learners in groups of about 4, and they would race against the other groups to see which group could complete the challenge the quickest.
To create the cards, I created a template in excel, where I entered the questions and answers, and the computer randomised the answer order, and worked out the ‘loops’, randomly changing the options each time, and it is this template that I have shared so others can create similar activities.
If a teacher wants to be even cleverer, you get the learners to design the questions in one week (and you could set up something like a Google form that the learners populate) – you then check the questions, copy them into the grid, print out and cut up.
I have recently changed the template, so rather than being limited to having to have exactly 36 questions, it will now work with either 36, 30, 25 or 20 questions.
The template itself can be directly downloaded from:
I run a lot of training on effective uses of a VLE (usually Moodle) and one of the easiest activities that I show, is finding a video on YouTube, and then embedding this into a forum activity within the VLE.
The reasons for doing this are:
By embedding the video (rather than simply linking to it) – we remove all the distractions, adverts, etc. that appear on YouTube around the edges.
By adding this as a discussion activity, we ask the students a question – this will focus their attention whilst watching the video, rather than just passively ‘absorbing’ it.
It doesn’t matter if students don’t actually post their answers to the forum (although useful if they do), as they will still benefit from watching the video with the question in their mind.
The following video goes through the steps of how to embed the video, and the basic settings within a Moodle forum activity.
And if you want to only show a portion of the video you can always identify the exact start and end points that you want to play, by following these instructions:
I am currently working with various different clients, helping them to develop their use of the VLE system Moodle.
One of the techniques that I show people is how a discussion forum can be used to create an effective ‘stretch and challenge’ activity. Stretch and challenge, is a term that is used by Ofsted, and relates to ‘does the tutor provide an opportunity for the more able learners to be sufficiently challenged – beyond the core learning objectives that they expect everyone in the class to meet?’ A few years ago – this area of work seemed to be one of the key questions being asked by inspectors, and something that caused many tutors problems. Other factors in the Ofsted inspection regime are currently more important, but stretch and challenge is still observed and commented on.
When I was teaching, I used the VLE extensively to support my delivery. I would organise each course by topic, which was often (but not always) structured with 1 topic per week. Within each topic, I would provide certain common items – e.g. some notes related to the topic, relevant links, some form of activity and as the last item within each topic, I would pose a challenging question related to that topic. For this I used the discussion forum mechanism to pose the question. This was for me a convenient mechanism as easy to set up, and I was providing an opportunity for the learners to engage in discussion during or after the session. In reality – in most cases no actual discussion took place within the forum itself, however this didn’t matter – as I knew from observing the students behaviour and from verbal conversations that took place during the session or at the start of the following session that they had read the question, and some had thought about an answer to it. On some occasions discussion within the forum did take place – which was great as it gave the ‘quieter’ learners a chance to air their opinion, as well as giving learners access to other learners opinions (which then helped with their assignment writing where they had to present a balanced viewpoint on a topic – not just their own viewpoint).
Examples of some of the questions that I used in my teaching were:
There were discussions in the media about sexual inequality within sport, and it was highlighted that women tennis players at Wimbledon got paid significantly less than the men. Tim Henman then contributed to this debate, by stating that it was right that men get paid more as they play best of 5 sets, compared to women playing best of 3. I was able to use Tim Henman’s opinion as an opener for the discussion – which did evoke a huge response from both the males and females in the group – without me having to offer my opinion on the topic.
In biomechanics (science of sports movement) I carried out an experiment to estimate the force that the bicep has to exert to move the forearm. The reality is that the muscle itself has to exert a much greater force than the end movement (as this is a type 3 lever which gives mechanical disadvantage) – so the challenging question was ‘Why has the human biceps muscle evolved as it has which gives such huge mechanical disadvantage – which hasn’t evolution moved the muscles attachment to the forum further from elbow, which would allow greater forces to exerted by the forearm? (Please comment on this blog post if you want to offer an answer).
The hard part of this process was thinking of a good challenging question, here are a few tips:
When starting a discussion, making a statement and then ending it with the word “discuss” – often doesn’t open a discussion. Instead ask a more specific question to open the discussions.
If applicable – asking topical questions (e.g. relating to something currently in the news) will more likely evoke a discussion.
It is possible to ask a question from a viewpoint that isn’t your own – which allows you to ask more ‘risky’ questions (see the Tim Henman example above).
Asking a question from someone else’s viewpoint also allows you to ask a question that is more likely to create an emotional response – which in turn is more likely to attract an answer.
If students do post – you can contribute to the discussion to further develop it, explore other avenues/opinion, reference articles or webpages that are relevant.
If you do respond to posts – be careful not to ‘kill’ a discussion by giving the students the ‘correct answer’ straight away, instead try to lead them through further questions.
Questions don’t have to have a right and wrong answer (again, think about the Tim Henman question.
Think of a series of questions in one go – rather than one at a time. This is much quicker, and it is often possible to relate questions together. Most VLE systems will have the option to time release the dicsussions, or you can manually hide them, and make them visible as required.
If you can think of other tips, then please add to the comments below.
In this post I am going to look at using Excel to create a collaborative learning activity.
Many people struggle (some are scared of it) with Excel which is a shame as it can be a superbly powerful learning tool – and it can be used in any teaching area not just maths, accountancy etc. There are many possible uses that I could list here, but I will stick with a couple of simple examples.
If I was teaching research methods or statistics, and wanted to investigate the idea of 2 sets of data and what the correlation is between them, then a simple way to do this is for each student to work out their height (m) and their shoe size (European) record these in a table, then everyone plots a scatter graph of everyones results – and we look at the line of best fit, standard deviation etc. Yes the constructing of a graph on paper with a ruler is an important skill to learn, but on this occasion I want to focus on the way that the correlation changes as more points are recorded, and for that I want to speed up the plotting process, so I am going to use Excel to help me.
Example of an excel sheet teaching the principle of data correlation
So I have created a simple spreadsheet which has a data entry table – I have identified each student with the letters A-K, and I have colour coded the area they need to enter their data into with a green shading. I have unlocked these cells and then protected the whole sheet, so when the learners add their data, they cannot accidentally alter or delete any of the workings. On the right you will notice that I have pre-created a graph that will plot the data as it is added, and then underneath the table I have created some simple statistical functions to identify mean, mode, median etc of the data as it is entered.
So having created the above sheet, all I need to do is save it to my OneDrive (new name for SkyDrive) – share it with my learners (see previous post), and then allocate each learner a letter between A-K. They edit the sheet in the web browser, entering the 2 pieces of information against their letter. All of the students will be editing the same resource at the same time, so they will see the graph and the numbers change in real time as the amount of data added grows. The beauty of this is that by speeding up the capturing and plotting process, I can spend more time helping the students to understand the significance of what the graph and the numbers mean, and I could reuse the same template to add my own dummy data to show the effect of anomalies, different types of correlation etc.
Any form of class experiment which involves the capturing and sharing of class data can be achieved with this method. If the data entry is more complex than my example, then you could create a sheet within the workbook for one student, then duplicate this lots of times so each student has their own sheet.
Another useful feature is that it is possible to embed sections of the file (e.g. the results table, or the final chart) back into a piece of web space (e.g. the VLE, or a blog) – so below is an example of the final chart – as the file is used and data is entered this will automatically update.
With the above example all students could see (and potentially alter) all other student’s entries into the resource. This may not be desirable – e.g. if you are capturing sensitive data (e.g. if working out Body Mass Index and asking students for their Weight and Height) or you could ask students to feedback what they have learnt, what they have found difficult, what they would like to recover in a revision session etc.
What you could do is create a single Excel file asking for the data that you want. Once happy with this, you duplicate that file however many times you have students. You then share each file with the individual student. This may sound complex but is a lot easier and quicker than you would imagine. You now have a mechanism for students to give individual feedback to you – you as the teacher can see all of the files, so easy for you to see the information – and if you are really keen, then you could create an ‘overview file’ which uses simple excel formula to pull the data from each students file into a single dashboard type file. This last suggestion doesn’t update the data live as it is entered, but everytime that the file is opened it will pull through the latest data at that point.
In my last blog post, I explained a simplification of how Office 365 and One Drive (formerly known as SkyDrive) work together to make collaborative learning activities possible. In this post I will give an example of how and why PowerPoint can be used for such an activity.
One of the programmes that I provide training for is the ITQ for Accessible IT practice as part of this programme I have adapted an activity where the attendees collaboratively discover accessibility features of Microsoft Windows that many don’t know about. To create the activity I have set up a simple PowerPoint presentation as follows:
Example of a PowerPoint Template for a collaborative activity
Basically I have a list of different accessibility features that I want the attendees to research, and for each one they have to summarise what the feature is and how it could be useful from an accessibility perspective. All I have done is created a simple slide within PowerPoint with 2 text boxes – 1 for each question. I then duplicate the slide numerous time and all I have to do is change the title of the slide to each of the accessibility features.
Looking at the left side of the image you will see 3 such slides of this nature, and you will notice that on this occasion I completed the first one as an example. All I have to do now is make a copy of this file (so that I have a clean master for next year) and to share this activity with my students (which I will explain later), allocate a topic (e.g. slide number) to each student and away we go. An old pack of cards is a useful way of randomly allocating a topic to each person.
The advantage of this activity for me is it is very quick to set up – once I have thought about what questions I am asking and how much space on the screen I want to allocate them, it is very easy to create the actual mechanism. When using this in class – all the attendees are editing the same document at the same time, so I can view that document and see what is going on – this means that I can see what people are doing, helping them if necessary, without having to walk around and look over their shoulders, it also means that if I had a student at home for example they could also partake in this activity either in real time or later on. If a student is doing something really good, I can pause the activity and show their slide on the screen and point out the key points, without having to mess with screen sharing, transferring files etc.
After a period of time I may stop the activity and ask people to then look at a different slide and edit what the previous person has done or to look at the points and identify the most important etc. At the end of the session, each person can take their own local copy of the file which may be useful to them as part of an assignment.
The beauty of this technique especially if using it at the start of a topic, is students get to see other students points of view – which can help when constructing an assignment to use other peoples opinions and not just ones own.
I mentioned earlier about sharing the file – there are different ways that I can do this, the easiest is to share a link as follows:
Sharing a link using OneDrive
On OneDrive, choose the ‘Share’ menu
On the left you could invite people if you know who they are, or you can get a link
There will be an option of whether they can ‘Edit’ or ‘View’ – choose ‘Edit’
If using the get a link option, you can copy the link as is, and email it to students or add to the VLE. or you can shorten the link and put it onto the board for students to type in manually or convert to a QR code.
At the end of the session I may revert the sharing settings back to view rather than edit, so students can view what has been completed but cannot continue editing it (in case they try to be funny and write rude things about me or other students in the document!).
In my next post I will give an example of how Excel can be used to create a collaborative activity.
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