MOO teaching: Rochelle style

MOO teaching: Rochelle style

Alright, I was talking to salmon about this and didn’t manage to really remember what I was originally thinking. How would I do it? I can totally justify the blog thing, and there’s no doubt in my mind that I would use blogs for a history class. To me, it’s a given at this point. Now, at that point I would hope that we would have edublog fully underway (by then it would probably be at 3.0 or so)…now, if we could have edublog work along with achieve, we’d really be rocking. Because then I could tell students to get a char first, which would generate them a blog. Yeah. But anyway….MOO teaching…

Okay. Assignment one, which would be the weeding out assignment and intro to MOO #1; login in (through Bingen’s own login screen) and wander through Bingen. I would want a short written report on three historical elements that they saw; I’d have to think more about how to word that question so that they get the most out of it. I might hand out a scavenger hunt, and have kids go complete it and hand it in. It would be a fairly specific sort of hunt, and it would be a hunt for historical fact. No no no, I wouldn’t hand anything out. I would tell them that our first assignment would be a field trip. I may or may not insist that they meet in a specific lab…I expect most students would have internet access at home. I think that will depend on how comfortable I feel about directing moo experiences online at that point. My goal with the MOO right now (as in, this summer) is to make the MOO user friendly to the point that if students come on without a better introduction; well, I would like the MOO to require less introduction. I would like it to be easier to figure out. And I think we’re getting there….it will get better and better as we tweak and fix and so on. More about that later….okay, so that would be assignment one…

The next thing I would do is set up office hours at a fairly un-fun time. Like, first thing monday morning or Friday afternoon, or something like that. And I would set up much more fun office hours online, and let students know that I’m available at Achieve during those times. There would probably be a lot more of those hours.

Then…I would set up a series of tutorial times. Tutorial #1 would be to send them through the tutorials I’m writing right now and build a home for themselves. I’d like to do something to get them working together on something….maybe I would just have them build homes in groups of 5 or something. Undecided.

Then….real assignment one. Mid-term assignment: Pick two historical moments covered in the course to date. Recreate them. I’ll have to create an generic justification object (!!) so they can drop one of those somewhere and tell me why they think each moment is so significant. I would give them two weeks to do it.

Then: mid-term exam. This would probably happen about a week or two after the assignment is handed in. This is in class, and it would be held in a lab. I would pick from the scenarios the students created, drop an object in each of them with the exam question on it that relates to the incident in particular. I might also link three or four projects together, and ask for an answer that incorporates all of them. Ah, so they would be in segments: There would be an exam room; with an exit to a short answer questions room (pick 5) and essay question room (choose 2 of 5). There we go.

Term 2: Well, we need a research essay. Essays are important, I realize that. So they would write a research paper. But I still want them to build something relating to it. I want them to build a key point of their essay, with no justification object, I want the building itself to do the justifying for it. The written part is the research paper. Final exam: propbably similar to the mid-term.

Hmmmm…

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