moodle newsletter october - 2011

7/29/2019 Moodle Newsletter October - 2011

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newsletterenos AiresOctober 1,

A Note from John S. Lucas

Moodle Tips of the Month...

Guides and tutorials for the Moodle modules and blocks featured in

monthly newsletter can be found on the MoodleLearn website:

https://moodlelearn.muat.iesabroad.org

Use the following generic log-in: User ID - iesstudent

Password - Student1

Uploaded les that contain a symbol other than an underscore in the

le name will not open properly and you will not receive an error

message. Most special characters are automatically removed during the

upload process, but it is best to use le names without special characters.

Thanks to John Schulze from the Berlin Center for this great tip!

I want to thank you again for your continued support of the

educational technology initiative and especially for your

patience during our transition to a dierent way of managing

the initiative. As I outlined for you in my last communication, IES

Abroad is pleased to announce the introduction of ve

Regional Educational Technology Specialists who will be

joining Kattrina Cannon and Erika Quinn in our eorts to

provide you with ongoing technical and educational support.

We introduce these team members in this newsletter.

Kattrina Cannon will soon oer introductory webinars to

introduce you to the signicant enhancements she has made to

MoodleLearn, our training site. Kattrina has been monitoring

the use of Moodle and has identied a number of features that

many of you have not yet discovered. In order to make you

aware of these exciting features, Kattrina is designing short,introductory videos to help you understand what Moodle has

to oer and how these functions work. She and Erika will also

continue to address any technical challenges and concerns that

you have as you discover this exciting educational tool. I

encourage all Faculty Champions to take full advantage of

these excellent training opportunities and to make them

widely available to their colleagues at the centers.

Our goal is to give our faculty and students the very be

technology to enhance the ne work they already do and

make teaching and learning at IES Abroad the richest, mo

rewarding experience possible. I cannot stress often enoug

that Moodle is designed to bring faculty and studen

together and to enhance their educational journey togeth

never to replace any of the best practices that you alread

implement and that are serving IES Abroad well.

I look forward to the Woord College partnership which wi

provide comprehensive training for our Regional Educationa

Technology Specialists. By the end of November, each regio

of IES Abroad will have a trained Regional Educationa

Technology Specialist close at hand who can provide advic

share innovations, and address challenges that are specic t

the cultures and educational models that dene IES Abroaaround the world.

Finally, I want to share a short story about how widel

educational technology is used. I just returned from a visit t

Costa Rica, where I discovered that two of our partners, th

National Institute of Biodiversity (In-Bio) and EART

University, both currently use Moodle to teach students an

for training seminars. Clearly, educational technology is fas

becoming a common feature of educational life in many part

of the world. In Costa Rica, the use of Moodle has made

easy and quick for me to review the educational work ou

colleagues are doing and to evaluate how best to work wit

our new partners and adapt their courses to the needs of IE

Abroad students.

Good Luck and Happy Moodling!

At the request of Beijing and Barcelona, Kattrina has reviewed

several additional components of Moodle, and I have approved

adding these additional modules to the IES Abroad Moodle

site. We are constantly striving to add more audiovisual tools,survey instruments, and other improvements to Moodle in

response to your requests.


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newsletterenos AiresOctober 1,

Featured Moodle Module - Lesson Activity

New Modules/BlocksMeet the IES Moodle Team!

Kattrina Cannon

MoodleAdministrator

[email protected]

Erika Quinn

Moodle

Specialist

[email protected]

Feedback Module:

The Feedback Module allows you to create and condu

surveys to collect feedback from your students. It allow

instructors to write their own questions and enables thinstructor to create non-graded questions. The Feedba

activity is ideal for course or assignment evaluations.

Quickmail Block:

The Quickmail Block has a link to compose an email to

students in the course. The instructor can select all students

or choose from a list of students to email. This enhances the

existing communications systems of messaging (one user)

and subscribed forums (all subscribers) by allowing teacher

to communicate with a specic subset of students.

The Lesson Module presents a series of HTML pages to the student where the student can view content and then answe

question based on the content presented. The next page that the student views depends upon the answer the stude

gives. In the simplest form of a Lesson, a content page (or branch table) presents the student with information and option to continue to the next page. No grades can be assigned for branch tables.

You can choose from two basic Lesson page types for your student

question pages and content pages (known as Branch Tables). Th

question page presents the student with a question and the student ente

an answer. After the student submits their answer, they will see th

response youve created and will be taken to another page or looped bac

Questions are scored and added to the students cumulative grade.

The signicant dierence between a Lesson and other activity modules

Moodle comes from its adaptive ability. With this tool, each choice the

student makes can show a dierent teacher response/comment and send the student to a diferent page in the LessoWith mapping and planning, the Lesson Module can customize the presentation of content and questions to each studen

with no further action required by the teacher. The Lesson is also a great tool for creating ash cards using the conten

pages to prepare students for exams or to help them memorize terms/vocabulary.


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October 1,

Meet Our Regional Education Technology Specialists

Stephen McMahon - IES Abroad Dublin

A native of Drogheda in County Louth, Mr. McMahon has taught at university level in

Ireland since 2002 and with study abroad students since 2005. He read for a Master of Arts

in English (Creative Writing) at Queens University, Belfast and for a Bachelor of Arts in

English and Human Development at Dublin City University (St. Patricks College), where

he taught for eight years.

A specialist in small group facilitation, he has taught on several multidisciplinary study

abroad programs with students from the U.S. and France, focusing on literature and

creative arts in Ireland, with an emphasis on writing and photography. He has taught at

IES Abroad Dublin since 2005, facilitating general studies and customised programmes

as Academic Coordinator from January to August 2011, and is currently the Moodle Faculty Champion.In conjunction with his teaching commitments at St. Patricks College, Mr. McMahon was a member of the IT

administration team at the Educational Research Centre (ERC) where, as part of the 2005 cycle of the OECD

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), he was Project Manager of the eld trial of the

Computer-Based Assessment of Science (CBAS)

Laura Vazquez - IES Abroad Barcelona

Ms. Vazquez was born in Madrid. She has been teaching Spanish and Spanish Cinema

to American students for over ten years. She studied Spanish literature in Madrid and

lived in Italy for a year to study literature and Italian as an Erasmus student. In 2001, shespent seven months in the U.S. teaching Spanish and Spanish Cinema at Washington

and Lee University in Virginia. She is currently writing her dissertation on intercultural

studies and cinema. She loves multiculturalism, new technologies, and learning about

other cultures.

Ms. Vazquez has been working on her professional digital identity for several years and since 2007 she has

written two blogs, one about cinema, de cine, and one about Spanish as a foreign language, MundoEle. In

2010, she worked as a community manager for a school in Madrid (Estudio Internacional Sampere). She also

uses technology in her classes on a daily basis, including Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, Isuu, and Slideshare

(to share PowerPoints and documents with students and colleagues); YouTube and Vimeo (to show videos

and activities, and also to register students oral activities); Overstream (to subtitle videos in Spanish); andFlickr and Picassa (to house interesting photos relevant to her classes). She uses Moodle for her courses,

including PowerPoint presentations, exercises, activities, forums, quizzes, compositions, and interactive

vocabulary banks.

This newsletter was sent to provide the latest information for IES Abroad Moodle.

IES Abroad Chicago

33 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60602-2602

Phone: 1.800.995.2300


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October 1,

Meet Our Regional Education Technology Specialists

Jeremiah Jenne - IES Abroad Beijing

Mr. Jenne is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of California, Davis. He

specializes in 19th-century Qing history and is currently researching anti-foreignism

and colonialism in the coastal (treaty port) cities of the Qing Empire. Other researchinterests include the Qing as an imperial(ist) power, the construction of identity

during the Qing Dynasty, nationalism in modern China, and gender and the family in

Late Imperial China. He has contributed articles to two books, China in 2008: A Year of

Great Signicance and The Insiders Guide to Beijing, 2009 Edition.

Mr. Jenne is the Associate Director for China Studies at the IES Abroad Beijing Center where he teaches courses

on Chinese History, Philosophy, and Contemporary China. He also runs the Chinese history websiteJottings

from the Granite Studio and is a frequent guest on the podcast Sinica, a weekly roundup of current aairs in

China.

Martn Tessi Vollenweider - IES Abroad Buenos Aires

Mr. Tessi Vollenweider was born in Buenos Aires, but completed his high school

education in Lima, Per, and Santiago de Chile. He attended college at the Jesuit

University and majored in Advertising with a minor degree in Journalism. He then

followed postgraduate studies in Business Administration and Sociology of Culture,

as well as a specialization in E-Learning. He worked in Marketing and Market Researc

in multinational corporations and in marketing research agencies, in addition to

lecturing in Marketing and Market Research since 1998. He began working at IES

Abroad Buenos Aires in 2009.

During 2003, Mr. Tessi Vollenweider was in charge of a distance education course in Public Advertising for an

NGO, Publicitarios Sin Fronteras. He has been in charge of Moodle implementation at IES Abroad Buenos Airessince December 2010.

Wolfgang Bialas - IES Abroad Berlin

Dr. Bialas works on a research project on Nazi ideology and ethics. He held a position as an

Associate Professor of Political Philosophy and Cultural Studies in the United Arab Emirate

from 2004-2007, and he also taught courses in modern European intellectual and cultural

history at the University of California, Irvine (2000 - 2003). In addition, he has held teaching

positions at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Turkey. He has published

numerous books and articles in various areas of the humanities, most recently PoliticalHumanism and Nazism, Vandenhoeck Rupprecht 2010 (in German) and Nazi Germany and

the Humanities (co-edited with Anson Rabinbach), Oxford 2007.

Dr. Bialas doctorate was on Hegels Philosophy of Religion (1982), and his Habilitation

(German post-doctorate) on the Philosophy of History in the Frankfurt School (1989). His

research interests are intellectual history of Nazism, political philosophy, and comparative cultural studies. Dr.

Bialas is a member of the international and interdisciplinary research group Political Culture of the Weimar

Republic and co-editor (with Gerard Raulet) of the "Series on Political Culture in the Weimar Republic.

In his various teaching positions abroad he worked with Blackboard. Most recently he took the Master-E

beginning Moodle course. He also uses Moodle for the IES Abroad courses he teaches on German culture,

history, and politics.

moodle newsletter october - 2011

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