Overwhelmed with Resources: How to Make It All Work Together
With the growing availability of digital resources it’s easy to get overwhelmed and not know where to start when planning a lesson. And if you’re overwhelmed it’s also likely that your students can be overwhelmed by all of the available resources, too.
Teachers now have access to Discovery Streaming, istation, YouTube, icurio (high school only), digital textbooks, and many other resources.
The key to managing all of these is keeping them organized and presenting them to students in predictable way so they know what they need to do for each lesson.
One way to manage it all is to have a consistent starting point for each lesson or activity. Once you have the starting point set up, students won’t have to come into class and wait to be told what to do every day.
Moodle is this starting point for your lessons.
What Happens in the Classroom?
The most common things that happen in a classroom are:
Teacher-to-Student Interactions: Providing information to students (instructions)
Student-to-Teacher Interactions: Collecting information from students (assessments)
Moodle makes both of these tasks easy for you.
If you’ve created or found files that you want to give to students, such as:
- PowerPoint or Keynote presentations
- Readings, worksheets, study guides, vocabulary lists
- Graphic organizers
- Downloaded videos from YouTube or Discovery Streaming
- Flipchart or Smart Notebook files
- Any file you have on your computer
Follow these instructions to easily add files to your Moodle course
If you’ve found a great website or online activity through icurio or just a Google search, follow these instructions to add the links to other websites to your Moodle course.
Ready to collect work from students? There’s no need to print it out and pass those papers up the row to turn in assignments. Follow these instructions to create an Assignment in Moodle that lets students upload a file for you to grade. Any file students have on their computer can be turned in to you through Moodle. This is great for having them turn in presentations, videos, drawings, etc.
I’ve Never Used Moodle
If you’ve never used Moodle before it’s very easy to get started with it. See our guide for Getting Started with Moodle.
