Moodle quizzes make it easy to use educationally sound assessment strategies that would be too difficult to implement with paper and pencil. Most people think of tests as an infrequent, high-stakes activity, like mid-terms and finals.

Better strategies involve frequent, low-stakes assessments you and your students can use to guide their performance during the course of the semester. Creating a series of small mini-tests gives you a very flexible system for gauging performance and keeping students engaged in the class.

While creating quizzes takes a little time initially, it will save you valuable time in the long term because you won’t have to grade them. Quizzes can also be assigned as homework so they can take up zero class time, too. Moodle allows teachers to build quizzes with different question types, including multiple choice, true-false, and short answer questions. These questions are kept in the Question bank and can be re-used in different quizzes.

Pre/Post Tests

Create a few questions based on today’s lesson. Assign it to students to complete before they come to class. Duplicate the quiz and have students take it again at the end of class. Comparing their scores on the tests lets you know what they learned. Looking at the questions they miss can help guide remediation or reteaching.

Practice Quizzes

Practice quizzes can be a great way to help students learn vocabulary and other concepts where repetition is important. Create the quiz and set it to allow unlimited attempts. Students can get immediate feedback and they can keep taking the quiz until they’ve learned all of the words.

Reuse Questions

Organizing your questions into categories in the question bank makes it easy to reuse questions.  For example, you can create categories for each section in the chapter of a textbook. With questions organized by section you can create short section quizzes. Then you can reuse those questions to build chapter tests and reuse them again to create unit tests, a midterm and a final exam.

ExamView Question Banks

If your textbook has ExamView question banks with it, you can import those questions into your Moodle course without having to retype them. We already have many of the science and social studies banks set up in Moodle.

Share Questions with Other Teachers

You’re likely not the only person in the district teaching your course. You can share the workload of creating questions with other teachers. Split the topics or chapters that you cover with other teachers. Once questions are created in Moodle, they can be copied to other courses.

How Do I Create a Quiz?

Printable Guides:

• Creating a quiz
• Create quiz questions
• Add questions to a quiz

Video Tutorials:

• Creating a Quiz
• Creating Multiple Choice Questions
• Creating True/False Questions

Google Docs is the web-based editors to create, edit, and share Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and forms. These will all continue to work as they always have.

The new Google Drive is a single place to manage all your files, including Google Docs.

Think of Google Drive as your personal stash of files and folders that follows you wherever you go – it lets you keep everything and share anything. With Google Drive, you can access files, folders, and Google Docs from a web browser or any device where you’ve installed your Google Drive. No matter what happens to your devices, your files are safely stored in Google Drive.

You can use Google Drive to store all file types, including documents, presentations, music, photos, and videos. You can open many file types right in your browser, including PDFs, Microsoft Office files, high-definition video, and many image file types, even if you don’t have the corresponding program installed on your computer.

How are teachers and students using Google Docs?

Forget about Pages and Office

Use Google Docs for word processing and creating presentations. Then you don’t have to worry about where it’s saved. You can access your files from any computer and even from your phone or iPad. If you can’t print from your MacBook, just log in to Google Docs on a computer with a printer and it’s there.

Automagically Logged in through Moodle

When you log in to Moodle, click the Docs logo on the right and you’re automatically logged in to your Google Docs/Drive account.

Make Uploaded Files Editable

To convert files for editing in Google Drive, click on the gear in the top right corner of your Drive homepage and select Upload Settings. Then click on, “Convert uploaded files to Google Docs format.” It will save this setting so that any files you upload in the future will be automatically converted.

Share Files on Your Website

Open your document, slideshow or spreadsheet and go to File –> Publish to the Web. Click the Start Publishing button. You’ll get a direct link to the file that you can post on your website or send to someone via email. You’ll also get the embed code to include the file within a page on your website. Just switch to HTML view and paste the code in.

Create Folders and Share Them

Many teachers share files with students through Google Drive. You can create a folder and share that folder with students. Then when you have new files to share, just drag the file into the folder and it will be shared. This means you only have to enter students’ names once to share the folder instead of entering them for every document you want to share.

Collaborate on Drawings and Diagrams

Students can also collaborate on drawings and diagrams. After creating a drawing, share it with your group membersand everyone can see and edit the drawing at the same time. Download Google Chrome for best results with this feature.

You can access APT PLUS’s digital Media Library at www.aptv.org. On the left hand side of the page you’ll find the link to the Digital Library.

Over this next year we will be working with schools to extend what Discovery Education can do for us. The last time we purchased the program we focused almost exclusively on what teaches could do with it. This time around we plan to focus more on what teachers can set up for students to do in Discovery. It should make for a very exciting year. Keep on the look out for other announcements about products from Discovery that we are working to get implemented.

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.

• Add files to your Moodle course
• Add the links to other websites
• Create an Assignment in Moodle

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.

UPDATED 10/4/2012

Computers on the admin side of the BCBE network (teacher computers) can now access YouTube.com to view videos. Student computers do not have access to YouTube.com at any time.

There are many instructional videos on YouTube.  Teachers can download the videos to use them in class.

The use of videos from YouTube must follow the BCBE Copyright Policy.

How to Download YouTube Videos with Internet Explorer

1. Use KeepVid.com – see instructions on top right for adding bookmarklet

Unlike many interactive sites, PicMonkey does not require students to register or login to use the service. They can simply drag an image file into the window to upload it and start editing. Once you’re image is uploaded, a menu on the left gives you access to basic editing tools, touch-ups, text overlays and advanced features, such as blemish fixes, teeth whitening, frames and stamps. For now, all of the features are free to use. Some effects and tools (marked with a crown) will eventually be part of the site’s paid service.

If you used the now closed Picnik photo editor we previously recommended, PicMonkey is an excellent replacement.

Introduction to iPads in the Classroom

K-12 Teachers and Administrators will be introduced to iPads, their basic functions, and discussion of appropriate apps in the classrooms.  Procedures for setting up iPads and connecting to iTunes will be shared along with managing apps. Dates offered: 6/11 & 7/10

Using Moodle

In this two-part session you will set up your own online course for students. You’ll learn how to create online activities for your students, such as assignments they can upload, discussion forums, etc. Bring your lessons to life and extend your class time virtually, with an online course to supplement your teaching. Bring files and materials with you that you want to use in your Moodle course In part two, you’ll will learn to use additional features in Moodle including: pages, choice, quizzes, and glossary. Dates offered: 6/11, 7/11, & 7/17

Creating a Class Website with School Insites

Learn to set up your teacher web page where you can post files, pictures, presentations, assignments, class news and much more. Dates offered: 6/13 & 6/28

Google Docs

Google Docs offers online word processors, spreadsheets and presentation programs.  It works very similar to Microsoft Office except students are not tied to saving their files in one location.  They can access their files from any computer and they can collaborate with others on the files in real time.  This session will give you hands-on practice using Google Docs and collaborating on files.  We’ll look at examples you can use in your classroom. Dates offered: 6/27 & 7/5

Skype

All Baldwin County classrooms can host or participate in online video conferences for free with nothing more than an inexpensive web cam and a program called Skype. Connect with the classroom down the hall, across the county or around the world. Students can talk to experts, share information with each other, discuss classroom activities, and collaborate on projects. This session will demonstrate how to install Skype, how you get started using it, and a variety of classroom projects that have successfully used the program. Dates offered: 6/14 & 7/5

iMovie

Using your Macbook, you can learn to create movies and develop classroom activities that incorporate digital video assignments for students. Dates offered: 6/26 & 7/9

Implementing iPads in Your School

Learn how to set up iPads for use in your school. We’ll cover management issues, purchasing procedures for buying apps, and best practices to make the most of your school’s technology investment in iPads. Dates offered: 6/28 & 7/12

Blogging

Learn the basics of classroom Blogging and find out how teachers can safely use this popular form of communication with students. Dates offered: 6/26 & 7/10

APT Plus and Other Media in Your Classroom

Learn the basics of using APT Plus/Learn 360. Then learn how to use other multimedia resources, such as YouTube, with your students. Dates offered: 6/26 & 7/10

Advanced Moodle Training

Explore some advanced features of Moodle. This session will cover the Personal Learning Designer, wikis, lessons and Joule Synchronous. Dates offered: 7/12 & 7/18

Moodle Work Session

Attend these sessions to get help preparing your Moodle course for the new school year. Mini lessons on specific Moodle activities will be presented throughout the day but most of the time will be spent working on your course and sharing ideas with others. Dates offered: 7/31 & 8/2

All of these sessions will be offered multiple times.  Registration will be handled through STI PD. As soon as the sessions are added to the schedule we’ll let you know when you can start registering.

Don’t forget to save the dates for GRITC 2012:  July 25 & 26