Book Review: Moodle2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Nicholas Freear's book "Moodle2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds" published by Packt Publishing. I was pretty excited upon reading the title as I have often grappled with the issue of how to make Moodle relevant for the younger years of K-12 education. Moodle is a LMS which has a deep history in third level education. It is a LMS designed by academics for academics making it pretty hard to customise Moodle so that it is suitable for K-12 teaching and learning.

So what's in the book? The book essentially looks at how different Moodle activities can be applied to educational contexts that are relevant to 4-9 year olds. For example using quiz to test basic maths and numeracy, the database activity for getting students searching and cataloging images on the web, using the lesson module for spot the difference games.  The book also looks at a selection of third party developed Moodle modules from the SIMILE timeline widget to range of simple word games to Scratch a programming language learning developed my MIT for teaching and learning. To aid the teacher the book also looks at how third party, opensource tools can be used for content creation such as Audacity for sound recording and Inkscape for  image editing.

The book takes step-by-step through the installation and usage of some of Moodle's greatest activities. It goes into great technical detail describing how to set up things like filters, how to add stylesheets and javascript using code and I suppose this is my first criticism of the book. I know plenty of teachers that are currently teaching kids between four and nine and this book is would be slighly beyond their technical skill level. There is an assumption in this book of a high level of technical competency, which I would question.

I did like the way the book gave examples of how to use Moodle activities for kids between four and nine but I thought they were, at times, forced. In some of the examples I felt like the author was taking the wrong approach trying to fit pedagogy around the technology affordances rather than moulding the technology around the pedagogy.

Finally, the author made no attempt to deal with the elephant in the room - Moodle's user interface. I can't see a child being motivated and engaged by Moodle's current user interface (no matter what the theme is). A complete rethink of the UI/UX needs to be done for this special user group to find Moodle as fun to use as something like mangahigh.com .

So in summary an interesting read but to be honest I was left a bit disappointed. Perhaps teaching four to nine year olds using Moodle is an issue that is too big for just one book.

Rethinking Pedagogy - First four chapters

As I mentioned in a previous post the publishers of the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age have asked me to give suggestions on changes for the second edition. This is the first proper post looking at this.

In this post I am briefly going to look that the first four chapters. So here goes:

Learning and e-learning - The role of theory by Terry Mayes and Sara de Freitas 

This chapter looks at the place of learning theory in e-learning. It introduces the reader to three perspectives on learning theory - assocationist, cognitive, situative - which is useful. I think perhaps more on this is warranted as a lot of e-learning researchers find it hard to understand all the various learning theories and how they sit with each other. The authors introduce the idea that each perspective has its place in the learning cycle. It would be great if there could be a diagram included to depict the learning theory perspectives. Also a diagram on the learning cycle would be good in the second edition. 

An Approach to Learning Activity Design by Helen Beetham

This chapter considers the design of learning activities. A learning activity can be defined in terms of learning outcomes, learners, digital resources and technology, and interaction with others. This is a good concise chapter that captures the key aspects of a learning activity.

Designing Courses for e-Learning by Rhona Sharpe and Martin Oliver
This chapter takes a macro view of course design whereas the previous chapter takes the micro view looking at learning activity design. The chapter begins with looking at approaches to course design and the problems with using learning outcomes and constructive alignment where 'assessment always defines the curriculum' and learning outcomes become essentially a straight jacket for the learner. The chapter then looks at models for course design. To be honest I would have liked a lot more detail here - each model could be a chapter on its own. This chapter also notes that its not by virtue of any pedagogical affordances that technology is integrated into course design - its by necessity to deal with some of the challenges in the classroom like growing class sizes. The chapter finishes with a brief outline of how to go about course redesign. This chapter is a key one for me and I would like to see a lot more detail in two areas - the models for course design and on the process of course redesign - perhaps new chapters for the second edition?

Practices and Processes of Design for Learning by Liz Masterman and Mira Vogel
This chapter looks at what e-learning designers are actually doing in the field in designing courseware and learning activities. The chapter draws on 3 JISC funded projects one of which is centered around the tool support provided by LAMS. The chapter looks at how learning designs can be represented. The goal of this should be the sharing of good learning design, which the authors look at in one of the final sections. I think if this chapter was more generic, not discussing LAMS so much, it would be much improved.

That's it for the first four chapters. I should have the next four in a week or so.