Day 7 Dominica: Moodle Quiz

Today the teachers began working in the courses I built for them. We have been playing a little with various assignments and links, but now it gets serious!

So I took them through a step-by-step of quizzes. We discussed the various settings such as unlimited attempts and the power of immediate feedback. They are all excited about getting this done as they will not have to carry papers back and forth between home and school. They are also excited that the quizzes are marked for them. They experienced how much work it is to put all the questions, responses and feedback into a quiz, but they also noted how lasting the work will be.

They are a traditional group. They certainly did not like the idea of a student getting 100% on a second attempt at a quiz. Most felt there should be a penalty given if a student got a question wrong on his or her first attempt. However, they could also see that there could be learning for that student while figuring out the right answer. One exclaimed, 'They are going to get a heavy penalty for a wrong answer' another noted that the students take it much more seriously if they know ahead of time that each wrong answer will cost them, even if it is only a small penalty. I hope to return to this discussion later in the week.

The day went well. They created quizzes consisting mainly of multiple choice questions and then they tried the quizzes of their colleagues. This allowed them to see the results they would get when their students took a quiz. They were impressed and we all had a good laugh when one teacher went to manually mark the essay question on her Social Studies test to read the first response, "Miss, are you serious?" Let's say we can't excel at everything.

As usual, we set the plan for tomorrow before leaving class today. We will cover course administration and embedding objects in a course or web page. This will also allow a little playing with various web tools.

This is a great group of teachers. Have I mentioned that before? I am going to miss them. Hopefully we will keep in touch. What are the chances?