moodle newsletter october - 2011
TRANSCRIPT
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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
Erika Quinn
Moodle
Specialist
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.