JP tech notes

The Justice and Peace course was new for me last year, and it's also very much about current topics; those are maybe the reasons why it's the course in which I most used "technology." But it was a little overwhelming for some at times. I think that will ease up in the future as students come having had practice with blogs and wikis in other courses. But I'm seeing if I can't somehow simplify things. Once complaint was that the students had so many places to go online that they didn't know what was what.

I'm moving away from Moodle a bit in that course. Maybe I can drop it for the most part. I had to move the wiki group assignments to Wikispaces because I have two sections glommed into one Moodle course, and it would be too time-consuming to form the groups manually. Auto-creating groups would mean students from different sections would be together.

Last semester I posted assignments on Moodle that were for the blog. Today, I thought, why not post the directions right on the blog? Duh. Maybe this will help with some of that feeling of confusion.

More on wikis

In the past I've considered Moodle wikis to be a bit clunky, but they're growing on me a bit. It's better to use group pages, because different groups trying to upload to the same page just takes too long.

Having the groups auto-generated seemed nifty, but then I got to a class and discovered that four students who were not shown as absent on the computer were on retreat, and the groups were lopsided. I didn't have time to reconfigure the groups. I only needed to move one student. She was not on the right page anymore, so her partner did the uploading.

Students explored websites of organizations to make connections between their work and themes of Catholic Social Teaching. I told them that if they had time they could "make it pretty" and upload photos, and most groups were able to do so. We then viewed each wiki page while the group explained their findings.

Not bad for a period's work.