I've got my textbooks, my hot tea, and my laptop computer--time to bust out some syllabi and then noodle through some Moodling!
Spring classes don't start until January 13, but we're leaving for a long road trip Sunday and I'll get back to campus around January 8 with my brain and body still recovering from the long drive home, and then, of course, I have meetings. So unless I want to finish my syllabi on the road, today's the day. (And tomorrow too. But not Saturday. At some point I need to take down the Christmas tree and pack for the trip.)
Over the years I've streamlined my syllabus-construction process, but it's still more complicated than it ought to be. I like to keep my syllabi concise and simple, but by the time I add the whole page of required college policies (academic dishonesty, accommodations, academic probation blah blah blah), it's a monster. I resent being required to use the official college statements because they were written by someone utterly tone-deaf to the music of the language, but I'm a good little proffie so I do what I'm told. The rest of the syllabus, though, is MINE.
I've worked out some pretty effective ways to state important things on the syllabus, and I've saved all this syllabus boilerplate in one file that serves as a template that I can customize for each class. Nothing flashy, but I do like to set a tone for the semester from the very start, so I include some playful language and even a title at the top. (Honors Literature: Life is a Highway. Concepts of Place: Florida Frontiers. And so on.)
And then it all goes on Moodle. Here I probably make the process unnecessarily complex: our standard Moodle layout is annoyingly busy and ugly, so I take some extra steps to make my Moodle pages uncluttered and easy to follow. I don't just upload a bunch of files and hope students find the right one; instead, I create a separate block for each day of class and upload the files needed in that block, and then I hide all the blocks that aren't immediately relevant so students aren't overwhelmed with too much information. And then I format the individual blocks uniformly, using font size and color to create a predictable pattern and flow. And all of this requires an incredible amount of clicking and typing and scrolling and clicking.
Of course, I could just post the first few weeks of the semester and add the rest later, but I'm obsessive enough to require closure: I load up the whole semester now and open blocks as they become necessary. I'll thank myself in March when I'm so overwhelmed by grading that I don't have time to breathe, but today I'll be pushing that boulder up the mountain all day long and hoping it doesn't slip out of my grasp and go sliding back down again.
Copy, paste, customize. Click, type, scroll. Repeat repeat repeat. That's today in a nutshell--and probably tomorrow too.
2 comments:
I'm impressed! This is my first year with moodle and my first year with all-new curriculum (some of which I'm writing myself), so it's all I can do to keep up with the day-to-day. And it's high school.
I also arrange my moodle differently than default. Our default is by the week, so I use that for some classes, but I put in labels for each individual day. Another moodle is arrange by the units and topics (each term gets two units, and each unit gets 2-3 topics, with almost every topic ending in a quiz). My co-teacher and I also add dates within this unit structure. Utterly frustrating is when students say they still can't find the files they need. I've taught many a student of the wonder of ctrl+F.
I know, and there are always a few in every class who can't seem to grasp the fact that nearly everything they need to know is posted on Moodle. If they don't see something immediately, they e-mail me to ask, and then I point them right back to Moodle. I also put the course Moodle page on the screen at the start of every class and point out important information, so anyone who still can't find things by the end of the semester simply isn't trying.
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