Moodle Blog

Just a different take on the conventional way of using Hot Potatoes in Moodle. (For those unfamiliar with Hot Potatoes, click here) Rather than have the teacher check the students’ learning with an exercise they’ve generated themselves, it might be both informative and fun for the students both to generate a Hot Potatoes activity and – via the Moodle Workshop module – to try out and assess those of their classmates. This could be done as a summative task at the end of a unit of work and would need at least two sessions – perhaps one class session and one homework. The students would need to come prepared with the information they wish to use in their quiz for testing their peers. They would then have to learn the very basics of Hot Potatoes. I am a Hot Potatoes trainer and for Our Lady’s Preston have used a Moodle lesson on the basics of Hot Potatoes. I set the students off on this lesson first, which gives them the choice either of following screencasts, or paper worksheets or just diving straight in. If you only have time for one activity, the J-match is probably the easiest to master first, although the J-cloze would probably be a better test of their learning. Allow students time to generate one exercise of their own which, at the end of the session they will save as an .htm file and upload to a Moodle workshop. When their friends try out the exercises they’ll get instant feedback but the results won’t show up in a gradebook as they’ve merely been uploaded as webpages, not in the Hotpot module. That’s not important here – the big advantage of the workshop is that the whole class can upload their activities into the workshop and allow their classmates to view, do and comment on each others’ work.

A workshop isn’t the easiest of modules to set up: some things to bear in mind are:

• use Criterion grading if you are unfamiliar with the workshop – this will allow you to set the standards by which the students grade.
• keep the Moodlers’ names hidden – that way they will not know whose work they are assessing and won’t be biased!
• set a reasonable number of items for each student to assess, according to the size of your class. I chose three per student in a class of thirty
• Set up the league table – perhaps to theTop Ten nothing beats an element of competition!

The actual assessing of each others’ work – the second session – can be set as a homework and if you set the dates such that all gradings must be in before your next lesson, your class can be greeted with their results on an IWB, prompting a discussion on why the Top Ten had been considered more useful than other exercises lower down the league.

ICT – independent learning – revision – peer assessment… co-operation… group discusssion …plenary….boxes..ticked…