Making Class "Teams" & 2nd Week Assignmnets

Thank goodness for the three-day Labor Day Weekend. It is giving me the opportunity to get my head around some project based learning concepts I have been reading and developing assignments for the 2nd week of classes.

This week I will have the students get on the computer, get into Moodle, the open source (FREE) course management system that our school district uses. We call it the HISD Online Learning Center. I am planning 3 assignments in Moodle.

Creating a Moodle Account
Editing their Moodle Profile
Acceptable Use of Computers & Networks Quiz

Other assignments I am planning for the week will be actually getting into our HSTE Project web pages for the first time.

Joining the HSTE Project on Wikispaces
Joining the HSTE Project Ning

The final assignment for the week will introduce them to Netvibes.

Netvibes Personal Learning Network

This will allow them to establish a place where they can aggregate all of the HSTE Project RSS Feeds for the class as well as get them used to having one place to stop to categorize all of there online favorites, for personal use and other classes, in one place. Netvibes is a wonderful tool and I have been using it for almost a year and I find that it really is a time saver by allowing me to keep all of my online favorites in one place for easy reference and reading.

This week's assignments appears to be heavy with technology and on the surface doesn't appear to address Health Science Technology, the courses that I teach, but it is laying the ground work to allow us to build the computer skills, or 21st Century Learning Intelligences, necessary to utilize the HSTE Project web pages to learn Health Science Technology concepts and skills as we move forward for the remainder of the school year.

The assignments are actually pretty short, for the most part, but it will allow them some opportunities to get used to working with the computers in our classroom as well as getting comfortable with working with their teams which I will allow the student to select on Tuesday.

Until next time...

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