During the current school year, over 40 teachers have begun to use, or ramped-up their use of Moodle (what Dearborn calls iLearn) in their classroom. One of these teachers is Nicole Laramee, science and social studies teacher at Woodworth Middle School.
Ms. Laramee has used iLearn (Moodle) for many things at this point, most notably for assessment. She has created tests on ExamView, then uploaded the test to iLearn. Doing so has allowed her to give students an experience with taking the assessment that they would not have had otherwise.
On a recent science quiz, for instance, Laramee’s students had the ability to answer each question and get instant feedback on their answer. She also enabled the students to fix their answer if they got it wrong–but at a 33% penalty for each successive try. This allowed students to recover some of the credit if they could at least narrow down a multiple choice answer to two choices–as opposed to simply getting a zero on a traditional assessment. That’s not to mention the test becomes more than a simple assessment: it becomes a learning experience in itself.
Ms. Laramee also embedded all of the necessary tools into questions. Take a look at this question that required a calculated answer. The question includes an embedded calculator to help students work out the answer.
Laramee also uses varied question types to gauge student understanding, including multiple choice, free response, and matching.
Together, all of these features make testing an engaging, thorough, diverse experience for students, who even get the chance to learn while they test.