Evolving as a digital teacher: Tools of the trade (Part 4)

Use Lesson Activity together with audio, short video and quiz.

A tutorial I created initially for colleagues in the Information Systems department, DWU but I would like to share it here on my blog as the 4th sequel to the Evolving as a digital teacher series. 

This tutorial is based on the use of Lesson Activity which is an activity tool in Moodle. 

Part 1 Lesson Plan.
Create a lesson plan based on the topic you are going to cover for that week.

Example: I want to cover a topic on VPN & IPsec concepts. This topic is part of a module that is already divided into three subtopics with clear objectives for each section. If you're using a text reference as a guide you may want to follow the text layout for each chapter.

Here are the key objectives for each section of the topic.

• Lesson 8.1 VPN Technology -  describe benefits of VPN technology.
• Lesson 8.2 Types of VPNs - describe different types of VPNs.
• Lesson 8.3 IPsec - explain how the IPsec framework is used to secure network traffic.

What I usually do is to identify what technique I want to use to cover each section and what tool will help me achieve that.

• Lesson 8.1 - Use Moodle's lesson activity to cover it.
• Lesson 8.2 - Post discussion points on Moodle and get students to post replies and contribute to the discussion. Creating the task as a Q&A forum and setting the options to allow students to post feedback to a discussion question which can then be rated using a rubric.
• Lesson 8.3 - Invite students to a 25 minutes Zoom or Webex online meeting/discussion.

For this tutorial, I will focus on Lesson 8.1 and demonstrate step-by-step on how to setup the Lesson activity.

Part 2 Creating the Lesson 
Creating the lesson will include an audio intro, a 30 minute pre-recorded video lecture followed by check your understanding quiz at the end of the lesson. (This is how I approach my lesson activity, you may have your style or method. Use what method works for you.)

1. Adding the Lesson activity

Click on Add an activity or resource and select Lesson.

Add a Name and Description. I'll leave out the other important details about a lesson activity like the Grade and Flow Control until the end of this tutorial. I'll go ahead and create the lesson.

Click on Save and Display.

2. Now to the Lesson

Integrate Camtasia Studio with Moodle

It has been a while since I last posted any tutorial here. Been very busy with work and family that I wasn't able to write something. However, I did get to participate in a very enlightening course over the course of three weeks on teaching online.

It was through this course that I started to assist the facilitator teach some of my colleagues on how to use Camtasia. Camtasia is a great screen capture tool. I shall not go into the details of the software as there is tonnes of info on their website (a simple Google search would do) but I would like to share a tutorial I wrote on how to integrate Camtasia with Moodle. Moodle is an open source LMS with a huge support its community of users. You can find more about Moodle here.