Sunday, September 25, 2011

Students Managing Their Own Data

Moodle RSS block

Post on Tumblr

Post pulled into Moodle page
I'm trying an experiment this year with my high school robotics students. I had been wanting them to document their work in a fun and creative way so I thought I would have them set up Tumblr accounts so they could easily post not only their code but videos and photos with their phones. Then I got thinking that I could pull in the RSS feeds from their Tumblrs to our Moodle class site. There's a block, or widget, for just that in Moodle. Then I thought why not just put them in the teacher role and give them an assignment to figure out how to connect up their own feeds. They didn't know what RSS was but I explained the concept and the purpose and gave them a couple hints. A few of them did figure it out and the rest did the next best thing, which was adding a link to their Tumblr on the page.

Why go to all this trouble? I think this exercise is important because they need to have experience making things with web tools for real purposes, not just using the web.

UPDATE on this: So one of my students got re-blogged by a porn site. I had to end the experiment. Fortunately I caught the spam before she could see it. Made me disappointed in the Internet.

2 comments :

Ener Hax said...

you have robot students! how cool! oh . . . robotics, oops =)

all of this to say hello and wish you a wonderful school year! =)

Erik N. said...

It's so fun, can't believe I get paid to do it. Thanks for the well wishes!