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Sharing Student Resources

It is very useful to teach students how to find resources in the real world. To do so, instructors often ask students to find or critique resources (books, journals, Web sites, etc.) about a specific subject and hand them in for review. Creating such an assignment may bring up many questions, including:

  • How can the instructor share the found resources with the entire class?
  • How can the instructor enable students to comment on each others' work?
  • Better yet, how can the instructor make the resource listings searchable and provide quality ratings to make them more useful?

Activities

There are many different types of activities that could be set up to enable students to share resources and critiques of them. Below are a few examples.

  • Enable students to collaboratively create a searchable listing of articles about a particular subject and to comment on each others' work.
  • Have students display their own creative work and enable other students or the instructor to provide constructive criticism about the work.
  • Enable students to share critiques of Web resources, online writing styles, Web site designs, and the like.
  • Ask students to create a searchable database of current events relevant to a specific topic or of sources of information for a presentation.

Teaching Tips

Instructors may want to keep in mind the following tips while creating a resource sharing learning activity.

  • Provide a structure into which students can insert their information or data.
  • Require students to provide information that is necessary for each resource entry to be useful and make other information optional.
  • Provide one or two example entries so students are clear about what is expected of them.
  • If you will grade students' work, make the grading criteria or rubric available to them.

Technologies

Instructors can use the Moodle course management system's Database activity to create resource sharing learning activities. It can be useful especially when the instructor wants to enable students to view each others' submissions and comments. The advantages of using the Database activity rather than a threaded discussion for this type of activity are:

  • The instructor can structure the information that is gathered by providing fields (and where appropriate the options available) into which the students enter their data.
  • The data will be searchable and sortable by these fields.
  • The instructor can require students to add a certain number of entries before they are able to view the entries made by other students.

Examples

We created the example scenarios below to illustrate how instructors might enable students to share and critique resources.

a screenshot of a Moodle Database settings page

a screenshot of a Moodle Database settings page

Figures 1 and 2: Entries on a Moodle "Adding a new Choice" settings page.

a screenshot of a Moodle Choice results page

Figure 3: A portion of a Moodle Choice results page. See the full page.

Adding a New Database Activity

An instructor could set up a Database activity in Moodle by following these steps:

  1. Turn the editing mode to "On."
  2. Select a Database activity under the "Add Activity" drop-down list in your course site.
  3. This will bring you to the "Adding a new Database" settings page. To get an explanation of various options, select the question mark icon next to the question.

Sharing Critiques of Good and Bad Work

An instructor could enable students to share examples of good and bad work using the Moodle Choice activity. For example: professor Y is teaching a Web site design course. She wants students to post two entries for everyone in the class to see: a URL, screen capture, and critique of one well- and one poorly-designed Web page. To promote individual thinking, she wants students to post their own entries before seeing the entries of others. She also wants each student to comment on at least two entries by his or her classmates. She decides to use the Moodle "Database" activity because it is easy to use and the database will be searchable on any of the fields she creates. To set up this activity, she follows these steps:

  1. Choose the appropriate settings on the Moodle "Adding a new Database" settings page (see the settings professor Y chose in Figures 1 and 2).
  2. With these settings, students would be asked to enter information into the fields shown in Figure 3.
  3. The instructor adds the ##user## field to the display templates so that students know the author of each entry (by default the Moodle database activity does not display the author of entires).

Related Resources

Last modified Tuesday, 19-Jun-2007 15:30:23 CDT