 So a little bit about me before I get started. I traditionally work in the IT department at Ingham ISD. I support a lot of our academic initiatives, one of those being Moodle. We host Moodle for about 80 school districts in the state of Michigan. And recently we pushed that off to a vendor who's now hosting that for us. So it allows me to work on projects like the new Moodle social wall course format. Being in IT, sometimes it's hard to relate to IT people. I am a real human being. I love to golf. That's my second hole in the one I've got over the last couple of years. I love to travel. My Labrador Retriever makes me walker every night, and that's our little future Moodler there. So that's a little bit about me. About our presentation today, I'm gonna share about our problem and our solution of our project, how to set up our course format, how to use the course format, what we're looking at in the next version, how to get involved, and lastly I've got a lesson learned about our project. So as our trainers around our local districts helping teachers get started with Moodle, we've run into the same problem over and over and over again. Moodle can do literally everything. It can do the quizzes that we were just talking about. We can do tracks, see how confident the students are. It can integrate with Google. It can integrate with Office 365. We can do next generation assessments. And the problem with that is Moodle is very complex. It's very robust, but it takes a lot of time to get teachers up and running initially inside the platform. And it's just because it is so robust. And what's happening is, in the state of Michigan is, a lot of our teachers are getting overwhelmed during that training and they're then leaving Moodle to go use one of our traditional LMSs that should not be named today. And what that results in is inside of a school building we'll have one teacher using one LMS and another teacher using different LMSs and maybe a third teacher even using a different one. So what we want is we want to get everybody in the same LMS to start with and then as they get familiar with Moodle that they can transition from a very light course format into our traditional style class. So what we've developed is a new course format called the social wall. It's got a simple interface. If you've ever used Facebook or Twitter, it's gonna be feel very familiar to you. It's also gonna feel very familiar to the students so they're gonna know how to use it initially. And the great thing about this is a teacher can get up and running within about 10 or 15 minutes of a training. So you can get them going within the first hour of your training session. So I had a question earlier. What is the social wall course format? It's a couple of things. One, it is a course format. We've also built out an alert block. We also have a filter URL resource and a backup helper. All of these are available inside the repository. To create a course, there's just a couple of questions to ask you when you select the course format. I always point out there's one option here. Allow users to upload files and links. And so a student, you can turn that on and off and a student can either upload a file or not depend on whether you select that as yes or no. There's just a couple of questions there on how many posts you wanna show at a time. The next thing I usually ask a teacher to do is to add the alerts block and the upcoming events block. And anything we tag as an alert is gonna show in that block. So the main format is a timeline view, just like a Facebook page. We can sort based on the mod types or if it's an alert, we can sort either in sending or a descending order on when the post was added. And we've got a couple of things I wanna show. If you wanna add an announcement, a lot of teachers just like to post an announcement of what they're gonna do for homework for the night. So then maybe you post out that you need to read certain pages in the textbook. It's quite easy to do, just using the post, the status or a note. Some teachers like to do a little bit of a style to their announcement so there's an HTML option. You can pop in and add some styling to your announcement. This time I changed the color and centered it. It's pretty easy to start a conversation. Anytime you post an announcement or a note to the wall, students can go back in and comment and like it. It's pretty easy to do. The little arrow here is showing there's a lock button. So after a while, you may be like, all right, we need to shut off the comments on this. The teacher can go and click the lock and it shuts down the comment, you know what. In our research, we saw that a lot of teachers like to add videos either to YouTube or maybe the Khan Academy. So if you drop a link in there with a description, it'll automatically embed the video for you, which is pretty nice. The teacher drops a link to an outside resource with a note on it. It's also gonna do the auto linking for that. Sometimes we wanna drop a picture into the timeline. It's pretty easy to do. You flip editing on for the course. You drag the image into the post box and it's automatically gonna upload it. It's gonna ask you whether you want to embed the image or just make it an attachment. In this case, I actually did the embed so you can see the photo. A lot of times, the teacher wants to drop a handout to the whole class. So we made that easy as well. If you flip on editing, you can drag and drop that document. Maybe it's a Word doc or a PowerPoint right out there for the students to see. You can stack a couple of documents out there with a post, a note or a status update. And as soon as you hit that, the post button is gonna go out to all the students. Sometimes we wanna float an announcement to the top of the timeline so it doesn't get lost. So we have a sticky option. It's either available in the dropdown here, make a post sticky, or if you wanna make a post you already posted earlier sticky, there is a button here that looks like a little thumbtack and you can click that and it's gonna float that post to the top. It's a great way to put an announcement out, maybe for the whole duration of the class. So those are generally the features that our teachers like to see when they're up and running inside Moodle, which usually leads to the can I fill in the blank? Can I use a quiz? Can I post an assignment? All those activities and resources are still available. There's a link here, it pops open a box where you can add in all your traditional activities and resources. One of the nice things about adding an assignment, this is a case where I wouldn't add a sample assignment and I posted it out to the wall, the student goes in and completes it and once the teacher grades it and posts any feedback, it's gonna go back on the student's timeline with the feedback and their grade on the assignment. Students can go in and they can edit what type of notifications they wanna receive with a link here and then get a notification on each post or a digest. If I want an item to appear in the alerts box that we added during the course setup, there's a dropdown that says make this post an alert and that's gonna show in that alert box. It's a really great way to bring attention to a special item, especially as your timeline grows, things can get lost over time. Like I said, students, they've got a view too. They can, using that course setup feature, we can allow them to upload a file if we want them to or add a link. Otherwise, they can post announcements as well. We did a bunch of research when we were, that led to this project and we've got a couple of best practices we always recommend. Moodle ships with a social course format out of the box. If you can install this course format, we recommend disabling the previous one to make it a little bit easier for your teacher so they don't get confused. On our project page, which I'll have a link to in a little bit, we've got some extra CSS, you can drop into your theme that will help improve the styling of the formatting of the box, the post box. And we always recommend start a new course with a social wall. This is really meant to get teachers into Moodle and using Moodle and eventually they're gonna wanna switch to a topics format down the road. So we really recommend this is for new teachers starting with a new course and the great part is there's a topics format underneath the social wall. So when a teacher decides they wanna go to a topics layout down the road, they can switch the course format back to topics and all the resources that they create will be in topic number one and they can reorder that to fit their needs down the road. If the teacher has been using for Moodle for a number of years and they're really comfortable with it, this is really not a good solution for them. They should keep on using topics or weekly. When we were doing our research around the state of Michigan, we noticed a lot of common themes. A lot of IT departments put in barriers for their staff. So we recommended the following best practices of one set up a common authentication. So this will help your teachers and your students get into Moodle without having to remember a second password. A lot of districts are using Google Now which you can do a common authentication or Office 365. Use a one responsive theme so that looks good and cross all of your classes. We were seeing a lot of teachers were picking their own theme and it was kind of making it difficult for the students. A lot of IT departments insist on making, creating the courses for their teachers. You can actually set your teachers up as a course creator and then go and create their own courses. This just removes one barrier for your teachers to get going. We were noticing a lot of districts weren't current with their version. I even noticed last year we had one district in the state and Michigan's still running out of one nine. And a lot of districts, we noticed we had a lot of performance problems because they weren't assigning the necessary resources to Moodle. So we recommend making sure things are performing well and you have enough resources. So we have a couple of ways to get involved. The first link is our project page that has all the links to some how-to videos and how to use a social wall, some handouts, links to download the actual plugins and blocks and alerts. And then we got links to our support forum. There's a direct link there to the plugin directory on Moodle that contains all the downloads. We've been trying to get the word out across the U.S. this year. We've been at the Michigan Moodle Mood, the Ohio Moodle Mood, and we're here today. We've got some good press from Moodle News as well as the Moodle blog a couple weeks ago. We have an upcoming release. We're working on it right now. We're gonna take our comments. We're gonna make them more threaded so we can have a more of a rich discussion. And one thing we noticed after we got done is we needed a better ability to edit and reuse our resources once they've been added. So that's gonna be in the next release. One last thought, a lesson learned on this one, is if you, I love this quote by Walt Disney. If you can dream it, you can do it. My friend Chris Kenneberg at a Dearborn Public School has had this idea about two or three years ago to create this course format because he was seeing this problem with his teachers. And he just, he didn't know how to move it forward. So he started talking to me about this and then we just started talking to everybody we could find about this project. And about a year ago we found a partner to help fund our project. So I typically say, you know, if you've got an idea, start talking about a blog about it, talk to your colleagues about it and eventually it can come to fruition. We were ended up funded by the Remzi Association of Michigan which is still funding us on our project and we're really appreciative to them. Is there any questions about our course format? You mentioned the notifications and I just didn't see it quickly enough. Other than so we can subscribe to all the postings via email. What are the other options? You could either an email on every post or a digest of it. The idea of an easy entry point for teachers into a blanket environment and it's kind of strange to ask this, but can you give us any insight on what the transition out of this course format into a more traditional topic, state format? Yeah, so when you're ready to transition back to a topics format, you just go back into your course settings and you can flip it back to topics and then all those resources you created end up in topic one. So then you can reorganize it. That will work, I kind of vision a lot of teachers would be like that worked really great for year one with a social wall, but they're probably gonna end up recreating it down the road anyways because they're just getting used to teaching online and teaching the blended environment. So yeah, you can flip the topics and then reorganize it. Yeah, you can flip back. Yep, over here. I think the course reset removes all of the post and what we're working on right now is be able to reuse like a quiz or an activity. We missed that in our original scope when we were working with Synergy out of the UK. So right now we're working on to get that back in because we realized that teachers are gonna want to reuse a quiz or an activity from year to year. So that's in our next release. We hope to have that done by the end of the summer. All right, question? Is it possible to flip back to make your course with posts and assignments and when you have time on your day and then you make some day so that they're ready to teach they are or not need to do anything so they don't have to be there just getting ready for something that is with the post. That is a great idea. Next question. Version three. So when the instructor raised her side to make the post back to the student and it goes back to the timeline, is it only the student that can see that that's a private post? Yep. So each student will see their own grade and their own feedback. It goes right back in that timeline. Any more questions? You said one thing through all that may be like kind of continuing from schools and school. Yeah, you wanna keep it consistent for your students. I always use the grocery store analogy. When my grocery store moves the package of Oreos on the shelf, I get really irritated. So if your students have to continually search out where things are in each course, that's where it gets problematic. So if you can keep things consistent for maybe a school building or a school district, that's the best way to do that. Just helps the students think about learning instead of where everything is at. If we have a building that I've got, buildings that want to be different than a district. So if I district a school, what's the difference between district and district? I mean, I think that the branding is a good thing to do for your school. You just wanna keep it consistent throughout that building with the branding and the theme. That's the best case scenario for your students and your staff. Hope we do set cognitive load. Any more questions? I'll be down here if you have any, any more. Thank you.