 All right, so personalizing learning with Moodle. Just to start with, lots of people have different definitions of what personalizing is. And certainly personalizing learning doesn't require technology. It certainly doesn't require Moodle. But using Moodle can make it a lot more effective and it can make you a lot more efficient in personalizing learning. So personalization, as I'm going to talk about it today, is really a combination of differentiation, which is like leveling content, pacing. Basically, you're studying the same content, but you're differing it for each student. Add to that individualization, which could mean different goals for different students. So maybe they're all learning fractions, but one's doing cooking and one's doing, for example, they could be doing architecture or something like that. So if you've ever looked into any sort of motivation or mindset research, there's a couple of different common themes that come across. I like to tell my teachers when you're personalizing, make sure to amp it up. And this involves adding autonomy. It means focusing on mastery and not necessarily grades, but are they allowed to retake the assessment until they actually master the content or you just shuffle them along? And what is the purpose? Make sure that students find that the content is relevant to them, that they understand the value of what they're learning beyond just the classroom and the grade. So with that in mind, a lot of teachers ask me, well, personalization takes a lot of time and effort. So why should I do it? And why should I do it with technology? Well, a lot of it has to do with automation. With Moodle, personalizing actually makes using a tool like Moodle a lot easier because you can do things like conditional access that are automated. They complete one activity and the next one opens up. So it saves you a lot more time in having to manage those activities. It also gets to the autonomy. If you gamify your class or if you're just allowing students to move at their own pace, you can do that a lot easier using Moodle. And although outcome-based grading is not necessarily required to personalize learning, it makes personalizing learning a lot easier because you're no longer trying to differentiate. Well, am I going to give the kid an A minus or a B plus? Did they get it or did they not? If they didn't get it, they have to relearn it until they get it. So it's a lot easier for you as a teacher to say, yep, they got it or no, they didn't get it rather than A minus, B plus, B, what factor did they pass at? So as I go forward, I'm going to talk about a lot of different ways you can do this in Moodle. But I always warn teachers, don't try to do them all at once, especially if you're new to Moodle itself. That's when people get really overwhelmed and they just quit altogether. So I'm going to give you a lot of different options. But if this is new to you, focus on one or two the first time you try to personalize your course. So the first one, someone mentioned the lesson module. If you haven't tried the lesson module yet, it is amazing. It is the one module that I can get almost any teacher interested in Moodle if they hadn't been interested before. So for those of you who aren't familiar with lesson modules, lesson module combines pages with assessment questions. And so for example, I have a science teacher who teaches sixth grade. She'll use the lesson module to put her flip learning video into it. Maybe some text content, maybe a link to simulation. And then there's a button that says, check your understanding. Students click that and they get a multiple choice question, or maybe a short answer question. So the kids who thought maybe they could just click through the lesson and go next, next, next, next, next, they can't do that anymore. They're stopped by a question. So if they didn't actually go through the content, they're probably not going to get the question right. And depending on their answer depends on where they go next in the lesson. It's kind of like a choose your own adventure. If they get it wrong, the teacher can send them back to the first page. Or they can send them to a different page altogether with a different video or different content that reteaches that same concept. So I like to describe it as the choose your own learning adventure. If you've never used lessons before, it's pretty similar to what a page looks like. The only difference is this lower section below that has content one, content two, content three, content four. And I'd like to make a plug if there's any developers in the room. We should really rename those button one, button two, button three, button four. So basically what those do is those let you define where they go from this page and what does the button say? So in my example with the sixth grade science teacher, she likes to name the button, check your understanding. Because the students know, okay, there's going to be a check after this content page. If I'm doing a lesson for adults, I typically just use two buttons. Previous, that goes to the page before. And next, that goes to the next page. But I've seen it used in lots of creative ways. My social studies teachers like to do a what would have happened if. So like to choose your own adventure, they might name different buttons. Okay, you're a slave. What would you do in this situation? And the buttons would be those choices, which would then lead them to different pages. So there's a lot of different ways you can use a lesson model. It can be completely linear or it can be more like a mapped lesson. So this is what that page eventually looks like. It just has the content, the embedded video, and a check your understanding button. And this is an example of a question within a lesson. So if lessons aren't your thing, you can also try automating quizzes. And this is the other thing that my teachers love to do and gets them the hook into Moodle. Quizzes are great because as someone said the other day, we should rename them the automatically grade an instant feedback tool, instead of quiz. By automating quizzes, one way you can do it is by automating your retakes. So one of the biggest complaints my teachers have when doing assessment for learning, that is allowing them to retake assessments until they've passed it, is that facilitating all of those retakes, especially if they're paper retakes, takes a lot of time and effort. You have to track down the kid, you have lots more grading to do, and some kids might blow off the first take, because they're like, well, I can take it again. By using Moodle, you can really automate that. One of the strongest things are using random questions. So I like to teach teachers to put their questions in the question bank first before they even create a quiz. So for example, if they have a 10 question quiz, you can tell it to pull 10 random questions from a category of 30. So when they take it another time, they might have 10 different questions. So each time it's a little different than the first time they took it. This is also nice if you're having a whole classroom of kids take a quiz, because the kids sitting next to each other will have completely different questions in completely different order. You can also use categories to have random questions within a section of your test. So you can use more than one category within a quiz. But essentially, you just use the random question feature instead of choosing which question you do. If you add in the ability to take unlimited or maybe two or three attempts, this allows the student to see their feedback and then retake it again. So rather than having to wait till after school when you're available, but you have a faculty meeting, so it has to be tomorrow. It allows them to retake it right again. The most powerful feature of quizzes is using feedback. Not just generic feedback of whether they got it right or wrong, but the fact that if you didn't already know, the feedback box is a rich text box. You can put anything in it. So if you're doing it as a formative assessment, think about putting your YouTube video in the feedback itself. So if they got the question wrong, it not only tells them that and what the correct answer was. But you can say, now here's the video that tells you how to get the right answer. So use that rich text box to provide links to additional resources, embedded videos, or even just funny gifts and other images that congratulate them if they do get it right. The other nice thing about quiz feedback is that you can provide feedback specific to a wrong answer. Rather than just it's wrong, if you have a common wrong answer. So for example, if you had what's three times three and six was a common wrong answer, you could say okay, if they put six in the box, they still get a score of zero. But the feedback is actually, whoops, you added instead of multiplied. So it's a different feedback than the kid who maybe put in 27. So make sure that you put feedback specific to wrong answers that you frequently get. Another way to provide purpose for students, there's less automation in this. But this is really getting to the heart of what's in it for me with the students. Teachers often say I want to be able to differentiate and I want kids to explore their own interests within the unit. But it's really difficult for me as a teacher to collect all of that. And to manage different tools, like maybe one's using Prezi, one's using PowerPoint, one's doing a sculpture. One way you can do that is by using the assignment module, specifically the online text option, but also the uploading files. Basically, they can put a link, an embed code, upload an image or a file all in the same assignment. So your student who's using a Google Doc can put in a link to their Google Doc. Your student who's making a Prezi can put in a link to their Prezi. The student who's doing the sculpture, the Rube Goldman machine, they can take a picture and upload it into the assignment. And so there's a lot of different options there to provide students with choice in what they're doing to demonstrate mastery. It takes all sorts of files. And additionally, one add-on that I do recommend is the Poodle add-on. So if you wanna collect audio and video responses, they can do that directly in Moodle using this add-on. I also learned this week that you can do it right through the mobile app as well from Moodle, so that's very cool. That's especially great for your students who might struggle with writing. And so maybe it's just a short answer assignment. But rather than having them type out because that's a barrier to their giving you their response, they can click Poodle and they can do a video of themselves giving their answer to you. So again, it's not just about purpose but also differentiating and providing accommodations for those students who maybe struggle with actually putting content online. One of the probably the most typical thing that's connected with personalizing learning online is learning paths. Whenever vendors come to me, this is probably the first thing they try and sell me on. Is we can personalize the path that your student goes on. And while these are really cool, I would caution that just because it can be automated, doesn't mean it should. So you could use this in pieces to help automate your work. But remember that this isn't gonna take over teachers as long as you keep embedding yourself back in there. So just because it can be automated doesn't mean it should. So learning paths can be created by determining or automating access to specific activities. You can automate this based on time. So maybe the activity doesn't open till midnight on a certain date. You can automate this based on previous performance. So they can't access the next activity until a quiz is completed at 80%. So there's a lot, and you can combine more than one. So you can say they have to pass the quiz and it doesn't open till Friday because really I don't want them working on it quite yet. So you can combine any of those factors together. Another great thing is the passing grade. So you can determine for each activity what constitutes passing. So again, this gets back to the rather than you having to determine A minus B plus. You can say as long as they get anything, 80% and higher they pass. And that opens the next unit. Or maybe it opens a badge that they didn't know existed. And suddenly they have that exploration and discovery because they know something might pop up if they do well within the quiz. You can also have students self-check. So maybe you're trusting your students on some activities to say, when you feel you've completed this, you can check it off. And then the system will open up the next module as well. And if you have students do that and you do a lot of this completion, there's a checklist add-on that works really well for students. It provides them an actual visual checklist of the units that need to be completed. And it shows little green checks when they've done them. So it helps give that visual, especially for your younger students. So the other piece of that is the restricting access. So if you've ever done this in a module, there's what makes this activity complete? And then the second piece of it is when is this activity available? So the restrict access is based on completion of other activities or other times, when is this one available? Again, that could be a date time, it could be based on grade. But it could also be based on which group they're in. And so you can put students into groups not only by class hour, but you could put them into groups based on accommodations that they need. You could put them into groups based on reading level. And so maybe your advanced kids see a different page than your lower kids. But they don't see that they're getting a different page, because you've named them all the same. All they see is they're getting the reading. They don't know that they're getting an accommodated version. So those groups are really powerful, and you can put them in different, more than one group. So you can have them in an accommodated group. You can have them in a class hour group. You can have them in an interest group. So really use those to provide different access to different activities. And you can have one student in a group if necessary. So lastly, but certainly not least, to help facilitate this. Again, it's not a requirement to personalizing learning. But it goes hand-in-hand, and it'll make your life a lot easier. Is the outcome-based grading. And Moodle has a few things that can help you facilitate this and make your life easier. One of them is that you can customize the letter grades. So for example, in the elementary school, we don't use ABCDEF. They use something like proficient, met standards, not yet proficient, something like that. It's like EMP something. So rather than, so the teacher was really concerned the first time she set up a quiz, and it showed kids whether they got an ABCD. And the kids didn't know what that meant. And so we were able to go in and change the course, the whole letter scale for the course to what matched the school's custom letter grades. But you can do it for yourself as a teacher. Whether or not you change the letters, you can also change the percentages. So if your school has different percentages than what Moodle has, you can say an A minus is actually 90% to whatever, rather than 89 to 93. Another thing that my teachers really like when doing standard-based or outcome-based grading are the scales. And so rather than having to even mess with points and grades, for each activity, I have a teacher who just does standards. She has met the standard, has not yet met the standard, or exceeded the standard. So for her grading, it's much easier. If she can look at it, yep, they met it. Yep, they met it. Nope, they didn't. And so for her, it's a lot easier than trying to differentiate whether they're getting seven points versus eight points versus nine points. And those scales do have points associated with them. You can't customize the points, unfortunately. But if you have, for example, three items in a scale, it's gonna be worth one, two, or three points. So it can calculate into the grade if you need to in the end. And of course, there's been some talk about this this week, but badges are a great way to recognize outcome-based grading. Because again, it pulls it away from the grade that they're getting, their academic grade. So you can also award badges for behaviors in class. That maybe you don't wanna give participation points because really, should we be grading participation? But you can give them a badge. You can give them a badge for helping their fellow students, or for making a good point in a discussion. So badges are another way to really recognize those outcomes. So before I go into some live examples here, this is the website where the presentation is. I also have some screenshots of some of the courses I'm gonna show you. So I'll leave that up for a second here. And it's also on the Moodle page as well. I think this is the first time I've used Internet Explorer in like ten years. Okay. I have to throw in that hate every time I can. Let's just see if I can remember my password. So this first example I'll show you here. This is one of my most recent examples. So this one, the ones I have to show you are professional development because for data privacy I can't show you the ones we use with students. But this is an example of essentially a flipped course we did for professional development. We required teachers to go into this course before our professional development day, and they were required to do two units. A copyright unit and accessibility unit, and then there was also an optional Google apps in Moodle. We did this because we found when we did professional development, we often got distracted by some of the same repetitive questions. A lot of them were about copyright. And then teachers didn't know to ask questions about accessibility, but we knew it was an issue that we needed to address before we got into the digital personalized learning. So for this course you can see in teacher mode I see a lot of content. So students or the teachers as students would not see all of this. So because a lot of our teachers were new to Moodle and may not have known to look to the checkboxes over there, I added a hidden label that when they completed the quizzes for each unit, this bright colorful label that says unit complete would show up. So it's a nice big signifier for them that you've completed this and you're able to move on. We used lessons to condense the content. And so each unit was actually a lesson. So rather than having the scroll of death with ten pages for unit, we had one or two lessons per unit. So each unit again, as I mentioned just a previous and the next button. We had some text content. We had some videos. We had some thing links. So this is an example of a question check. So again, I know teachers are busy people and I knew they would have been tempted to just go next, next, next. In order to get to the quiz and we wanted to stop to make sure that they were actually going through the content. So we just had one or two questions for lesson to make sure that they would go through it. So it'll tell me I'm wrong, it'll tell me why, and then I'll move on. So again, you can kind of see an example of what a lesson looks like. And if you haven't used any of the built in bootstrap or added things like font awesome for those check marks and things like that, I highly recommend looking into those design elements. So when you use conditional activities, you can decide whether or not students see this piece that indicates that an activity is hidden and what they need to do to access it. So for unexpected things like this label or maybe an unexpected badge, I would hide it all together, give no indication that something's hiding there. I do this when I automatically grant certificates in an online course. But then there are things like, for example, the unit quiz where I would actually show to them this piece that says, yes, there's a quiz in the unit, but it's not available until you've completed this activity. I find those are useful for students because it tells them that this lesson is important because then it opens up the quiz. And so there's that indication of what they need to do in order to access the final quiz. And then you can see for our optional units, it's grayed out here because it's hidden, but I had a button, let me go to a student view here, that linked to a pretest. So again, it was the same, I didn't have to remake questions for a pre-quiz and the assumment of assessment, I used that random question feature so that, I don't want you to be talking at the same time. So we gave for the optional units, they had the option of taking a pretest to test out. But I put it into a label so that the label visibility was dependent on their completion. So if they took the quiz and they didn't pass it, it disappeared. They didn't have the option to test out anymore. They tried it, sorry, you've got to go through the lessons. But if they did take it and pass it, it still disappeared, but then that unit complete appeared. So they knew right away you passed it, you got the unit complete. So it gets kind of messy on the teacher end because you have all these things filling up your screen. But for the students, it's really nice to be able to hide some things until they need it and then hide it when they're done with it and just get it out of the way. So we used lessons again, and you don't see the pretests because they're hidden in a orphaned activity unit. So that's an example of personalized learning. Again, you don't have to do everything that I mentioned in order to personalize learning, nor does everything have to be automated with technology. And there's another example as well on my blog, but I think I'll leave time for questions right now. Hello, I have a question. There was some reports that personalization creates a burden on teachers because they have to multiply the amount of preparation that they have to do. What do you say to that? Well, I will definitely say it's not less work, but I would say it's front-loaded work. The teachers who I've worked with on personalizing, in fact, one of them said, during a Moodle training, which I actually love her for, she goes, I hated Moodle the first year I used it, and she was personalizing from the beginning. Just because she said it took her so much time, but then during the school year she found, because she wasn't correcting quizzes and she wasn't having to open things and hide things, is that it gave her a lot more time to work individually with students. So she found, and often the teachers who personalize find that it's a lot during the summer or before a unit starts, but then it frees up the time during the actual learning. So it's not less work, for sure. And it gets easier, so each year you personalize, there's less you have to do the next year. Yes. Wanted to mention about the quizzes with the improvements in the recent Moodle versions, they're much more usable for the students to gain the understanding and not just strictly as a summative test. So we've got the instant feedback, which is really nice. You've got your adaptive mode and your interactive mode, and where you give hints or don't give hints. So if people are not familiar with using the quizzes, they're much greatly improved on helping the students to learn the knowledge, as opposed to just strictly testing the knowledge. And I like that very much on that. Yes, certainly. The adaptive mode helps a lot, because you can reuse the same quiz as a formative and then take off that adaptive mode for the summative. Well, I just learned so much, and thank you. I wanted to add to the idea of randomizing questions that one of the things one of our professors came up with was instead of just creating, say, 30 questions and choosing 10 of them, creating 10 questions at a lower level of blooms, 10 at mid-level, 10 at a high-level, and then randomly selecting, say, five and three and two or something like that, so that you didn't accidentally wind up with one quiz that covered really, really hard questions in terms of blooms. And then, again, you still have a different quiz every single time, but you get a better sense of the difficulty that you can produce. Yes, that's a great suggestion. Another thing I forgot that just remind me of is that you can do user overrides on a quiz, which means if you have students who need accommodations like longer time, things like that, you can override it for just that quiz, so just kind of reminded me of that, differentiating a little bit. All right, well, thank you. Reach out on Twitter if necessary. Thank you. Thank you.