10 Great Ways to use Moodle in the Classroom
I am spending some time this weekend improving our Moodle VLE courses for AS and A2 Economics - the response from schools and colleges to come on board and develop a collaborative course has been tremendous and there will be over thirty different schools, a hundred or more teachers and well over a thousand students having access when school starts in a few days.
Here is a super post from Miguel Guhlin, who recently re-posted a collection of 10 “Moodle instructional use scenarios” which is basically 10 ways that you might successfully use Moodle in the classroom.
Teacher Survey: Using Moodle in Economics
I am doing a short presentation next month in Belfast on developing Moodle as an open-source e-learning resource and I’d like to do an informal survey of Moodle users among the economics teaching community. I will be very happy to circulate a discussion paper and summary of the responses and ideas to colleagues who are keen to develop a new or existing VLE during the summer months. If this is of interest and you are happy to spare a few minutes of your time at this busy stage of the school year to complete this questionnaire, I would be hugely grateful.
Embedding BBC Video Clips into Moodle
It is straightforward to embed BBC and You Tube video clips into your Moodle VLE. Here is a brief illustrated guide to the process.
read more...»Contestable Markets – The Market for Smart-Phones
In AS microeconomics the examiner may set you a question about the effects of a new supplier entering a market. There are also frequent questions on the costs and benefits of competitive markets compared to industries dominated by a monopolist or a handful of new firms. In A2 economics, contestable markets form an important part of your study of the theory of market structures, economic welfare and efficiency.
Tim Weber, Business editor of the BBC News website has written a superb article on the competitive pressures building inside the mobile phone market – “as the market for high-end mobiles gets ever more crowded, which should you pick?” – this is a classic tale of a market space become evermore congested as the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion and Symbian (developers of the software that run most of Nokia’s smart-phones) compete with each other for a share of the lucrative corporate and personal sector market.
It is a market where performance, functionality, speed and reliability of access, look and feel of the hardware and the length of battery life are all important non-price factors influencing consumer preferences. Price is significant – and the article makes reference to the need to attract heat-seekers or ‘early adopters’ – consumers who are willing to pay a premium price for being among the first to be seen using a new piece of kit.
Despite the obvious barriers to entry for new participants, the smart-phone market is increasingly contestable even though it is dominated by a handful of major players. The increasing use of open-source software has helped to make the battle for market dominance a more intense affair.
Far from being geeky, this is an article that gives you a super case study in how the existing operators are competing with each other. How will the market for smart-phones be affected by the recession?
The article is available here:
Regular articles on the economics of contestable markets appear on my blog here:
Standing on the shoulders of giants
It strikes me that we have probably already reached a critical mass for a wide and ever-growing range of open source software products. The BBC’s iPlayer is now cross-platform. Google is based almost entirely on open source software. And Specsavers, one of Britain’s largest private companies with a network of over 1,000 stores (growing at two a week) has built its entire infrastructure on open source. What is true for Specsavers also holds for Pepsi Co and Pixar. Mozilla Firefox, Linux, Moodle and Apache web servers have come of age and are sympotmatic of an age of collaborration and rapid innovation within the open source community.
Tim Harford on carbon negativity
Too good a post not to mention. We should never underestimate the power of innovative thinking and ideas when approaching some of the most intractable issues of our age. For me, what matters is (pardon the pun) creating the right climate for innovation to flourish - incentives matter enormously when it comes to developing ideas to reduce CO2 emissions. Can open source be a catalyst for effective and viable solutions?
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