Three powerful tools for getting information to students are Moodle, Google Classroom, and Hapara Teacher Dashboard. You should use one of these as your starting place for students. Start with Google Classroom if you have never used these much.
Here is a breakdown of the key features of each of the three core tools
Moodle – The most powerful and commonly used online learning tool in the world
- Getting Started Site
- Does your page need a refresh or new layout to make it more clear?
- Many teacher prefer the Collapsed Topics or Grid format
- Use the announcement forum to send all students an email
- Moodle has a tool for everything: discussion forum, quiz with auto grading and really easy essay question grading, TurnItIn assignments for collecting and grading digital work.
- Adding due dates to activities in Moodle adds to the class calendar. All student course calendars are joined together on the student dashboard page so they can see work across all classes very easily.
Classroom – The easiest way to grade google docs online
- Getting Started Site
- Classes can be created right from your aeries dashboard page next to the gradebook summary. Just click Add/Edit Website.
- Invite coaches/support teachers to be teachers on your page so we can see and support
- Adding due dates to activities in Moodle adds to the class Google calendar.
Hapara Teacher Dashboard – Send google docs to student folders
- Getting Started Site
- Use this tool to push out documents (great if you have a central google doc calendar or instructions slide show.
- This tool shows your whole class and each student’s last time editing the files in your class folder. This can help you know who is not engaging in class work and who has new work for feedback.
Aeries – Gradebook used by all 6-12 grade teachers
- Add a website to your Aeries gradebook that points to the moodle page, website, document, folder, presentation that has the up to date class calendar/homework.
- Pre-posting assignments with future due dates can really help students plan and manage their work.
- Make sure your assignment names match the name in the instructions and the name of the files students are using