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Buenos Aires

newsletter
October 1, 2011

A Note from John S. Lucas


I want to thank you again for your continued support of the educational technology initiative and especially for your patience during our transition to a di erent way of managing the initiative. As I outlined for you in my last communication, IES Abroad is pleased to announce the introduction of ve Regional Educational Technology Specialists who will be joining Kattrina Cannon and Erika Quinn in our e orts to provide you with ongoing technical and educational support. We introduce these team members in this newsletter. Kattrina Cannon will soon o er introductory webinars to introduce you to the signi cant enhancements she has made to MoodleLearn, our training site. Kattrina has been monitoring the use of Moodle and has identi ed a number of features that many of you have not yet discovered. In order to make you aware of these exciting features, Kattrina is designing short, introductory videos to help you understand what Moodle has to o er and how these functions work. She and Erika will also continue to address any technical challenges and concerns that you have as you discover this exciting educational tool. I encourage all Faculty Champions to take full advantage of these excellent training opportunities and to make them widely available to their colleagues at the centers. At the request of Beijing and Barcelona, Kattrina has reviewed several additional components of Moodle, and I have approved adding these additional modules to the IES Abroad Moodle site. We are constantly striving to add more audiovisual tools, survey instruments, and other improvements to Moodle in response to your requests. Our goal is to give our faculty and students the very best technology to enhance the ne work they already do and to make teaching and learning at IES Abroad the richest, most rewarding experience possible. I cannot stress often enough that Moodle is designed to bring faculty and students together and to enhance their educational journey together, never to replace any of the best practices that you already implement and that are serving IES Abroad well. I look forward to the Wo ord College partnership which will provide comprehensive training for our Regional Educational Technology Specialists. By the end of November, each region of IES Abroad will have a trained Regional Educational Technology Specialist close at hand who can provide advice, share innovations, and address challenges that are speci c to the cultures and educational models that de ne IES Abroad around the world. Finally, I want to share a short story about how widely educational technology is used. I just returned from a visit to Costa Rica, where I discovered that two of our partners, the National Institute of Biodiversity (In-Bio) and EARTH University, both currently use Moodle to teach students and for training seminars. Clearly, educational technology is fast becoming a common feature of educational life in many parts of the world. In Costa Rica, the use of Moodle has made it easy and quick for me to review the educational work our colleagues are doing and to evaluate how best to work with our new partners and adapt their courses to the needs of IES Abroad students.
Good Luck and Happy Moodling!

Moodle Tips of the Month...


Uploaded les that contain a symbol other than an underscore in the Guides and tutorials for the Moodle modules and blocks featured in the le name will not open properly and you will not receive an error monthly newsletter can be found on the MoodleLearn website: message. Most special characters are automatically removed during the https://moodlelearn.muat.iesabroad.org upload process, but it is best to use le names without special characters. Use the following generic log-in: User ID - iesstudent Thanks to John Schulze from the Berlin Center for this great tip! Password - Student1

Buenos Aires

newsletter
October 1, 2011

Featured Moodle Module - Lesson Activity


The Lesson Module presents a series of HTML pages to the student where the student can view content and then answer a question based on the content presented. The next page that the student views depends upon the answer the student gives. In the simplest form of a Lesson, a content page (or branch table) presents the student with information and an option to continue to the next page. No grades can be assigned for branch tables. You can choose from two basic Lesson page types for your students: question pages and content pages (known as Branch Tables). The question page presents the student with a question and the student enters an answer. After the student submits their answer, they will see the response youve created and will be taken to another page or looped back. Questions are scored and added to the students cumulative grade. The signi cant di erence between a Lesson and other activity modules in Moodle comes from its adaptive ability. With this tool, each choice the student makes can show a di erent teacher response/comment and send the student to a di ferent page in the Lesson. With mapping and planning, the Lesson Module can customize the presentation of content and questions to each student, with no further action required by the teacher. The Lesson is also a great tool for creating ash cards using the content pages to prepare students for exams or to help them memorize terms/vocabulary.

Meet the IES Moodle Team!

New Modules/Blocks
Feedback Module: The Feedback Module allows you to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback from your students. It allows instructors to write their own questions and enables the instructor to create non-graded questions. The Feedback activity is ideal for course or assignment evaluations. Quickmail Block:

Kattrina Cannon
Moodle Administrator kcannon@iesabroad.org

Erika Quinn
Moodle Specialist equinn@iesabroad.org

The Quickmail Block has a link to compose an email to students in the course. The instructor can select all students or choose from a list of students to email. This enhances the existing communications systems of messaging (one user) and subscribed forums (all subscribers) by allowing teachers to communicate with a speci c subset of students.

Meet Our Regional Education Technology Specialists


October 1, 2011

Stephen McMahon - IES Abroad Dublin


A native of Drogheda in County Louth, Mr. McMahon has taught at university level in Ireland since 2002 and with study abroad students since 2005. He read for a Master of Arts in English (Creative Writing) at Queens University, Belfast and for a Bachelor of Arts in English and Human Development at Dublin City University (St. Patricks College), where he taught for eight years. A specialist in small group facilitation, he has taught on several multidisciplinary study abroad programs with students from the U.S. and France, focusing on literature and creative arts in Ireland, with an emphasis on writing and photography. He has taught at IES Abroad Dublin since 2005, facilitating general studies and customised programmes as Academic Coordinator from January to August 2011, and is currently the Moodle Faculty Champion. In conjunction with his teaching commitments at St. Patricks College, Mr. McMahon was a member of the IT administration team at the Educational Research Centre (ERC) where, as part of the 2005 cycle of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), he was Project Manager of the eld trial of the Computer-Based Assessment of Science (CBAS)

Laura Vazquez - IES Abroad Barcelona


Ms. Vazquez was born inMadrid.She has been teaching Spanishand Spanish Cinema to American students for overten years.She studied Spanish literature in Madrid and lived in Italyfor a year to study literature and Italian as an Erasmus student. In 2001, she spent seven months in the U.S. teaching Spanish and Spanish Cinema atWashington andLee University in Virginia. She is currently writingher dissertationon intercultural studies and cinema.She loves multiculturalism, newtechnologies, andlearning about othercultures. Ms. Vazquez has been working on her professional digital identity for several years and since 2007 she has writtentwo blogs, oneabout cinema, de cine, and one about Spanish as aforeign language, MundoEle.In 2010, she worked as acommunity managerfora school in Madrid(Estudio Internacional Sampere). She also uses technology in her classes on a daily basis, includingGoogle Docs, Dropbox, Box.net,Isuu, and Slideshare (to share PowerPoints and documents with students and colleagues); YouTube and Vimeo (to show videos and activities, and also to register students oral activities); Overstream (to subtitle videos in Spanish); and Flickr and Picassa (to house interesting photos relevant to her classes). She uses Moodle for her courses, including PowerPoint presentations, exercises, activities, forums, quizzes, compositions, and interactive vocabulary banks.

This newsletter was sent to provide the latest information for IES Abroad Moodle. IES Abroad Chicago 33 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60602-2602 Phone: 1.800.995.2300

Meet Our Regional Education Technology Specialists


October 1, 2011

Jeremiah Jenne - IES Abroad Beijing


Mr. Jenne is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of California, Davis. He specializes in 19th-century Qing history and is currently researching anti-foreignism and colonialism in the coastal (treaty port) cities of the Qing Empire. Other research interests include the Qing as an imperial(ist) power, the construction of identity during the Qing Dynasty, nationalism in modern China, and gender and the family in Late Imperial China. He has contributed articles to two books, China in 2008: A Year of Great Signi cance and The Insiders Guide to Beijing, 2009 Edition. Mr. Jenne is the Associate Director for China Studies at theIES Abroad Beijing Center where he teaches courses on Chinese History, Philosophy, and Contemporary China. He also runs the Chinese history website Jottings from the Granite Studio and is a frequent guest on the podcast Sinica, a weekly roundup of current a airs in China.

Martn Tessi Vollenweider - IES Abroad Buenos Aires


Mr. Tessi Vollenweider was born in Buenos Aires, but completed his high school education in Lima, Per, and Santiago de Chile. He attended college at the Jesuit University and majored in Advertising with a minor degree in Journalism. He then followed postgraduate studies in Business Administration and Sociology of Culture, as well as a specialization in E-Learning. He worked in Marketing and Market Research in multinational corporations and in marketing research agencies, in addition to lecturing in Marketing and Market Research since 1998. He began working at IES Abroad Buenos Aires in 2009. During 2003, Mr. Tessi Vollenweider was in charge of a distance education course in Public Advertising for an NGO, Publicitarios Sin Fronteras. He has been in charge of Moodle implementation at IES Abroad Buenos Aires since December 2010.

Wolfgang Bialas - IES Abroad Berlin


Dr. Bialas works on a research project on Nazi ideology and ethics. He held a position as an Associate Professor of Political Philosophy and Cultural Studies in the United Arab Emirates from 2004-2007, and he also taught courses in modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of California, Irvine (2000 - 2003). In addition, he has held teaching positions at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Turkey. He has published numerous books and articles in various areas of the humanities, most recently Political Humanism and Nazism, Vandenhoeck Rupprecht 2010 (in German) and Nazi Germany and the Humanities (co-edited with Anson Rabinbach), Oxford 2007. Dr. Bialas doctorate was on Hegels Philosophy of Religion (1982), and his Habilitation (German post-doctorate) on the Philosophy of History in the Frankfurt School (1989). His research interests are intellectual history of Nazism, political philosophy, and comparative cultural studies. Dr. Bialas is a member of the international and interdisciplinary research group Political Culture of the Weimar Republic and co-editor (with Gerard Raulet) of the "Series on Political Culture in the Weimar Republic. In his various teaching positions abroad he worked with Blackboard. Most recently he took the Master-E beginning Moodle course. He also uses Moodle for the IES Abroad courses he teaches on German culture, history, and politics.

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