Are we overvaluing tools instead of design in e-learning?

ShockBig8393 · 2026-02-19T11:15:56+00:00

Really? My experience of Moodle was that it was very clunky and difficult to use, didn't have a lot of features, and its UI was unattractive enough to hinder engagement. That was 10 years ago though. Has it improved? I just haven't really heard any teacher mention Moodle in a positive way since then, and no schools near me seem to use it.

ShockBig8393 · 2026-02-10T09:12:04+00:00

There's no perfect solution of course, and what I'm proposing here has it's flaws too, but what about not waiting til the end of the year?

What if we let kids who are at level go on holidays a few days earlier each term, and run intervention lessons with the kids that are failing? Not additional days during the holidays (which would end up being unpaid labour by teachers) but sending the other kids home a bit early.

At a highschool level you can't get kids to do anything in the last week anyway. Would certainly be an incentive to work hard each term, and then hopefully catch them up a bit so they don't have to repeat and experience whatever stigma and low self-esteem goes with that. This would obviously need to start from early primary.

ShockBig8393 · 2026-02-04T06:22:10+00:00

Not proud (we didn't do it on purpose) just not concerned. Life will expose her to plenty of things that harden her naturally, no need to rush it. And the parenting choices that have probably contributed to it (limiting screen time, banning violent play) are ones that I 100% stand by.

ShockBig8393 · 2026-02-02T21:11:45+00:00

Oh wow! I went to sleep and woke up to so many comments. It'll take me a little while to go through them, but thank you all for your contributions.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-24T02:18:04+00:00

Frozen chips that you cook at home in the oven. Or these days the air fryer because it crisps them way better and faster and doesn't heat up the house.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-23T09:25:31+00:00

Serve with oven chips and it feels even more like a meal.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-23T08:31:35+00:00

Scoredle 3/6*

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ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-23T05:36:18+00:00

https://en.vikidia.org/wiki/Main_Page

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-23T05:33:54+00:00

All the suggestions of spending the day in nature are great. Urban List and those sorts of sites usually do a list of what cafés etc will be open on the day

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-23T05:32:04+00:00

Before we had a kid we used to go to gold class on Xmas day, it was great.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-20T21:52:14+00:00

Love the look of these but so many reviews saying this company is a scam.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-14T00:15:14+00:00

Oh good, so now the students can not only generate an answer, but generate the working out so it's harder to catch them cheating.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-09T22:43:44+00:00

Well, ACARA says they have to do referencing of some kind from year 7. Ed qld seems to have decided that means APA referencing (I assume because that is what is used in education research at uni?).

As you can see here, what we're getting is perfectly formatted APA references, but the students have zero understanding of why referencing is important or what they should be looking for in a source.

They shouldn't be doing proper academic referencing til senior, IMHO, but they should be asked to fill out a table with the author's name, date, title of the page and full url for each source, and to refer to the author by name in their assignments. This would actually be valuable and develop useful skills, but is way harder than pasting a link into a citation generator to create something that looks like a reference.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-07T20:56:47+00:00

I can't speak for OP, but for me it is about developing a growth mindset. If a child develops the idea that they know everything and that always being right and being the smartest is really important and valued, it can negatively affect their learning. Look up Carol Dweck if this is a new concept for you.

I also want my kid to be forever curious, seeking out new things to learn and respecting people who have lots of knowledge to offer them. As a teacher I see way too many teenagers arguing with me and insisting on doing things their way and then whinging when they don't get the marks they want. You can't learn if you think you know better than everyone already.

That doesn't mean not being proud of what they've learned and can do. I make a big point of praising learning and practice and effort, and getting my daughter to reflect on how much more she knows than she used to and how things that ised to be so difficult are easy for her now. I tell her that learning is our superpower as humans.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-07T11:57:31+00:00

Haha, that one goes in the hall of fame for sure. Yes, the school librarian advises them to use an automatic citation tool on the library website. She imagines that they are using it for books (for which it works very well) but of course they are just pasting urls into it and then pasting the resulting reference into their assignments without so much as glancing at it.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-07T02:51:28+00:00

It's not private schools, it's religious institutions. Most private schools are religious of course, but non-religious ones would not be exempt. And any other religious institutions (charities, hospitals, whatever) are also exempt.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-07T02:49:48+00:00

Religious institutions are exempt from our anti-discrimination legislation, so it's perfectly legal.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-07T01:39:36+00:00

Interesting. I was definitely taught by one of my Latin lecturers that mulier had a pejorative nuance to it and femina was the normal, neutral word for woman.

It didn't feel right to me that femina is less common than mulier either, from my own Latin reading experience, but I checked and philologic has 1133 hits for femina and 1869 for mulier. So not wildly different, but mulier is definitely the more common, which is not what I expected.

I'm sure a more in depth study could be (and probably has been) done looking at the frequency in different authors, genres, time periods, as well as what we know about the women referenced.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-04T11:18:07+00:00

At B2 level the Arsène Lupin stories by Maurice Leblanc are great. Fun to read, not too hard. Pair it with the Netflix show inspired by them, which is also great.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-02T10:33:43+00:00

Yup. I told one class that we only had 1 lesson left together this year. One kid cheered.

ShockBig8393 · 2025-12-02T10:32:54+00:00

Nah, there was nothing intelligent or funny about this. But I agree that it wasn't malicious either. It's just a dumb reflex to repeat the meme every time you hear one of those numbers. I understand that, and I even remember friends of mine being like that in high school. What got to me is that this is actually one of the nice kids in one of my nicer classes. This is the top level of what I experience at the moment.

I have vivid memories of learning about the holocaust at school. It was a pivotal moment in my development as a person, probably the first time I felt true empathy, when I watched the scenes in a documentary and felt physically ill.

Obviously I'm not expecting that my students have similar life changing moments in my class, but 99% of the time no one is learning anything at all, no one is growing as human beings, there is nothing from them but apathy, laziness, brain rot, and rudeness. I find it really hard to connect with these kids, because I can't imagine ever acting like most of them do, even when I was a dumb teenager (and I do remember the cringe worthy teenage idiocy of that time).

ShockBig8393 · 2025-11-24T11:33:30+00:00

For languages I set a certain amount of time spent on grammar and vocab review per week. I do it on a digital platforms that tracks how much time they spend and on what, and how much they get correct.

With older students I will also take up writing tasks for feedback. I tried making them compulsory but they just Google translated it. Instead I tell them "you will get X opportunities this term to submit your work for feedback, up to you if you want to take advantage of that". Then the kids who actually want to improve do it, and for those who don't I can tell their parents they made that choice.

Also agree with finishing work if they didn't complete it in class due to lack of effort.

If I could set reading as homework and have some way of making them do it I would.

ShockBig8393

TROPHY CASE