Check out my review of Moodle 1.9 Theme Design on Moodle News.

• Follow @moodlenews on Twitter
• Follow @packtpub on Twitter

I’m very excited to read and review two books from Packt Publishing.

Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner’s Guide

• Create your own Moodle theme from the graphic design stage right through to the finished complete Moodle theme
• Offers design examples and ways to create appropriate themes for different student age groups and styles
• Effective planning for creating and modifying new themes, customizing existing themes, and enhancing them further
• Clear focus on beginners with ample screenshots and clear explanations to facilitate learning

Moodle 1.9 Extension Development

• Develop your own blocks, activities, filters, and organize your content with secure code
• Thoroughly covers key libraries of Moodle and best practices to use them
• Explore the Moodle architectural concepts, how it is structured, and how it works
• Detailed examples and screenshots for easy learning

These two books are probably the most exciting to me to begin reading out of all the Packt Publishing books I’ve read. I’m currently into the 3rd chapter of the Theme Design book, which I will be reviewing on MoodleNews.com. It should be posted on Moodle News within a few weeks and the Extension book I will be reviewing on this blog.

Back in January Helen Foster wrote a blog post telling about all of the “official” Moodle Twitter accounts. I just wanted to remind users of them!

• @moodle – The official Moodle.org Twitter account
• @moodleplugins – Tweets about newly added modules and plugins to the database
• @moodlethemes – Tweets about newly added themes to the database and other Moodle theme news
• @moodledev – Tweets about the CVS
• @moodlesecurity – Security announcements
• @moodlejobs – Job offerings and wanted job that are Moodle-related

If you don’t already use Moodle, I highly recommend joining and following the above Twitter accounts and check out this awesome WeFollow – Moodle site, where it lists the top Moodlers on Twitter. That link is the place to start when trying to find good Moodlers on Twitter.

Just a quick note to stay updated with Moodle 2.0 news at Moodle Monthly. Moodle 2.0 Beta recently came out and is available at Moodle.org for download.

Recent posts

• What’s up with FTP in Moodle2.0? by @moodledan #moodle2PR
• 4 part video preview of #Moodle2 by @Moodler
• @ghenrick showcases the #moodle2 navigation
• @Moodleman outlines #Moodle2 conditional activities

Other ways to keep informed of the development of Moodle 2.0

• Moodle Monthly web site
• Moodle Monthly Twitter – @moodlenews
• Martin Dougiamas – @moodler
• #Moodle2 Twitter hash tag

As I mentioned before I wrote a series of blog posts on Moodle Monthly recently and now it’s been put together into a book! Joseph Thibault (creator of Moodle Monthly) was kind enough to put together the posts and publish “Once Upon a Moodle Install” on LuLu.com. Big thanks to him and Moodle Monthly!

This is the full account of a Moodle implementation in a large school district in the USA. The guide writes about the planning, development, roll-out, training and important tips and tricks of managing a successful learning management system integration.

I wanted to take a little time out to talk about this pretty cool company that I’m consulting and working with– IT4Educators. IT4Educators is a site that provides educators with affordable online technology integration courses for college credit. In courses, learning is applied by creating classroom content:

Start with your own curriculum, and add Atomic Learning video clips on the most  innovative technology tools available—from Twitter to blogs, Moodle® to SMART™ Notebook.

And since they use Moodle it’s..

Online and self-paced.
The interactive courses are created and delivered in Moodle by highly-trained practicing educators in the field to help you stay ahead of each new generation of digital learners.

And that’s also where I come in. I work with and maintain their Moodle install along with starting up their IT4Educators Blog which will consist of quality posts about tech integration. I’ll also be writing “Moodle Moments” for the blog every so often which I will refer to in future Moodlerific blog posts.

I’m very excited to work with IT4Educators and I think it’s a great way for educators to get credits needed. I’m also excited about helping with their online web presence and getting their blog up and off the ground. The instructors at IT4Educators are some great tech leaders and will be providing useful resources and posts on the blog.

A recent piece of exciting news is that IT4Educators has joined forces with Atomic Learning

IT4Educators collaborates with Atomic Learning to offer teachers technology integration courses for college credit
The online, anytime, anywhere format you enjoy with Atomic Learning is now available in courses for college credit in cooperation with IT4Educators. Founded by an experienced technology educator, IT4Educators offers affordable 1-, 2-, and 3-credit courses that are all aligned with ISTE’s National Technology Standards.

Check out IT4Educators course listing – some courses include Google™ Integration, Using Technology to Implement Theme-Based Activities, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom, Twitter in Education, SMART Notebook Software in the Classroom and many more!

If you’re not interested in taking any classes check out the IT4Educators Blog for tech integration resources, ideas, tools and thoughts. Like I said, I will also be providing the blog with some “Moodle Moments” (name pending ha) posts and cross referencing that blog with Moodlerific.

Related

• IT4Educators Official Site
• IT4Educators Blog
• Follow @it4educators on Twitter!
• Atomic Learning

I’ve recently taken an interest in a few Moodle.org Moodle courses. The first is Teaching and Learning with Moodle which is facilitated by Tomaz Lasic.

An organised, curated point for educators, new and experienced Moodle users alike to find out about Moodle, find quality links to sources of further information, collaborate on projects and share their best practices in teaching of children and adults in a range of settings.

This is a new course but long overdue! I’m very excited to learn and share here. One cool thing that Tomaz created in the course was a clever little resource called “Moodle Recipes for Educators – a community cookbook” where people can add examples of how they’re using Moodle in education. I haven’t added anything yet but plan to : )

The other course I’m going to mention is Moodle for Business Uses facilitated by Ralf Hilgenstock and Stuart Mealor. I just found this course today through a Linkedin Moodle group. I haven’t fully explored this course but I hope to get something out of it as I work with a business that uses Moodle for their courses.

This course is for discussing and sharing ideas about using Moodle for

* paid courses – where entrepreneurial businesses provide courses to customers in return for payment
* corporate education – where companies are implementing a site for internal courses

Take a look at all of the courses on Moodle.org.

The last few weeks I’ve been posting a series of blog posts called “How we implemented Moodle” on Moodle Monthly. I broke down the series into topics:

• Preview
• Part 1 – Idea to Reality
• Part 2 – Installation and Modules
• Part 3 – Customization
• Part 4 – Rollout
• Part 5 – Training
• Wrap Up (teacher and admin tips)

It basically goes over our 2 year implementation of Moodle in the Osseo School District. If you’re already passed the implementation part there are still several recommendations of modules and plugins along with some of my favorite Moodle tips in the Wrap Up post.

Check it out and if you’re not interested in the Implementation Series check out Moodle Monthly – an awesome resource for Moodle stuff.

I recently read the book, Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques by William Rice and Susan Smith Nash which was published by Packt Publishing. This book discussed creative ways to build powerful and effective online courses.

When I began reading this book I was expecting to learn a bunch of “real-life” classroom applicable examples of using specific Moodle features. While it did list many of those examples, it really focused on learning theory and creating a positive learning experience and community. The book mentioned many educational psychologists and philosophies of teaching and learning. Each time the authors explained a feature or gave an example of classroom use of a Moodle feature they also reminded the reader to make sure the activity was tied with the course outcomes and the learning objectives.

I thought the discussion about learning styles and effective teaching practices was interesting as my education has been in technology and not k-12 education. One thing I liked about the book is that for each feature example the authors gave a variety of ways to accomplish the same thing, giving the reader an option if they prefer one way or the other. Another thing that the authors provided were tips or recommendations on using each feature. For example, effectively running a chat and chat etiquette, taking the fear out of assessments, how to create and maintain exciting and engaging forums, etc. I guess you can call it “best practices” of the Moodle features.

As I mentioned before there were some awesome ideas on using Moodle features – without going into detail here are a few:

• Using the Chat module with a guest speaker
• A self-assessment practice quiz using the Lesson module
• Creating a flash card activity with the Lesson module
• Guided note-taking with the Wiki module
• Using the Glossary module for student submitted quiz questions

One note to mention is if you’re expecting to come away with created activities as you follow this book you should have some basic Moodle experience.  This book does not go into step-by-step, detailed instructions for most of the modules. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to know Moodle already in my opinion. This book did a good job of convincing the user that Moodle can create a learning community that is easily adaptable to different learning styles and offers some great teaching strategies to accomplish this.

Drawbacks

As with all of the other Packt Publishing Moodle books I’ve read I wish the screenshot images were in color. Another thing I noticed is a difference in our district’s Moodle (v 1.9.7) settings page for some modules and the screenshot images in the book (I believe the Choice activity looked a *bit* different). I was also made aware that the Gradebook is out of date. As always, take into consideration the frequent updates.

Wrap Up

In the end, I enjoyed the book and learned the most about having an “effective” course and what that even means. As I mentioned earlier, I am a techy person not a teacher, so I am at a point where I need to understand more about theory and teaching and learning strategies. This book had me nodding a lot and just “made sense” (if that makes sense!). It put things in perspective as each and every activity was tied with the course outcomes and made me aware of some of the things that are needed to create an effective learning community such as student confidence, fear of assessment, feeling comfortable with their peers, etc. And don’t get me wrong I am talking about the “theory” stuff becasue that is what interested in but there are many cool ideas and tips to using the modules. I only listed a few above. Visit Packt Publishing for more details on the contents of Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques.

This is sort of a two part post…

I recently joined the Moodle Monthly team and started off by telling my experience of implementing Moodle into a school district.

Stopping on that note – I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about this great new site, Moodlemonthly.com. By now, most of you already know : ) but Joseph Thibault started up the site and it has multiple daily posts with up to date information, breaking news and resources. Check it out and follow @moodlenews (Moodle Monthly Twitter handle) on Twitter.

Okay, back to my series of blog posts that will be on Moodle Monthly about my experience with implementing Moodle – I’ll be breaking down the process into segments based on topics over the next few weeks. After I’m done I will probably collect the links and write up a post on Moodlerific to reference all of the posts in one place.