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.

I wanted to post this quick link I just found from @tobyholman showing Moodle’s growth graphically on a map. Check it out! It looks like it’s from Moodle.org. Moodle rocks!

Planet Moodle

• Meeting moodlefairy 10-23-09 (Helen Foster)
• Moodle 1.9.7 supports IMS CC import 10-20-09 (Helen Foster)

Other

• Testing Moodle for Accessibility 10-21-09 (Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org)

….and More

Recently I’ve been helping out with getting our district’s Moodle-Google SSO fully working. It had been working but we ran into a few issues. I think we have solved our problem…we’ll see tomorrow! I plan to write a complete blog post about our situation and how we were able to get it working which will hopefully help others out there in the same situation. We’re using Ubuntu 8.0.4, Moodle 1.9.1+ and the LDAP Authentication.

Although it’s a few weeks into school I thought I would give a few good links for the beginning of a new school year.

Here are a few “introductory” type videos and presentations

• Show your colleagues what Moodle is all about (presentation) (GlobalClassroom)
• Moodle Student Induction Video 2009/2010 (via @sukhwantlota)
• How can Moodle change a school (Part 1) (thanks @edtechsandyk)
• Moodle Presentation [Version 2.0, HD] (thanks @edtechsandyk)

Moodle blogs

• GlobalClassroom – This blog has many great Moodle related posts. It’s updated frequently and it’s a great Moodle (as well as educational) resource for new learning, discovering new tools and getting some great links.
• Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org – Another awesome blog with educational and Moodle posts. This blog is also frequently updated and I find myself visiting it quite often.
• Moodleblog.org – A blog all about Moodle. Posts consist of tips and tricks, ideas, how tos and more. Another blog to bookmark!
• Check out all of the other equally as great Moodle blogs on my Resources page

Moodle.org Help

• Moodle Docs (official documentation – I use this all the time)
• Using Moodle – This is an actual course on moodle.org. It consists of all forums. If you have a question, this is the place to go! This is the best source for Moodle help.

Other Moodle Resources

• WeFollow Moodle – Looking for fellow Moodlers using Twitter? Here is a dynamic list of Moodle Twitter users. Awesome!
• Moodle Administration book – Great book for Moodle admins. I highly recommend this book for future admins or even current ones. I was a Moodle admin for more than 1 year and I still learned a bunch.
• Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide – Another great book targeted towards teachers. This is an excellent book to help you convert your current course into an online Moodle course. By the end of this book you will have an engaging Moodle course. What I like about this book is that it gives real life examples and less step-by-step directions.
• MoodleTutorials.org – A YouTube-like site with all Moodle video tutorials.

This is another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video.

“Did You Know 4.0″

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

For credits and more information visit the xplanevisualthinking YouTube Channel.

There are so many more great Moodle sites, these are just a few. Check out my Resources page for a more complete list. I plan on updating and organizing that resources page soon, so if you have any I’ve missed please let me know!

It took awhile for me to finish reading “Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide” by Ian Wild but definitely not because I did not enjoy it, I have simply been very busy! I recently read and reviewed “Moodle Administration”, which is also from Packt Publishing, and like that book I was impressed with this one as well. I was actually a little more impressed with the Course Conversion book!

One reason why I enjoyed reading this book so much is because it did a good job of covering a lot of topics without overloading your brain. It guided the reader from start to finish – creating a new course to backing that course up and everything in the middle. Of course the book could not explain every single feature in depth but I thought it did a great job of covering the main, important topics.

Another reason why I enjoyed this book is because it put the reader in the teacher role where I am used to being in the administrator role. The author told you his own experiences and it was good to know that he’s been in that teaching position so he knows what it’s like. The book even gives the reader web sites and resources to use within Moodle like Voki, Odeo and Slide.com.

A big reason why I think this book would be so useful for Moodle users is that it shows the reader real classroom applications. It goes through many common tasks that teachers will more than likely run into like working with PowerPoints, taking images from a Word document, how to zip files so you can upload multiple files at once to Moodle, using video in Moodle and more. Instead of focusing only on the “how tos” and explaining the actual Moodle features it showed how to use the features by using real examples such as embedding a YouTube video with “compose a web page” or transforming a project into Moodle assignments.

It would get very boring and probably overwhelm a reader if it were to give you step by step directions on “how to” use a Moodle resource or activity, so by giving the reader an example on when and how a feature could be used is much more engaging and memorable. It may also spark some ideas for the reader or they could even use that very example in their own Moodle course.

To sum it up, I would highly recommend this book for any teacher that is planning to start using Moodle with their class. This book gives you the knowledge and power to create an engaging Moodle course from start to finish by taking you along his own journey of converting his course into Moodle. If a reader were to read this book and follow along by creating their own course I would be confident that it would be a success. Being a Moodle admin/trainer/support I can greatly appreciate this book for showing me the “teacher side” of a Moodle course. What I’m also taking from this book is the knowledge of other resources to use in a Moodle course, some great ideas and information about Moodle feature settings I never knew (wikis, gradebook, scales, lessons). Finally, it has helped me and will continue to help me form and structure our district’s Moodle help page. I have always struggled with how to display and give Moodle help and support to users in an online format because there is just so much information. This book has given me a few ideas on how to structure online Moodle help.

I could go on and on about the specifics in this book and the interesting things I found but I would really recommend buying it so you can read for yourself and refer back to it in the future – I know I will! Now, I must get back to all of the post-its I stuck in the book to try out and explore on my own Moodle site!

Related Links:

• Buy Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide
• Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide complete table of contents
• Packt Publishing Moodle Books

I’ve finished the book, Moodle Administration, by Alex Büchner! It was a very easy book to read and I read it surprisingly fast considering how busy I have been lately.

Overview & Thoughts

This book started off giving an overview, a rationale for using Moodle and it explained the uses of Moodle. From there, it took you all the way through the installation of Moodle to more advanced features like Moodle Networking and Third-Party Add-ons. You can view the complete table of contents here.

What I liked about this book, which I have already mentioned, is that it’s easy to read. It does not overload your brain with so much text and information that you forget it two seconds later. Also, the chapters and topics covered were very well organized. Already being in the position of a Moodle administrator for our district for a year, I was impressed with the topics covered because during my first year working with Moodle those topics and issues were exactly what I had encountered. The book did a good job of explaining how to do things on different platforms. I found the instructions and explanations easy to follow and very concise. However, I had already done a lot of the processes before, so I may have been more aware than a user learning about it for the first time.

After the main chapters there is a nifty little “Moodle Health Check” and “Configuration Settings Reference” section. I am going through the Health Check now with our site. The Configuration Settings Reference section is great! It describes the different settings in the config.php file that can change the look and functionality of Moodle. Now I just need to get read/write permissions on the config.php file!

Overall, this book did a great job of explaining a lot of different topics and issues that I know from personal experience you will run into while implementing Moodle. Being a nerd, I do wish it was slightly more technical and talked more about the code and manipulation of code. The book also failed to have have a “themes” section, which I think would been beneficial to users.

Who is this book for?

Well, like the book title says.. I would say it’s for Moodle administrators : ) You don’t have to be a techy nerd to understand most concepts in this book. You don’t need to know all about networking and servers. This book is perfect for the person who will be maintaining your Moodle site and who will be taking questions about Moodle’s functionality and customization.

I would also suggest this book for your networking person (if they are willing to read it!). The reason being, just like any other software, there are settings and ways of doing things that are specific to Moodle. If your network admin can understand how Moodle operates I think it can really help you and your network admin to get things done. For example, I do not know much about networking so there are some things in Moodle I am unsure about. When I ask our network admin he is not familiar with Moodle so it’s hard to get on the same page. If your network department has a basic understanding of Moodle (which this book gives) I think it would help a lot.

In Conclusion

After reading this book I would highly recommend it. I really wish I would have read this book before we implemented Moodle. The topics covered in the book were exactly the topics we ran into and spent hours researching about. I think this book would have helped me out tremendously. However, even reading it after working with Moodle for a year was beneficial in that it really reinforced the important concepts and confirmed to myself that the correct settings were set (or not set!). Towards the end of the book the topics got a little more advanced. I learned a lot about the Moodle Networking piece and I’m excited to try it out. I’m also excited to try the Mahara/Moodle integration. I didn’t realize that the integration was so popular. So, in conclusion.. I would recommend this book to any type of future or present Moodle administrator.

What’s coming next!

I will be reviewing the book, Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide, written by Ian Wild. I’m eager to read this book because it looks like it will cover more “teacher” stuff. I love the technical part of Moodle but I need to learn more about the teacher side of things. If I don’t know the teacher perspective of things it would be pretty hard for me to make Moodle the best it can be for the teachers. Keep an eye out for my review.

Related Links:
Buy Moodle Administration
Packt Publishing Moodle Books

Summer is here! Before I leave town for the weekend I decided to pop in and give a few links.

We are doing some Moodle trainings for our district this week and today we have a couple of math teachers. I forgot the link to the Latex math equation editor for Moodle, but a few people helped me out via Twitter (@SirMelman, @ronhoutman, @markkings314, @jenn_nelson).

The links are: http://www.sitmo.com/latex/ and http://thornahawk.unitedti.org/equationeditor/equationeditor.php

Those links display a WYSIWYG equation editor using Latex. You can pick the symbols and it adds the code where you can copy and paste into Moodle. To allow this certain code to work you must have it set up right. Having the capability to use symbols in math makes using Moodle as a math teacher a lot more useful : ) . This afternoon I will be showing the teachers this tool and hopefully get some (good and bad) feedback about the usefulness of this tool.

Unless I find out anymore awesome news today, I will be back next week! Coming next week is my full review on the book, Moodle Administration. If anyone has any good math tools, resources or tips please comment!

In a previous post I mentioned that I would be receiving the book, Moodle Administration, to read and review. I have read about 3/4th of the book and I have been overall pleased with the content and the way it is presented.

Below is a stream of thoughts I have so far about the book with a couple of random interesting facts I read in the book.

Initial thoughts after the first few chapters

The first few chapters consisted of mostly beginner information and a lot of it was review for me. However, even if some of it was review it outlined a lot of the important concepts of Moodle.

• Written in a non-technical way, but still covers techy concepts
• Well explained, concise information
• The book does not overload you with information
• Easy to understand
• Well-organized chapters and concepts

What I’m getting out of the book so far

• A good refresher in installing and getting Moodle started
• A good outline of the important concepts
• The “recommended” or standard way of doing with with Moodle

Interesting facts and tid bits

“Moodle states that once you are registered the Moodle Registration button will be removed, which is not the case. The fact that the button remains actually makes sense, as it is used to change any of your registration details at a later stage.” – Moodle Administration page 33

Yes, a silly fact but I made note of it because I have always wondered why that button is still on my Moodle site and thought I did something wrong. Now I know it’s okay : )

“Meta courses are courses which take their enrolment from other courses. They populate many courses from one enrolment or one course from many enrolments.” Moodle Administration page 75

I had always been confused with what Meta Courses were and when to use them, the book explains what they are very clearly.

“It is possible to rearrange the column order, but the feature is rarely used in Moodle.” Moodle Administration page 172

I really want to test this out on my development site. I can see a lot of possibilities with themes and this option.

That ends my short review and check in of Moodle Administration for the first part of the book. My next review will be a full review with a more complete summary and discussion. Stay tuned.

Related links:
Buy this book
Packt Publishing Moodle books

I was recently presented with an opportunity to read and review the book, Moodle Administration, by Alex Büchner. This book, which is published by Packt Publishing, is described as “an administrator’s guide to configuring, securing, customizing, and extending Moodle.” Packt Publishing also has several other Moodle Books.

I’ve never read any type of Moodle book before. Most of my learning has come from researching online or trial and error so I’m excited to take some time to read a full-length guide about Moodle. One good sign about this book is that it looks like this book has received a lot of positive feedback in other book reviews (Moodleman, Kassblog, Patrick Malley).

Being a Moodle admin in our district, I am eager to gain knowledge over several topics regarding Moodle. Our district has been using Moodle for almost 1 year now, and with staff spending hours creating and editing courses I think it’s my responsibility to make sure our Moodle site is reliable and well maintained. Looking through the complete table of contents it seems like this book will help me do just that.

I plan to write a few blog posts with short reviews on things I find interesting while reading this book and I will write a complete review after finishing the book. I’m very excited to dive into this book and learn a bunch of new information. Stay posted for the upcoming reviews on this book.

Related Links:
Buy this book
Read more about this book
Packt Publishing Moodle Books

• Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: Moodle and Twitter
• Helen Foster’s blog: Moodle 1.9.5 release coming soon!