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.

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!

Martin Dougiamas recently posted on Moodle Announcements that latest stable releases of 1.8.x and 1.9.x are now available.

There are many small bug fixes and some new features in each release, but the main two things you need to know about are the gradebook interface changes in 1.9.5 and some important security issues. – Read more

Related Links:
Release notes for Moodle 1.9.5
Release notes for Moodle 1.8.9
Moodle 1.9.5 and Moodle 1.8.9 are now available – Martin Dougiamas post

Have you ever wished there was a way for students to draw or paint in Moodle? If so, you’ll be pleased to hear that one of our GSOC 2009 projects is a paint tool for Moodle.. read more

This is a bit late (first posted on Moodle.org on May 8th) but Helen Foster posted a Moodle Announcement about a paint tool being developed. Read more about it.

Helen Foster posts a blog about My Moodle in Moodle 2.0 :

Great news for My Moodle users: Mike Churchward is planning major improvements in Moodle 2.0 (MDL-19124). Please join..  read more

Sweet! I love the My Moodle feature and I think it has much potential! Take a look at Lewis Carr’s My Moodle development.

Just a reminder that Moodle is on Twitter. Back in March I posted about Moodle getting an official Twitter account but I wanted to post a reminder because Moodle’s tweets are pretty interesting and useful (in my opinion). Many of the tweets are links to interesting forum questions and answers.

Some of the links in the tweets I found interesting:

• Twitter Like Feed
• Moodle 1.9.5 release coming soon!
• Free access without login and  password
• YouTube code doesn’t work – how to embed a video ?

Follow Moodle on Twitter!

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

Check out slides from keynote by Martin Dougiamas from morning of Wednesday 6th May at the Educause Australia conference in Perth, Western Australia. The content of the slides include what Moodle is, what it provides, why people use Moodle and a few slides about Moodle 2.0 and what is coming.

Do you Tweet? Follow Martin Dougiamas @moodler.

An e-mail from Martin Dougiamas to Moodle admins:

Hi,

Two things you should know about as a registered Moodle admin:

Firstly, a reminder to keep your Moodle sites upgraded to prevent security issues.  Using recent weekly versions such as 1.9.4+
(http://download.moodle.org/) will help ensure your site is protected.
Some recent security announcements are at http://moodle.org/security and there is documentation about upgrading Moodle here:  http://docs.moodle.org/en/Upgrading

Secondly, please note that some Moodle interface changes are planned to arrive in stable CVS in a week or two, so be warned that the Gradebook may have a new (and we hope you agree it’s better!) appearance.  This sort of change is a very rare occurrence in a stable branch as we take stability seriously.  In this case, however, there were several important usability and calculation issues raised by the community and the benefits of these fixes are large enough to justify the change in 1.9.5 (and 2.0 of course).  Please make sure your teachers are all aware of this change before you upgrade, and make sure you are prepared for it.  Avoid upgrading during a busy assessment period, for example.

Exact details about the Gradebook changes (Stage 1) are on this page:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Gradebook_improvements_in_Moodle_1.9.5

and you can read Helen’s recent announcement here:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=120167

If you have any issues about the gradebook interface changes PLEASE let us know as soon as possible:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=119925

If you have any questions about upgrading or general Moodle issues please start with http://moodle.org/support.

(Please don’t respond to this email – I get more email than I can handle already)

Cheers,
Martin Dougiamas (Lead Developer)

This post is inspired by me finally getting read/write permissions to our Moodle server! Since last summer when we installed Moodle we have wanted to add themes, plug-ins, modules, edit the php, etc. Yesterday, that day came. Today, I am searching for recommended modules, plug-ins, course formats, themes and other small tips to make our Moodle site look good. I’ve added Book and Tab Display modules from Moodle.org. Now, I want to ramp up our Moodle site theme and layout. We force our users to use their My Moodle page, so I will also try and make that page look good.

Please give me your favorite Moodle themes, modules and tips! Comment on this post or Tweet me!

Related Links:
Moodle.org: Modules and plugins
Moodle.org: Themes
Moodleman Blog: Creating a custom Moodle Theme – LIVE!!
Moodleman Blog: Getting the most out of course design
NewSchool Learning (Moodle themes – some free, mostly paid for)
Taming Moodle: Ugly category names on front page? Pimp it!
The Moodle Playpen