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’ve recently been asked to review the book Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques by William Rice and Susan Smith Nash published by Packt Publishing. This book is about “creative ways to build powerful and effective online courses”.
I’m especially excited to read this book and learn more about classroom applications. I know quite a bit from an admin/techy role, now what I need to learn more about is not how to use the features but how to integrate it into a lesson to create an effective activity for students.
Check back in a few weeks for my review!
To hold you over check out an extracted part of the book called “Instructional Material” for free!
I haven’t done one of these for awhile so I’ll try and gather up all my saved links from the past weeks!
Moodle Monthly – An awesome new site by Joseph Thibault
Moodle Monthly is a collaborative project bringing order to news and information pertaining to the open source project and learning management system called Moodle.
First look at Moodle 2.0: html editor – From Moodle Monthly
Posts from Helen Foster
Moodle Moots coming up!
- Register for the 2010 iMoot! The schedule is now up.
- Midwest Moodle Moot – July 26-28th in Indiana – Martin Dougiamas will be attending and will be the key note speaker!
The past two days I attended the TIES 2009 Education Technology Conference and co-presented “Successfully Integrating Google Apps in Education” with some of our tech people. The presentation is about Google Apps but it also includes using the Moodle-Googleapps SSO plugin. We had a good turn out as a lot of school districts are either looking into using Google Apps or are having issues implementing it. Below is the description of our session.
Come see how Osseo Area Schools have begun to leverage the power of Google Apps for Education. Participants will learn reasons for using Google Apps, tips for successfully implementing Google Apps, questions you should answer before going forward, and see some examples of how Osseo is using Google Apps for both instruction and improving productivity.
TIES provided each session with a wiki so they could post links and resources from their presentations. Here’s our wiki with a link to the presentation and to our delicious account with links we used while implementing Google Apps. You can also check out other sessions and links to their presentations and resources – there were some great presentations this year!
Moodle Announcements
Other
Great Post: “Moodle is an Airport!” (GlobalClassroom)
On another note, I plan to write a few posts about our district’s experience with the Moodle-Google SSO module. I will be co-presenting at the TIES 2009 Conference about this and in January I will be giving a short presentation to another district with my co-worker.
I hope to write up a few posts with bits and pieces and maybe attach some of the slides or parts of our presentation. Happy Moodling!
I found this great blog post and screencast from Mary Cooch on her Moodle Blog explaining a new Nanogong assignment.
Similar to the “upload a single file” type where students can browse and send you their work for marking , the nanogong assignment presents them with a little sound recorder into which they can record themselves , play back to check and then send to you. read more
I just wanted to post a quick link to her post and screecast. This looks like a great module that I know the teachers in our district would use! I hope to test this out soon and possibly add it to our Moodle site if I get some time for it. Thanks Mary!
Read the full post and watch the screencast explaining how to install and use it.
Related Links
Mary Cooch
Moodle Blog
Follow Moodlefairy on Twitter
Planet Moodle
Other
….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.
Just a quick reminder about the awesome resource, WeFollow (for Moodle). It’s a ranked list of Moodle Twitter users (people who have added the moodle tag to themselves when joining). There are currently 120 users on the list and you can also add yourself to the list.
Twitter is a great resource to network with other Moodlers and ask questions, learn about resources, get news and share things yourself! There are many awesome Moodlers using Twitter that are very helpful.
@moodle is the official Moodle.org Twitter handle. Tweets consists of Moodle news and helpful forum post links
@moodler is the man himself, Martin Dougiamas
Check out the main WeFollow site or take a look at the Moodle WeFollow list.
Moodle Announcements
Planet Moodle
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org blog posts
Other Links
ischool Learning Network – videos
