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.

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!

In my last post mentioning some cool screenshots (posted by Moodlemonthly.com) of an iPhone app for Moodle it was brought to my attention there are several Mobile Moodle projects.

Ignatia/Inge de Waard commented

hi all, the screenshots made available are in fact screenshots from a collaboration between the Institute of Tropical Medicine Alexander von Humboldt (IMTAvH) in Lima and the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp. We were working on it with a Peruvian/Belgian team. I posted the team effort and project here:
http://tinyurl.com/yapp736

Check out  the blog post explaining effort!

Today Moodle Monthly wrote the blog post “Mobile Moodle is COMING (screen shots available)” which showed some awesome screenshots of Moodle on the iPhone and gave a link to the official Moodle site with a discussion about Mobile Moodle.

“Martin announced at the #imoot2010 that MoodleHQ will be working on an iphone app once Moodle2 is finished.” – (via @moodleman on twitter)

I feel as though Mobile Moodle will create tons of opportunities for classroom and student use. Just a few ideas off hand include student response systems (instant feedback), no need for checking out computer labs and 24/7 connection with Moodle courses (if using an iPhone, smartphone..) for teachers and students.. extending the school day is always a plus.

Check out the full post at Moodlemonthly.com or join the discussion at moodle.org!

Edit: There are several different Mobile Moodle projects, applications and discussions but the specific project mentioned and screenshots shown on moodlemonthly.com are from the site: http://www.bravenewcode.com/products/wptouch/

Are you like me, who either missed some iMoot 2010 sessions or you attended a session while another one you wanted to go to was going on? Check out the repeat session!

Posted at imoot.org by Julian Ridden:

Has this happened to you over the past 36 hours?

• A great session was on at 3am when you were in your right mind sleeping peacefully
• Two awesome sessions were on at the same time making you choose favourites.
• You were on Twitter and heard cool stuff about a session that you just didn’t think of attending.

If this is you then have we got just the right answer to perk you up again. In your program you may have noticed that all the previously live delivered sessions are now available in “Repeat” mode

Read the full post here!

Below are just some live blogging notes and my stream of thoughts. Not organized at all but I highlighted a few key items I found interesting. Sorry if I noted anything wrong as I was listening and typing.

Panel 1 – moodle.com

Presenters: Martin Dougiamas and others (I can’t remember their names)

Ask questions directly to the moodle HQ team in Perth. What are their development processes? Where does funding come from? Who is the best foosball player?

This was just a Q & A with Martin and others at the Moodle HQ. I noted a few questions. If you haven’t already checked out the replay check it out – if you’re registered!

Question I asked:

briefly exploring an installation of moodle 2.0 dev the navigation (docking) seems a bit different and something to get used to. have you done any user groups to see how “regular” teachers will react and adapt? as an admin i witness a lot of frustration with “change” after they get used to something..

Their Response: One of Tomaz Lasic’s first jobs will be testing/working with this. They rely on people like “me” and the Moodle Tracker to help them out.

My After Thoughts: “Techy” or people like me are different than regular teachers. Regular teachers won’t go on the tracker, they don’t even know what it is. It’s the lower techy users that I’m worried about. I’m worried it will turn them away, make them frustrated. Is there any user groups strictly with teachers who are not that tech savy, users who don’t even know about the Moodle.org!

Question I asked:

will the journal module be in the core and will it be gradeable?

Their Response: The journal module will not be in the Moodle 2.0 core but still available for download if it’s kept up. The online assignment will replace it.

My After Thoughts: Isn’t there a difference between journal and online assignment? I think there are a few differences that a teacher would want in journal that isn’t in online assignment – like repeated journaling – not having a “one and done” assignment – something ongoing. I’ll have to look at this.

Question I asked:

are there major upgrades in blogs? will there be comments on blogs? also will there be an option to make the blogs a course module instead of everyone with shared courses seeing each others – lots of complaints about seeing user blog enteries they don’t care about

Their Response: There are comments on blogs already. RSS external blogs into blogs (like WordPress). They said blogs = forums pretty much. There is a new forum type called blog forum type which looks more like a blog. Sounds interesting!

Question Asked:

In Forums: Is there any way to set a default for all users to not be subscribed to forums automatically? On that note, will Moodle 2.0 have a central place for users to control emails they get from a Moodle site? At the moment there are subscriptions (forums), message settings and settings in the profile.

Their Response: This is available at modules | forum | default you can change that.

My After Thoughts: I either heard wrong and they didn’t mean this or it will be in Moodle 2.0. I’m not sure, but I couldn’t find this in my Moodle 1.9.7 version.

Other Notes:

The Feedback module will NOT be in the Moodle 2.0 core which was planned before. They also talked about how the Questionnaire and Feedback module will somehow work together and merge into something new called “Survey”. This will combine the best features and allow Questionnaires and Feedback to transfer into a “Survey”.

I’m not sure if “Survey” will totally replace both modules and if so I’m not sure when.

B-04: Making Moodle Funky by Bending the Code!

Presenter: Lewis Carr

AWESOME session!

• quick edit – turn editing on – change weeks/topics, short code, more settings on the course homepage instead of having to go into the Course Settings – not on moodle.org plugins/modules – hard coded.
• Sweet Moodle user and course ajax search – very useful for admins – I would use this every day.
• Course Format: no weeks or topic number — “clear format” – modified weekly topics format and told it not to display the numbers
• moodle bar (like on the iMoote site) – will be publicly available soon – go to moodle tracker and his website
• iphone theme – iphone theme in own folder “We detected an iphone theme would you like to switch to iphone theme?
• iphone app/mobile will include all features..like quiz… use it as a “student response system”.. YES
• user agent switch – test in different browsers

Just a quick note to remind everyone to sign up for the first ever Moodle Moot online – iMoot 2010! Read more about it or register here!

For those of you already attending follow iMoot2010 on Twitter and use the Twitter hash tag #imoot2010.