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.
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!
Moodle is great by itself but it can be even better when using other web 2.0 tools and resources. I know I will leave out many resources in this quick post, so I plan to write a “part 2″ of resources to use within Moodle.
Description: “Voki is a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages.”
This is a fun tool for teachers to grab the attention of students and allow the students to listen rather than just read. This can also be a supplement, just another way, for teachers to give information to their students. Since we know that students learn in different ways, you can take advantage of a Voki’s audio feature.
It’s free to sign up and you can create multiple avatars. You can either use a microphone and speak for 1 minute or type in text, which will be translated into a “computer voice” (there are even different accents!). It gives you various types of embeddable code which allows you to use the Voki in your Moodle course.
This resource has been a big hit in our summer Moodle trainings. Spanish teachers like it because they can talk or type in Spanish. Some teachers have made a “Welcome” message Voki avatar and put it in their summary section on their course homepage. Some teachers have embedded it within a “compose a web page”. If your students have emails, they can sign up for a free account and even create their own! Tired of taking class time for oral exams? or you just want a fun, different way for students to do an assignment? They create a Voki and hand it in via Moodle!
Description: “A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.”
MathTV.com – Like YouTube, but with all Math videos – great quality.
TeacherTube – Like YouTube, but for the educational world. A great site that a lot of our teachers like to use. Embeddable code is available to copy/paste into Moodle.
YouTube – Although it contains some totally useless content, there are quality videos here. Embeddable code is available to copy/paste into Moodle. You can also choose to not have the “related videos” show up in the embedded video – which is good for because students can not click on it and go to the actual YouTube site.
HowStuffWorks.com – “A wholly owned subsidiary of Discovery Communications, is the award-winning source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works.” [read more] Contains quality videos on all topics. Unlike YouTube, you won’t have to worry about students watching inappropriate videos because they all look educational and credible.
Keep an eye out for Part 2 of Resources to Use in Moodle. Please leave any comments about your favorite resources you use in Moodle!
I thought I would blog about a great source to get information about Moodle – Twitter! I love how Twitter connects you with people across the world that you have never met and may never meet.
Every day I see interesting links, get questions answered and see awesome Moodle-related resources via Twitter. Below are just a few that I follow.
@moodle – The official Moodle Twitter account. Tweets consists of links to useful posts from the Using Moodle forums.
In a previous post I talked about wishing there were more Moodle communities. Here’s a Moodle community that I hope catches on and gains a big community. It’s called MoodleShare and it’s a community of Moodlers just wanting to share their Moodle sites and information.
It looks a litte raw right now but hopefully it can become a good community of Moodlers. You can post your Moodle site or create a group. It looks to me like a place to post Moodle links that you think others can benefit from. You can search by the tags. I think the site has potential. I’m trying to see if there are forums or anything but I do not see any. Sign up today!
However, considering how popular Moodle is I expect there to be more blogs, sites and communities revolving around Moodle. I would think that Moodle, being an open-source product, would have more communities and sites with resoures because the open-source community is known to be large and very collaborative. I wonder why this is–maybe I am just not looking in the right places or maybe it is because Moodle.org has such great documentation and a great community itself that any other community would just not be as good. Don’t get me wrong Moodle.org has the best, most complete documentation, help and awesome forums to get an answer but where are the communities or social networking sites that focus on things like “Moodle in Elementary Schools”, “Teachers using Moodle in the classroom”? A place where teachers can collaborate and get ideas from other teachers using Moodle.
The two Ning Moodle communities are pretty good but there is not a ton of user action. I guess I just expected there to be more out there about Moodle, whether it’s a web site, blog or community because Moodle is getting very popular.
I would greatly appreciate any suggested Moodle sites, blogs or resources!
