Archive for the ‘Moodle’ Category
Moodle web 2.0 or not?
Over at Moodle News they are having a poll whether Moodle is web 2.0 or not.
Frankly speaking, I don’t care. Moodle is a fine LMS, period. I couldn’t care less if it is or isn’t web 2.0. It suits its purpose perfectly and that is what counts!
Moodle Plugins (a lot of lists)
You can pimp improve your Moodle with numerous plugins. The official Moodle website lists hundreds of them, ready for your or your pupils’ enjoyment. To give you a starting point, here are three shorter lists of the best or most used plugins:
- Best Moodle Modules & Plugins : Part 2
- What are the most sought Moodle Modules/Plug-ins?
- 5 Moodle Modules
Our Moodle uses the following plugins:
- Lightbox Gallery Resource (To give the students some eye candy. LMS don’t need to look boring!)
- Book
- Feedback (Very good for surveys and feedback.)
There you have it: Four lists of plugins. Now explore and enjoy!
Drag’n'Drop in Moodle
In case you are sick of all those clickable arrows you usually use to arrange your resources in Moodle, why don’t you enable drag’n'drop?
I simply wonder why this isn’t turned on by default. Or, to be more precise, why AJAX is turned on but deactivated for course editing by default.
Moodle 101
I just love this (old school) introduction to Moodle by Steve Williams (@MrHSIE):
(via Moodlenews)
Another day, another Moodle install
Let’s see:
- new hosting provider for our school-website: done!
- new domain name for our school-website: done!
- contents transferred from old to new site: done!
- installing Moodle on new sub domain: done!
- configuring the freshly installed Moodle to our preferred settings: done!
But: Why on earth does it take around a million clicks to setup Moodle with sane (for our school) settings? I wish there was an option where I could set these things during installation. Or maybe even something like: “Do you want to install full multimedia (+links to Youtube) support?” and/or “Is this Moodle for your institution/school only or for a broader audience (=guests allowed)?”
This would make it much quicker and less painless to set up a Moodle. With most school-Moodle-admins being teachers–who might not be computer science experts–security might benefit, too. I hope that Moodle 2.0 will offer significant advancement in this area.
MoodleMoot 2010 Dokumentation
Die MoodleMoot 2010 Dokumentation ist hier online einzusehen.
Falls mich jemand sucht, ich bin dann mal ein paar Stunden lesen.
More cold water…
As the school year is coming to an end, it is time to evaluate what time and energy I have spent on my Moodle install.
All in all, I think that testing Moodle in one of my classes was a positive experience for both me and my students. They’ve acquired technological knowledge, had fun while learning English and did more of their homework than before.
All valid reasons to broaden the experiment to further classes next year!
I’m ready to jump into the cold water…
..that is: I’m ready to test Moodle in up to three of my classes. I’ve taken down my personal website and installed Moodle 1.9.x (weekly whatever) on it.
So far I’ve already started a course for the book I’m reading in an English class. Two history courses (on industrialisation and the First World War) will be added shortly. Tomorrow evening, the first bunch of students is going to get their feet wet with creating accounts in Moodle and giving the system a go.
I plan on using one lesson to get them ready with the system and another two hours of first real work in it. This should give them enough time to try out forum and chat as well as the glossary and whatever nice tasks I can think of.
BTW: as a starting point, this book is a nice introduction to Moodle.
Moodle for 2nd language and history teaching
This book (Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching) seems to be exactly what I was looking for. Strangely, there are no reviews on Amazon for it yet. The contents are impressive, as is the price tag: a hefty €35-40.
The book is promoted in the Moodle Language teaching community and probably worth the money, so I’ll get it eventually and read it.
Now, is there a similar book for history teaching?
For starters I’ll read the teachers’ manual here (German).