Moodle Monday: 30+ Moodle resources from @NJIT
The New Jersey’s Science and Technology University (www.NJIT.edu) uses Moodle and has over 30 Moodle videos, tutorials and PDF documents that highlight the basics to the more advanced and 3rd party modules specific actions and procedures in Moodle (i.e. Turnitin integration).
It’s a great page to peruse if you’re looking for documentation to work into your own resource collection or for ideas how to structure high quality “how-to” information for your teachers.
Find information on
- Working with Groups
- Using the various assignment types
- Creating and displaying directories
- Using Mahara
- And much more
View the full list at http://moodle.njit.edu/tutorials/faculty/
LikeMoodle Do’s and Don’ts Comic
Caught this on Twitter yesterday (thanks @wagjuer); it’s a comic style tips sheet for Moodle. Not as robust or in depth as the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers; but helpful (and fun) nonetheless. I love the design and layout (maybe it’s time for an updated comic version?). It was originally uploaded to Moodle.org in 2006 and created in part by Steve Noonkesser [link]:
NEWS FLASH: Wimba will Stream from the Midwest Moot Keynote from Goshen (7/27)
Thanks to Floyd Saner, Midwest Moodle Moot in Goshen coordinator for alerting us of this late breaking news. On Tuesday the 27th of July (next Tuesday), synchronous educational service provider, Wimba,
will host a live webcast of Martin Dougiamas’ keynote address, Moodle 2.0, at the 2010 Midwest Moodle Moot.
Date/time: Tuesday, July 27, 9:00a – 10:00a Eastern Daylight Time. Information: http://www.goshen.edu/moodle/wimbawebcast.html. It’s free to attend (unless I find otherwise). Visit the link prior to the session to run Wimba’s setup wizard.
Happy Friday: 3 Moodle Sessions Streaming Live Today from #et4Online (5 more archived)
The Sloan Consortium is in it’s final day of the 3rd Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium out in San Jose, CA. For the last few days educators, administrators and technologists have met and shared their best practices and research at the ET4Online conference (including the West Coast Moot event). There’s still a chance for you to catch some online professional development though by attending a live, streamed session today, several of which focus on Moodle.
- 8:15 AM (PST) - Course Backup Management Strategies for Moodle
- 10:35 AM (PST) - Designing for engagement: Marginalia, an annotation add-on to the Moodle discussion forum
- 10:35 AM (PST) – Links and Kinks to Effective Moodle Training for Faculty at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde: A Three-in-One Story
Or check out any of Wednesday and Thursday’s sessions by visiting this page and clicking on any session that sounds interesting (the presentation archives will play automatically from their session pages): http://et4online.sloanconsortium.org/pages/StreamedSessions.
Check out this one by Kevin Kelly of SFSU on how to use iPods together with Moodle to teach uses of technology:
MoodleMayhem: A growing community of helpful Moodlers
MoodleMayhem has only been active since March but already has established itself as one of the best resource communities outside of Moodle.org. Miguel Guhlin and Diana Benner (among a cast of others) have stepped up to answer questions, preemptively create tutorials and provide extracurricular resources such as podcast interviews with the likes of Mary Cooch and Julian Ridden and videos of presentations of conference session events. According to the Introduction page, their are three main goals of MoodleMayhem,
- to create a community of learners wiki
- to facilitate a community of problem solvers via email list serv
- knowledge management
It’s already achieved all three. Already the problem solvers email list is 183 members and growing!
This past weekend MoodleMayhem was featured on Classroom2.0 Live and received some due recognition. Check out the video of the session embedded below, or visit the resource archive page at http://tinyurl.com/moodlemayhem-cr20live.
NEWS FLASH: Final Release of 2.0 pushed to September
Final Release date: September, 2010 (if testing goes well)
Previously the push to release Moodle 2.0 was focused on readying the code for use by schools starting this September, unfortunately, with at least one more QA testing cycle in store for Moodle 2.0 the release has been pushed back to September, 2010 (at the earliest).
For more information:
- http://docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle_2.0_release_notes
- Until then, get your Moodle 2.0 fix in the archives: http://www.moodlenews.com/?s=2.0
- Or on the Moodle 2.0 Moodlenews.com page: http://www.moodlenews.com/moodle-2-0/
- to cheer you up: http://ismoodle2outyet.com/
“To Moodle or Not…?” video (brief history of Instructional Tech)
This is a great video from Humboldt University and California State University, Monterey Bay focused on a colleges decision about adopting a new LMS. It’s about the research study that teachers utilized to compare a (unnamed) commercial LMS with Moodle and their findings. It’s about 10 minutes and is one of the first thorough (and “scientific”, as it is was a quasi-double-blind design) studies that I’ve seen comparing Moodle and another LMS objectively. The video narration is relatively unbiased and portrays the positives and negatives of both LMSs.
- Here’s a link to the video directly: http://www.digitalwell.washington.edu/rcuwtvdownload/csu_sc_moodle_ipodv.m4v
- A page with a synopsis of the video and some background: http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?fID=568&rID=24413
The beauty of having Moodle is that we can alter the technology as long as our university has those capabilities,
Says one of the speakers in the video.
Some key findings:
- No statistical differences in comparing student outcomes and learning between the commercial LMS and Moodle LMS
- Students preferred Moodle 2 to 1
- Capabilities are similar
- Great environment for student programmers to augment system
- Less expensive
The “Moodle Museum” from CLAMP-IT.org
CLAMP-IT, the developers of the Moodle 1.9.9 + LAE distribution announced last week [link] have a great archive of Moodle tips and tricks called the MoodleMuseum. Tips are anything from advanced uses of the wiki, using the summary field appropriately, tips on organization of resources and your course page, forums and glossaries.
All in all there are some great case studies on specific users of Moodle resources and activities that may help you in your course.
These are the titles of a few select “Museum Artifacts”:
- Pre-Exam Question Forum
- Using Choice to let students self-schedule presentations
- Using the Glossary Feature for Languages Across the Curriculum
- Using the summary field to create “liner notes” for course materials
Find more and read them all at http://www.clamp-it.org/category/gallery/moodlemuseum/.
Moodle 2.0 Release day +1 (Delay update)
You may have noticed that it’s now July 21st and despite the information listed on the Moodle 2.0 Roadmap at Moodle.org, the long awaited Moodle 2.0 has not been released. Originally there were upwards of 8 Preview Releases scheduled, but after only four Martin Dougiamas updated the community with a call for QA testers in order to release the software on time as “Release Candidate 1″ or “RC1″,
If all goes well, it’s looking like we should be able to hit a usable and feature-complete state for Moodle 2.0 in a couple of weeks, around July 20. You can follow the the main blockers in the tracker to see progress towards this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can call that a final release yet, because the testing period for much of it has not been long enough, so at this point we’ll call it Moodle 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). [http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=153815]
So unless you’re using a Preview Release or are planning to adopt the RC1, the wait will be a little longer. Why? For the sake of quality; which is a good thing.
For information on helping with the QA Cycle 1 check out our previous post or Helen Foster’s call to QA at Moodle.org: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=153814
Related:
Intro to Moodle Video by @MrHSIE
Saw this on Twitter and had to share (Thanks to @Moodleman for the RT). It’s a great video by Steve Williams (@MrHSIE) created in the style of Common Craft highlighting the history and use of Moodle. A great introductory video.
