The Savvy Technologist

Moodle meeting

I got together with Pete Misner Wednesday afternoon at Starbucks and talked about Moodle for a while. Pete gave a workshop earlier in the week where he demonstrated and taught the participants how to use Moodle and manage courses. Once again, it was great to be able to meet someone face to face that you might only interact with digitally 99.9% of the time. Pete described a bit about how his school used Moodle to manage a senior project course. It sounds like things went well enough that he’s going to expand by quite a bit next year.

We’ve developed some online teaching expertise over the past few years of the Hopkins Online Academy (now part of Northern Star Online) and I hope that some of that expertise can now be leveraged to bring some online learning elements to our regular courses. If nothing else, Moodle is a great way to host online, threaded discussions, collect digital assignments, communicate hyperlinks, and all kinds of other collaborative work for individuals or groups. I’m trying to figure out how I can use a Moodle course to facilitate communication and collaboration among the teachers involved in our 1:1 project.

We talked a little about the need for an individual space for each Moodle user. Blogging, for example, would be a little difficult unless each student (or teacher) were to blog within each individual course. That might be fine for certain types of activities, but I might prefer that students maintain a single blog so that their online writing could be found in one place. I think that would promote continuity and would certainly make blog maintenance a lot easier. If Moodle had that feature, I could consolidate our weblogs, wikis, and online forums into one system that would have a single sign-on and outstanding external authentication. The savings in management time would be significant.

I think it’s time to buy a good PHP book and start Moodle-hacking.

Tags: iste, moodle, necc, wiki