Moodle update

April 17th, 2005 | by Tim Wilson |

I installed Moodle on a spare server last June as an experiment. Since my district was an online learning pioneer in Minnesota and continues to work in that area as part of the Northern Star Online collaborative, it seemed logical to see if some of our teachers who have gained experience teaching online might be interested in incorporating some of those skills into their face-to-face courses. The results, at least in terms of popularity, have been dramatic.

What began as a little-promoted experiment has turned into a system that serves nearly 1,600 students in 150 courses across the district. We’ve got teachers and students doing online forums, journaling, sharing links, making wikis, and using many of the other standard Moodle modules. Most of the teachers are using Moodle as a simple course Web page system, posting links to relevant Web sites and uploading course documents, but the flexibility of the Moodle system makes it possible to start simple and add more interactive elements later.

I don’t know how long we can sustain the current growth rate, but I look for Moodle to take off in our elementary schools next. The elementary teachers who are using it love how easy it is to assess their students’ writing. I’m also planning to explore how Moodle can be used to support online staff development. So much Moodling, so little time.

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  1. 5 Responses to “Moodle update”

  2. By Rob Cormack on Nov 10, 2005 | Reply

    Hey great podcast on Moodle this week. It led me to this post. We’re looking at Moodle, Wordpress and Manila at our school. Our elementary school teachers are needing a tool to let them create class websites easilty. They need to be able to communicate with parents and post student work. Moodle does not appear to be the tool to do this but your comment about elementary teachers using Moodle makes me wonder if I’m missing something. Thoughts? Can you point me to an elementary classroom that’s using Moodle successfully?

    Thanks again. Your podcasts and blog postings help keep me on top of things.

  3. By Tim Wilson on Nov 10, 2005 | Reply

    Rob, I work with several elementary teachers who are using Moodle effectively. What do the teachers need Moodle to do?

  4. By Rob Cormack on Nov 13, 2005 | Reply

    The elementary teachers are looking for a tool they can use to post newsletters, photos, and podcasts of what’s going on in their classrooms. The main audience for this would be parents.

    Also, they would like to be able to post materials for their students i.e. reference sheets, outlines, webpages, planning pages, and calendars.

    Finally, they need a way to publish their students’ work.

    It was your comment about elementary teachers using it assess student writing that got me thinking. Can they use Moodle to publish student writing for parents and others to see?

    Our high school teachers are looking at Moodle as a substitute to Edline. I was just wondering if the same software would help our elementary teachers too.

  5. By Tim Wilson on Nov 13, 2005 | Reply

    It’s possible to give “guest” access to any Moodle course. In fact, there are three possible modes of operation as far as user/guest access goes.

    1. wide open — In this mode there is no need for anyone to log in to the Moodle course because it’s wide open. No password required. This is essentially an anonymous class Web page. You can’t really have any interactive features in a course like this, however. See http://courseweb.hopkins.k12.mn.us/course/view.php?id=77 for an example of this kind of course.

    2. interactive, but with guests — You can set a separate guest password in Moodle. In this case you can have students logging in to post in forums, contribute to wikis, etc. and you can have a different password for all parents to use to access the course to view things. They won’t be able to contribute, but they can view what’s going on.

    3. closed — In this case you must log in to participate at all. No guest access. Only enrolled students can get in.

    I would think that #2 would work well for almost any elementary classroom. If you’d like a little more privacy, I would have the students use only their first names and last initials when they create their user profile (i.e., “Tim W.” instead of “Tim Wilson). Then anyone with guest access wouldn’t know who everyone is.

    Hope this makes sense. Let me know if it doesn’t.

  6. By Rob Cormack on Nov 16, 2005 | Reply

    Thanks, Tim. It made perfect sense.

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