Monthly Archives: June 2006

Moodle gets significant upgrade

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Moodle fans everywhere rejoiced yesterday with the release of version 1.6. The new version brings some significant improvements. Here are a few of the ones that matter most to me:

  • “My Moodle” page now presents a summary of all the work going on in whatever courses a student is enrolled. We have a quite a few students who have more than one teacher using Moodle. This will help them keep up across the board.
  • Multiple group membership means that teachers can create multiple groups and students can be members of more than one group. This is a huge improvement and will allow teachers to do much more flexible grouping on a per assignment basis while preserving course-wide groups.
  • The database module is a totally flexible module for creating all kinds of custom activities that include multimedia, comments, votes, etc. Nothing like this existed before, and it’s really going to open Moodle up to some creative uses.
  • Blogging comes to Moodle in version 1.6. Every Moodle user will now have their own blog that supports tagging and even podcasts. There was a lot of discussion about this and Martin himself explains the rationale for why blogs work the way they do in 1.6. Bottom line: this is just a start for blogging in Moodle and integration with the rest of the Moodle tools is really complicated.

There a bunch more, but those hit closer to home than most. If you’re just learning about Moodle you may be interested in the podcast interview I did with Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas last November.

MLB discovers the iPod

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ESPN has an interested article about how a few major league baseball players have discovered that their video iPods are giving them a competitive advantage. Hitters are using video iPods to analyze their swings and pitchers are studying batters to look for weaknesses. From the article:

The Rockies have downloaded video clips into the iPods of 14 players so far. For the hitters, they’ll store every at-bat and download performances of upcoming pitchers. A 60-gigabyte iPod can hold roughly five seasons’ worth of a player’s at-bats. Pitchers can get all their performances, along with opponents’ at-bats.

Of course these ballplayers aren’t taking the time to create their own iPod video playlists. They’ve got “people” for that. If they can use this technology, then all kinds of high school athletes could benefit too. With a simple iPod microphone, music and speech students could record rehearsals for later review. Throw in teacher-produced podcasts of lessons, labs, or extra study materials (don’t forget that you can podcast documents!) and you’ve got the makings of a digital learning interface that most students would crave.

ipod, digital learning, video

Site@School CMS

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My district is evaluating options for a new system to maintain our Web pages. We had a demo of SchoolCenter a couple days ago and it didn’t look too bad. I found their templates to be pretty unattractive, but they’re probably better than most schools’ Web pages. While poking around I discovered an open source alternative called Site@School. I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure if it would scale up to an entire district, but you can’t beat the price. I found some good examples on their Websites using Site@School page.

cms, site@school