Moodle

I promised that I would tell you more about Moodle. To begin with, I quote from the Moodle Website:

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

The Moodle Website was created using Moodle, so exploring the site will give you a good idea of what you can do with it. Moodle can be downloaded for free from their website.

Now for the exciting stuff! Moodle is a software package that you can use to construct a class website or to manage distance learning features. It is designed in modules, giving you great freedom and flexibility to add content. You can access some demonstration courses in several languages on the Moodle website by clicking here.

You do need a server that would be accessible to your students. You cannot for example, house the course on your laptop - the students would not be able to access the course. Your school or district is bound to have a server, and if you are allowed (or encouraged) to have a class website, investigate the possibility of using Moodle for that purpose.

If you cannot use a server dedicated to your school or district, look into GlobalClassroom, a website that offers free hosting to over 2200 teachers and professors who wish to offer online components to their teaching.

Please watch this excellent video on which middle school teacher Molly Tipton explains how she uses Moodle in her social studies classroom.

Check out my guest post

I was recently invited to write a guest post at Schaefersblog entitled 10 ways to develop your creativity. You can read the whole post at http://www.schaefersblog.com/10-ways-to-develop-your-creativity/.

An excerpt: The right attitude for developing a creative lifestyle is a willingness to take risks, a willingness to fail, a willingness to be different, a willingness to stand out, a willingness to question, a willingness to laugh at one self.

Trying out web 2.0 technologies

There are a great many new technologies available of the "web 2.0" variety. These include blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, and sharing of photos, documents, and applications.

A recent survey conducted among American teens found that 59% of them believe that their schools are not preparing them adequately for a career in technology or engineering. For more about this survey, see the 2008 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index .

I believe a big part of this is the inability of teachers to get their heads and hands around the new technologies. We don't know how to use these things, and consequently we cannot teach sdstudents how to use them effectively. Note that students learn how to use the new technologies on their own by playing with them and figuring out how to use them for their own purposes. But effective use for work related purposes is another story.

To help you with your explorations into the new technologies, I recommend two websites: 1) Common Craft is a creative commons website that posts highly creative short videos explaining some of these technologies - In Plain English. You can find them at:
http://www.commoncraft.com/show.

As an example, I give you: Blogs in Plain English from the common craft website:



2) Atomic Learning is a website that offers short Quicktime training videos on a vast range of software applications for both Windows platform and Mac. Some videos are free, and others are available through a purchased membership. The basics of most applications are free. Find them at http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/home
At the moment you can do the complete workshop on blogging for free at:
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/blogging

Why don't you explore some of these resources? Next time I will tell you about Moodle - an open source course management application with some easy to use features that can help you set up distance learning portions of your classroom teaching.