Often I am reminded of the reason why I chose Moodle as my LMS platform. It was not the rich feature list, it’s usability or component based architecture that allows easy expansion (although they all may have had some impact). No, it was the impact it has when directed by teachers who are keen to engage their students online.
They are not techno junkies or hold special super powers. They often don’t get time release or even additional PD. They are standard (and I don’t mean that in a negative tone) teachers with one major difference. They see validity in elearning and see it as a way of making a difference in their classrooms.
This is a video from 2007 of Molly Tipton, a social studies teacher from Nolan Richardson Middle School in Texas. In this video she describes how she uses Moodle in the classroom. All I need as an integrator is just one teacher like Molly that shows why the investment of my/our time and resources is worth it.
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P.S. If you haven’t browsed TeacherTube lately you should check it out. I came onto this video in one of my typical random “moodle” searches.
Tonight is the second meeting of the Sydney Moodle Users Group. This group is a must for any administrators, teachers or educational facilitators who use Moodle or who are maybe evaluating Moodle as possible LMS.
The User group consists of passionate Sydney based Moodle users who are keen on sharing their experiences and knowledge with others. So if you would consider yourself an enthusiast then this is the group for you.
Tonights meeting starts at 6pm and is being held at Saint Ignatius’ College Riverview (address details are listed below). The event will be held in a lab to allow attendees to be able to show some of what they are doing with Moodle and how they are fitting it into the mis in their classrooms, boardrooms or wherever else they happen to be.
The only requirement we ask of attendees is to bring $5 pizza money (I feel like a Uni student again) and a want to share, play and learn with your fellow Moodlers.
How to get to the Meeting
Riverview is located on Riverview Street, Lane Cove
The event is located on our ‘Regis’ Middle School campus.
As an educator working with students ranging from Year 5 through to 12 I have a strong belief on the importance of fun in the learning process. This is doubly so when dealing with youth online. To be truly effective e-learning needs to be engaging as well as informative. And one the best ways to engage online is to be interactive, and yes I’ll say it again, FUN! What many teachers have yet to realise is that online games satisfy the basic requirements of learning environments and can provide engaging learning experiences for students.
A great Moodle plug-in that facilitates a bit of fun in your favorite LMS is the “Game” module. This new module is created by Vasilis Daloukas, a Moodle developer based in Greece who is currently studying a “Computer Engineering and Informatics” degree specialising in “Using games in education”. And what better way to demonstrate his knowledge than to build fantastic Moodle plugin for the rest of us to enjoy.
The idea of the Game module is simple. To create dynamic and interactive online games while reducing the need to duplicate online resources. To do this the games don’t require you to create new questions and answers but instead it ties in with existing dat that you have entered into Moodle Quizzes and Glossaries. The range of games is diverse as well to add to the variety.
Current games include:
HangMan - This game takes words from either a Glossary or quiz short answer questions and generates a hangman puzzle. (I have reworked this on my site to be a less gruesome game called HangMouse)
Crosswords - This game takes words from either a Glossary or quiz short answer questions and generates a random crossword puzzle
Cryptex - This game is like a crossword but the answers are hidden inside a random cryptex.
Millionaire - This game takes words from multiple choice quiz questions and creates a “Who wants to be a Millionaire” style game complete with the three lifelines. Can they make a million dollars?
Sudoku - This game shows a sudoku puzzle to the students with not enough numbers to allow it to be solved. For each question the student correctly answers an additional number is slotted into the puzzle to make it easier to solve.
Hidden Picture - This game randomly grabs an image from a glossary and hides it behind panels. As each question is answered correctly a portion of the image is revealed. How fast can they guess the image?
Snakes and Ladders - The students have to traverse a traditional “Snakes and Ladders” board by answering questions taken from either a Glossary or quiz short answer questions. As they get n answer right the dice is rolled and a random number displayed.
Like most well made Moodle modules it is installed by simply adding the downloaded directory to your Moodle’s “mod” folder and then visiting your Admin screen to install. It is currently available in Basque, French, Greek, Norwegian, Rusian, Spanish and English.
I don’t know if this just proves I am way to much into Moodle, that I have way to much spare time spent on the net or a combination of both.
Check out this great ad for ‘Good and Plenty‘ licorice lollies from 1959. It’s amazing to think that the Moodle term has been around since then. Is Good and Pleanty going after Martin D for copyright? Lets hope not
Enjoy the advertisement below, it really is Moodle-agic
Afternoon all and welcome to my latest blog post. This week I want to look at how we can use functions in Moodle to automatically assign students into class groups within a course.
As I am sure all of you reading this would know, Moodle is traditionally a “course based” system. And while this works great for most educators, the reality is that we need to have some way of splitting students up into easier to use groups. In Moodle, we call these “Groups”…..Hard huh?
The old fashioned way of doing this would have been to manually assign students to groups or to work on a fancy importing procedure. Both of which are painful. So how about a third easier option which involves using Group enrollment keys.
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The Procedure
First the course in question must have an enrollment key set. What it is is irrelevant, Moodle just needs to know a key is needed to enter this course
Go into your courses “Groups” settings from the Administration menu and create a new group. You will see that you can also set an enrollment key for each group. Each of these keys must be unique.
You can also add images for each group if you wish. This helps students differentiate each other when in combined tasks.
Thats It! Its now set up. Now when a student enters and types in a key Moodle will first look at the course key. If it matches it will let them in. If not however it will now compare the students key against each of the groups. If it matches one of the keys required by a group it will then enroll them into the course and automatically assign them to the matching group. Easy as that!
Use In Enterprise
This is a great way of locking things down within Enterprise/Business Moodle installations. When a user has paid for or is in a position to enter a course you typically want to separate them into classes or intakes. Rather than constantly enrolling them yourself or changing course keys, now all you have to do is create a group (i.e. “January Intake”) and give it it’s own key and send that key to the appropriate students. When finished, just delete the group or change the key to something unguessable. Should students start appearing in this intake that you know should not be there, you know you have a possible security breach and can act accordingly.
Use In Education
As explained in my video, this can get even easier for those in Primary or secondary education. Typically you are not that worried about where students go as long as they are in the courses they need to be. A year 7 student exploring a year8 course is not a bad thing (at least in my humble opinion). So for this reason I have made the enrollment keys for the groups the same in every single course. In my case my classes are based on a A-H scale, but yours might be numbers. Either way just create appropriate groups in all your courses and have the same keys cross the board. To make it even easier, change the language pack to present your students with instructions and this is a pinch to do.
I have had quite a few schools and clients of mine lameting the fact that Moodle no longer supports anything but LAMS 1.0, a now extremely outdated version. I also had accepted this as fact and had moved on. But how wrong I was!
At last weekends OLPC Techfest held at my college I randomly ran into a couple of LAMS developers. I asked them both why support had ceased and imagine my surprise when they told me it hadn’t. LAMS have continued to upgrade their activity style integration with Moodle all the way up to their current release, 2.0.4.
After this discussion I asked Jun-Dir Liew to add the latest code to the Moodle Modules and Plug-ins database for easy access for those needing it. Great news is that last night he did so and the new code is now available from Moodle.org
So if you are wanting to use LAMS with your Moodle and would like to use the latest version, then click here to download the latest LAMS activity module. You can over-write the existing module, but I would recommend you uninstall and remove the old one first and then install this new version as nearly no code from the original is present in this new release.
What is LAMS?
LAMS stands for “Learning Activity Management System” and is a Java based lessen sequencing authoring tool that is available for free as an Open Source project. Whereas Moodle is about social and self led learning (in it’s purest form), Lams is about leading students through pre-programmed sequences. This is especially useful in purely online learning environments. Tasks can be either class based of for individual students and, lie Moodle, come within a wide rang of different activities
Well, this has been a gamble. I don’t even know if I’ll call it successful, but here it is for you all to see
Many ask me how I go about building Moodle themes. They assume it is difficult, time consuming and a realm for experts. Well I am here to say “Poppycock!” to that and give you a brief glimpse into how quick and easy it is with just a little knowledge of CSS and HTML.
Below I have recorded myself developing a theme for a client..the whole shebang, while trying to provide some useful commentary. I don’t know how many will survive the entire duration. but it does show how simple the process can be. It is not necessarily best practice and I have tried to simplify as much as possible, but it should be enough to get even the most layman of people going.
The Video’s
Due to limits with YouTube, this has been split into 5 files. The first is embedded, the rest are links.
Too lazy to do it yourself? Want a theme thats cool without the effort? Try these options.
New School Learning - Best site for purchasing professional themes. These are the best I have seen and are cheap as well
Get me to do it! - Cant resist the sales pitch, but I do build custom themes. This is a more expensive but customised way of getting your sites looking just as they need to.
A big day for me today, I have finally got this blog mobile! I am a moblogger in the extreme, so finding a way to make my blog more accessible to other mobloggers has been a challenge. Using a great free service from mofuse they have provided me the tolkits to make this site accesible on mobile devices.
Now this isn’t just an RSS feed. It allows for logos. various pages, RSS feeds, pages of content and more.. Well worth checking out. Best of all it also now provides interfaces for iPhones as well..and I do love my iPhone.
So from today, please make sure you bookmark my new Mobile Link in your phone/iPhone/iPod Touch devices by either clicking here or on the button on the top left of the page.
If you want to see a demo of what it looks like without a device just click on one of the following links.
Today I finally got around to installing Mahara, the new Open Source ePortfolio system from New Zealand on my server. What makes Mahara so special, well let me tell you.
To best summarise what Mahara is about in a succinct paragraph lets her it from Penny Leach, one of Mahara’s developers:
Mahara means to think, thought, reflection in Te Reo Maori. Mahara is an electronic portfolio system that is designed to run alongside Moodle, and provide a student-centered space to create and store learning related artefacts, present them to different groups of people in varied ways, as well as some social networking functionality.
Mahara is the first portfolio system to start tying in with Moodle. as of 1.8 Moodle has included a Networking function to allow external systems to connect and share information with it. The logical use of this was to allow users to access multiple Moodle installs. But Mahara is the first external application to make use of this to allow for users to jump between two different web applications.
The integration is still in it’s early days as the new Portfolio API is not yet complete. Once completed, the new API will allow for:
When portfolios are enable, every page or major piece of content in Moodle has a little “Capture this” button beside it.
User clicks one of these buttons
User is able to choose from a list of configured portfolios (this step will be skipped if there’s only one).
User is asked to define some metadata to go with the captured content
The content and metadata is COPIED to the external portfolio system
User has an option to “Return to the course” or “Visit their portfolio”.
But for now the integration does allow for SSO (Single Sign On) and also brings user data across from Moodle.
Having just installed the Mahara/Moodle bridge I am starting to explore the functionalities and possibilities that they provide. I thought that I would share my discoveries with you as vodcasts attached to these blog posts. As I explore and better understand this application I hope to continue to bring these to light in the blog.
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If you have questions or features you would like to see highlighted, please post them in the comments and Ill tray to answer them in the next installment.
Today I discovered this great video that really describes the challenges of educating todays students in a nutshell. I found it both educational and inspirational. Hope you do to.
This was posted by Greg Whitby who is the Executive Director of Schools for the Parramatta Catholic Education Office and has extensive experience in K-12 schooling and senior system leadership.
How to get to the Meeting
Well, this has been a gamble. I don’t even know if I’ll call it successful, but here it is for you all to see
A big day for me today, I have finally got this blog mobile! I am a 
