Exercise Your Noodle with Moodle
Ok, ok, that's bad for a title, but really, the latest and greatest in online classroom management is a free application/website called Moodle. My classmate's blog mentioned it, so I had to go check it out. It's totally open source, and can be used for one teacher to a whole district full of teachers. At least, that's what the website says, and at least one of my EDTEC classmates says his school is moving to that platform this fall. That's as in, high school, NOT college. I'm familiar with Blackboard, since that's what BSU uses, so I thought I'd wander around the website and see what I could find. Oh, and here's a link to a paper comparing Blackboard with Moodle: Learning Management Systems for the Workplace: A Research Report
And, what I found looks nice...I admit I haven't used it yet, but I'm thinking about creating a course for my emergency preparedness program and seeing what happens. (See this blog for that.) One thing I really like is that it provides a wiki capability. In my EDTEC class last semester we played around with a wiki -- and it was painful because it wasn't associated with Blackboard, the interface was (as a coworker described an application the other day) "user abusive" -- and I felt I always had to keep half a dozen windows open in order to do the tasks. Having the wiki integrated with Blackboard would have been nice -- just another tab to work through. (Although Moodle admits their wiki isn't very powerful yet, but they're working on that.)
Surveys are also included as standard Moodle content. Again, I had to learn how to use Survey Monkey for this course (here's Kirk's bit on Survey Monkey) -- I admit -- the technology isn't usually difficult to learn -- it's the fear of going to a new place that I have to deal with -- but I like the one-stop-shop concept.
More on Moodle after I've actually registered and played with it a bit.
Resources:
http://moodle.org/
Winter, M. (2006). Learning management systems for the workplace: A research report (Electronic copy). Christchurch, NZ: Core Education Ltd. Retrieved July 18, 2007, from http://www.tanz.ac.nz/pdf/LMS_Final.pdf
And, what I found looks nice...I admit I haven't used it yet, but I'm thinking about creating a course for my emergency preparedness program and seeing what happens. (See this blog for that.) One thing I really like is that it provides a wiki capability. In my EDTEC class last semester we played around with a wiki -- and it was painful because it wasn't associated with Blackboard, the interface was (as a coworker described an application the other day) "user abusive" -- and I felt I always had to keep half a dozen windows open in order to do the tasks. Having the wiki integrated with Blackboard would have been nice -- just another tab to work through. (Although Moodle admits their wiki isn't very powerful yet, but they're working on that.)
Surveys are also included as standard Moodle content. Again, I had to learn how to use Survey Monkey for this course (here's Kirk's bit on Survey Monkey) -- I admit -- the technology isn't usually difficult to learn -- it's the fear of going to a new place that I have to deal with -- but I like the one-stop-shop concept.
More on Moodle after I've actually registered and played with it a bit.
Resources:
http://moodle.org/
Winter, M. (2006). Learning management systems for the workplace: A research report (Electronic copy). Christchurch, NZ: Core Education Ltd. Retrieved July 18, 2007, from http://www.tanz.ac.nz/pdf/LMS_Final.pdf
Labels: Blackboard, content, management, Moodle, open source, survey, system, wiki
posted by Karen | 12:15 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home