What do you do for advanced Moodle users in PD?

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Frank
Any suggestions for pd homework so my Moodle high flyers don't get bored?

This is a great question. I have a few quick options off the top of my head. 
  1. Explore the MoodleNews blog there are tons of little articles about the cool features of Moodle there.
  2. Explore features in the Moodle Documentation that are advanced but cool. I would recommend starting with Glossary, Workshop, Conditional, Social Topics Course Format, Choices, and Wiki. Also the Moodle Documentation pages on philosophy and pedagogy are great reading and help you start to understand not only Moodle, but how technology can changes teaching and learning. I put this list from the pedagogy page in front of my staff every year. I ask them to reflect on where they were and where they are now and where they would like to go. I wish I had them write down those reflection every year, it would have been a powerful assessment of the program.
  3. Around The Corner is another good blog with a lot about Moodle. Explore.
  4. Another challenge I give teachers at workshops is to think how it would change their assignments if student had to post the answers in a public forum. This starts to get at the changes we would like to see in student work where they have to write responses to our creative prompts that are unique to them. 
  5. I am not sure I would teach this again, but it is compelling for some teachers. Have them look over the quiz question import tools and experiment with importing questions. Better yet, have them prepare a presentation on importing questions and share it with the faculty.
I hope some of this helps. Moodle has been invaluable in our transition to a digital environment. 

Moodle User Groups

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 9:36 PM, Nate wrote:
Hi Jim,

I am a member of the Yahoo PowerSchool User Group and learn a ton from it each day.  Have you joined any Moodle User groups that you would suggest? 
Thanks,
Nate

I mainly do two things. First, I subscribe via RSS to the moodle.org forums that interest me. Second, I also subscribe to this moodle RSS feed bundle. That bundle might seem like too much, so the two blogs I always read in the bundle are MoodleNews and Around the Corner. 

Interior Table Borders In Moodle 2.1 Course Content

I have had several questions about the interior borders of tables as we have moved to Moodle 2.1 from 1.9. In the new HTML editor is not as clear how to edit table properties and the default table border color for interior borders seems to be set to white. Once you have a table there are a lot more options, but you have to right click on a cell when editing a cell. Then you get a whole menu of options. The screen cast allows you to see how to change the default color of you borders to black in the table you are working on.

Transition to Moodle 2: The Switch Role To Menu Has Moved

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 2:22 PM, Bob

wrote:
HI, Jim,

Any way to toggle between teacher view and student view in Moodle when I'm logged in? Am I missing something?

Bob

I searched and searched for the relocated location of this incredibly popular and important peice of a moddle course that allows a teacher to see what a students would see. This setting has moved from a menu at the top to a menu in the side bar below the Edit Settings link. See the attached screen shot.

2,500,000 Attempts

I am upgrading the schools Moodle server this week. We were using Moodle before Moodle was cool. The very first course ever created in our Moodle was Peterson Independent Research in Physics.

I love Moodle. It is the perfect mix of teacher and school terms, ease of use and student flexibility. It is the glue that holds together our one-to-one MacBook program. Teachers feel comfortable moving their lessons into Moodle. They get it right away. They have this blank nice looking page, and they add familiar items like assignments and resources and quizzes.

At my first ever whole faculty training on using the Moodle quiz module I spent the first hour trying to move the teachers off from the idea that you had to use it for quizzes. I had them brainstorm other uses for it. I showed them ideas I had been using in my classroom with pre-assessment and formative assessment.

Wednesday I am pulling the plug on Moodle 1.9.9 and moving to Moodle 2.1. This is not an upgrade for the feint of heart. As part of this upgrade there is huge change in the way the quiz engine works, and I was presented along the way with a statistic. In all the years we have had Moodle it has stored every quiz attempt ever taken. This sits in our database, and the total attempts at quizzes are 2,500,000.

Our school mission is, "Equipping minds and nurturing hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ." My question: would we have advanced our mission more by giving 2.5 million quizzes, or if we had instead applied our learning to make 2.5 million edits to the Wikipedia?

Aspen Learning

Tim,
Dan and I had dinner with a guys last night from Aspen Learning. Here is in a nutshell what they sell. A 1U server that runs a very modified Moodle with other open source software and SMB. You plug it into you network and upload a .csv of users, passwords and emails, and you have a server for file storage, classroom activities, blogs (they do not use the moodle blog server) and everything else you need to have a good one to one program. Pretty cool technology.

By the way, when I talked about funding for their company the guy told us he was at Apple and presented an intelligent keyboard to their product people 15 years ago. They did not want to market it, but they allowed him to start his own company. He named it AlphaSmart. This company is what he started when he sold AlphaSmart.

--jim
Jim Peterson
Teacher and Technology Coordinator
Holland Christian High School
http://frufra.blogspot.com/