Moodle birthing

I have generally been a teacher approaching Moo from the front-end. My interest has always been from a curriculum focus – what new tools I can incorporate into my courses to inspire my students.

Today, however, I became a back-end fella, and installed Moodle to run locally on my own machine.

I had a couple of reasons for doing so; firstly, I have been asked to be part of the process to phase in Moodle at another school. The second reason is simply curiousity.

I found the installation process to be pretty fascinating. Having downloaded the install pack, and already having a webserver running locally, installing and starting up Moo was a sinch! Literally a 5 minute job. Knowing what I know already about Moo, I was able to set up a few users and courses and began nutting out how to enrol one into the other…..

Anyway enough of techie stuff. what I found quite thought provoking was the sheer emptiness of the site once it is up and running, even with a couple of courses created. Our e-learning developer has spent the better part of 3 years building the monster that is now our multi-campus college moodle site, and I had to stop and reflect on the sheer volume of development that has gone into making a really neat, tight LMS.

It struck me that to make a site that really works on a curriculum level, a serious amount of planning, and thought needs to go into the ‘what-goes-where’ questions. I remember having arguments with our Moodle-development committee trying to decide how to create the links to separate Primary from Secondary, and one campus from another. Let’s not even get started on the difficulties we faced considering how to create links to subjects that had students taking the class cross-campus.  But if the site is to be student-friendly (and novice IT teacher friendly), this needs to be thought through.

The other thing that the blank canvas made me consider is the many uses of Moodle. Having adopted moodle at an ‘in-construction’ phase, the new courses we inherited already had some basic formatting and topic titles added. Yet when the course is empty, one tends to consider how many possibilities there are for a moodle course. Extra-curricular pages, welfare pages, pages for year levels…the list is endless and only limited by your imagination.

The thing I have come to love about Moo is its flexibility, the variety of ways in which you can use its courses, and the way that a teacher can shape a course to suit their needs. The other big positive with Moodle is the way it promotes collaboration, but more on that another time…….

A classroom without Moodle

I teach senior IT, and am faced with a session without PCs.  This means no typing, no Internet, and most troubling no Moodle.  Our Careers guys are comendeering my lab for an afternoon, so we have to move on.  To make this just a little more interesting, I will be out on PD on that day.

We had a Moodle dropout last week, (see previous post.)  Stuffed up my whole day.  At least this time I have some warning.

So what are we going to do?  If the class had PCs and Moodle but no Me, no problem.  Write up a quiz or a webquest and away they go.  Would be a dream of an extra class to pick up.  But no Moodle!

I decided, on agreeing to give up my lab, that completing a task on paper is no big deal – the kids have to do this in exams anyway, and it is a good exercise to remind them that they have tobe able to verbalise IT concepts, not just do it on a computer.  It is planning the tasks for the class that is getting me down; no previously posted resources, no scanned textbook pages, no messaging instructions, no clever web2 tools to liase with.  It will have to be a case of read this bit in your text book, now do this.  I am going to have to type up instructions and print them out!  Ughh.

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Well the session has come and gone and the kids coped without Moodle.  I guess that they slipped back into paper and pen mode a lot more easily than I did.  I hear that the students made good use of their session and worked away pretty well at the paper tasks set.

Yet, by the time the next opportunity to deal with the info came around, it seems that most of the students had manage to lose their bits of paper.  I can’t help thinking that with a PC and moodle available, students would have completed the task, saved their work and then uploaded the completed assignment for me to grade.   Perhaps the students had no idea what to do with bits of paper, as I have not done photocopying for IT for years.  Perhaps Moodle and online facilities make students less inclined to be organised with hard copies?

Food for thought.

The day Moodle died….

We had a storm here last weekend which took out our WAN. We arrived to work on Monday with no Email, no Internet and NO MOODLE!

As my computer tried to log on, I wrote a list of things to do for the day. On discovering that Moodle was down, I immediately crossed off half of the things on the list to be dealt with when the WAN woke up.

My morning then consisted of things I had been putting off for a while; sort out my budget, worked on some IT tutorials the old-fashioned way (in Word grrrr,) twiddled my thumbs trying to work out how my day suddenly became so defragemented…. .

Got to thinking about how much my day now revolves around access to Moodle.  With all my curriculum being replicated online, it made it exceedingly difficult to generate anything new.  I tend to be quite anal in my teaching resources anyway, so I make a lot of new resources. I have spent much of the last week developing tutorials for Access databases.  I decided it was time to fully embrace Web2 and do this online as a wiki.  I figure that I can then update my tutes over time with new ideas or better ways of doing things.  If the kids find a better way, then heaven forbid…they could add to the resources themselves.  Teacher losing control of class….ahhhhgh   With Moodle down, all that ground to a halt. Lots of our curriculum materials are now also stored or interfaced with via Moodle.  So the storm put an end to that as well.

Happily, our technicians restored access to Moo by lunchtime, so the universe righted itself once again.  The experience made me realise how much we now rely upon online content to get through our day.  I was also reminded how much I have come to rely upon the tools and resources that Moodle does so well.

Oh Moodle!  How shall I ever live without thee?
In fact, a colleague of mine turned down a job offer in another school as they didn’t have a decent LMS.  Well not Moo anyway.

Moodle – silly name for a wonderful tool

12 months ago, our school introduced Moodle as our LMS.  What this program with the silly name achieved was a revolution on how those of us who are IT minded worked. 
As Moodle is web based, and therefore accessible outside of school, we effectively became a 24/7 classroom, where students are able to access resources for their studies anywhere, any time.
As we have broadened our knowledge of the tools Moodle uses, I have come to love it and wonder how I ever taught without it.

More on Moo soon…….