After getting my Moodle site set up I thought I would try the toolkit activity. Previously, I have read materials about Moodle and the functions that it is capable of performing but I have never used a Moodle site as a teacher or as a student.
Overall, my experience was more positive than negative. I was able to complete the activity in about 10 minutes and I felt that I learned some new things. However, I relied heavily on the instructions from the activity. I consider myself to be very self-directed when it comes to new technology. I can usually open a brand new program and figure it out with maybe only minor help from a “help” menu or instructions. This was the case for me in learning Mediawiki, Fetch (FTP), iWeb, iMovie, CMaps and more. My fear with Moodle is that without direct instruction I won’t know how to proceed with some of the functions. In creating a discussion forum, it was obvious to me that I would select “add an activity-forum”. The questions for me came when I got to the creation screen and there were all of these drop down menus with default settings. I wasn’t sure if I should keep the default setting or if I should change it. I see that I will potentially have difficulties in this area…. for example, I don’t know what “aggregate type” refers to nor did I make sense of any of the options in the drop down menu. I assume that with time, I will figure these out. After all, Moodle has probably just assigned names to things that I might normally know but not by a particular name. I do anticipate having to spend a great deal of time learning about all of these options before becoming comfortable with Moodle.
On the upside, the links to further resources were helpful and there is a lot of self-directed teaching about the functions of Moodle on the web, similar to learning Mediawiki.