Adventures with Moodle
by Deborah S ~ June 2nd, 2011. Filed under: Uncategorized.I had an opportunity to play in the sandbox on the Moodle.org site. I have never used Moodle before but have heard really good things about it. I found the process to be fun and manageable.
Observations
I found navigating to be quite intuitive and getting from page to page was pretty painless. I also liked the fact that the functions of the buttons appear in text when you hover over them (similar to Microsoft Office). For a first-time user, this was very helpful as I didn’t have to memorize what each button did or continually refer to user documentation.
The process did not take that long once I figured out how things worked. I was able to add a couple of activities, and played around with adding a YouTube video as well as a link to a URL.
What Worked Well
As mentioned above, the ease of navigation was a nice surprise. I had an opportunity to set up some true/false questions under “assessment”. I liked the fact that I could place text to appear when a student answered correctly or incorrectly. The ability to get immediate feedback is something we’re trying to move toward in my board and this would be a great tool for accomplishing it. In addition to giving students the correct answer when they answer incorrectly, I could also add some encouraging words to prompt them to continue.
I also liked the fact that I could hide or delete some blocks in order to customize the course. I didn’t care for the layout of the main page when I loaded it up so I’m glad I have an option to customize it.
What Was Challenging
I have an idea about how I want my final project to look and was trying to play around in the sandbox to see if I could figure out how to get there. I still have more investigating to do!
Surprises
I was pleasantly surprised at the functionality that Moodle has. I can bring in PowerPoint files, YouTube videos, link to URLs, set up RSS feeds, and have lots of choice regarding types of assessment. It had more functionality than I was expecting. I’m very excited about building my course site!
June 2nd, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Put your hand on your heart and repeat after me:
“I will not use Moodle to distribute Powerpoints, PDFs and Word files. I promise to create proper HTML pages that load within Moodle. I will ensure my learners can access the content directly online, though I may choose to add a PDF link for a downloadable version to read offline.”
Thank you! 🙂