So, today I took the time to work through some of the E-learning Kit activities for Moodle. I created a welcome page as well as a discussion forum, and you know what? I’m impressed. I have heard a lot about Moodle in the past; the good, the bad, and the ugly. But today I discovered – it really isn’t all that bad. The first thing I did was create the Welcome page – simple, and straightforward. I did find that the instructions weren’t spot on, but I was able to work through the holes – perhaps the Wiki is just out of date… I think the next step is to make the page more “welcoming” rather than just having some text – I’ll play with the HTML and see if I can’t throw a simply repeating image in the background… something to break up the static grey. After the welcome I decided to make one more page – just to make sure that I had it down, so I created an “About me” page, and threw a picture in there. It would be nice if the editor allowed some manipulation of the image (float left etc) but i managed to make it look ok.

Following the page exercise I created the discussion forum. I found that the instructions in the Wiki were WAY off on this one, but I managed to make that one work as well. I went along with the icebreaker idea and invited students to answer 3 questions from a bank of a dozen or so “interesting” questions. A fun simple exercise to hopefully get students typing…

Again, over all a simple experience that took me around 30 min in total to complete. I know that as I work through this assignment i will need to be very cognizant of the time as I can get very caught in the minutia, and not finish the bigger picture as I get lost in the details!. But in the end I enjoyed the opportunity and am beginning to look at how I can start to introduce the Moodle environment into our district infrastructure… slow and steady wins the race. I will introduce it at a tech meeting I am running tomorrow with teachers from all the schools, and we will see where it goes.

until next time – happy Moodling! 🙂