My Overall Moodle Experience
Below is a copy of my overall Moodle experience that I posted to the Course Site page of this blog. I thought it might make sense to copy it to this part of my ePortfolio as well seeing as though it fits in this category too.
About my overall Moodle experience…
My Moodle experience was an interesting one. As I have mentioned some time previously, I am a relative neophyte when it comes to this technology. I was a bit apprehensive when I learned I would be faced with not only the challenge of creating a Moodle Site, but also sharing my creation with my peers. The thought of being judged by those that have more experience and skill than I do left an uneasy feeling in my stomach. I have to be honest, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. Once I got “my feet wet” the learning curve was relatively steep.
Creating a site for me would and did take a lot of time. Personally, I didn’t mind the extra effort because I viewed this as an exercise that could be described as short-term pain for long-term gain. Creating a Moodle site did take a lot of my time initially, but after creating all of this work I know I will be able to use it for long periods of time in the future. I also noticed that as I got more comfortable with Moodle, creating documentation became far less time consuming. For me, the pros FAR OUT-WEIGHED the cons. I can say for certain that I will be using Moodle in the very near future. I will continue to build my site over the next few months and will launch it in September at the start of the next school year (I better be teaching Engineering again!).
Perhaps my single-most memorable Moodle experience occurred this afternoon at school. I was putting the finishing touches on my site at lunch today at school. I was checking to make sure that all of the pages loaded properly when a couple of colleagues dropped by to have a chat. They looked in at what I was doing so I asked them to navigate the site and give me their impressions. They were so impressed that they asked if I would lead them in a Professional Development session on Moodle next month. I have to admit that it felt pretty darn good to have fellow teachers (that teach Info Tech) to ask me for help – until now it has been the other way around! At a time or nervousness (about to submit my site for evaluation) this was the best possible compliment I could receive. Some may like what I have done and some may think it is rather elementary. But for me, it is pretty much exactly what I was looking to create.
Cheers
~ Ryan