Life after Moodle :( or maybe not?

I have been using Moodle for sometime now and it has been quite effective at getting teachers to engage with using ICTs in their teaching and learning. However, a recent slide-share presentation, see below, has got me thinking about the possibilities after Moodle. My work colleagues would be shocked to hear that I am contemplating learning and teaching without Moodle - because I really adore it - it has served a wonderful purpose of engaging teachers at my school and opening up the classroom, but.... maybe

Future of the LMS - towards a more open and personalised learning environment

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I think it maybe a bit premature to walk out on Moodle for one main reason, it provides a place that my students and teachers come to to start learning. Ok at times some courses can be a bit dull but there is no reason Moodle cannot be used as a place from which to leap into the wider web and return to in order to consolidate a learning journey.

For now I will re-frame my idea of Moodle as "The Classroom" - I find that learning is happening within non-physical space and Moodle serves as a common location, a point, an island in a sea of chattering hyperlinks, images and online video.Whereas the physical classroom serves as a place for students to come together face to face, learning within a physical dynamic environment, to (be) at and with(in) a learning context rather than just attend to mentally, the physical classroom as learning embodied . In contrast Moodle often is "The Classroom" a simulation of the linearity of the Lesson Plan, a beginning a middle and an end, temporal and bound despite it social constructivist origins; I wonder has its success and malleability resulted in its becoming an antithesis to is social constructivist origins?  

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Getting teachers to use Moodle

Currently I administer a Moodle for a secondary school and I am also currently developing a second for our other campus. One question that always comes my way is how do you get the recalcitrant to use Moodle. The answer is I don't, the students do. After awhile most teachers get on board, it is a slow process but slowly is the best way to go. Usually I focus my attention on the keen but technically challenged teachers and encourage them to have a go, this is always supported by one on one help. Over the past four years and three implementations this appears to be the best way to go, find an interested teacher and give them one on one help and hopefully others will follow. It is impossible for one person to adequately train a large number of teachers of various capabilities and motivation but get a few key people on the band wagon and this is a good start. What is cool is that students do actually appreciate Moodle even though many will not admit it in front of their peers.

Creating a Moodle Quiz

A great tutorial on how to set up a Quiz in Moodle, quizzes are really good for checking understanding, revision of key concepts and giving immediate feedback to students. You are all most probably saying but when will I find the time to write these. I suggest get each teacher in your faculty to log into the course and write a couple of questions each then construct the quiz from these. Even better break your students up into groups, group one for questions, and group two for answers. Get the students to write the quizzes and answers and upload them as a txt file so you can copy and paste them with little trouble over to the question bank.

Moodle the step by step process

A recent post ( I can't for the life of me find it !) by a Moodler talks about how often Moodles are just static sites with little interaction. While this is most probably the case in many implementations it does not mean that all Moodle sites need to be this way. This has led me to think about how we move from what I call the upload/download step to the interactive step. I tend to divide Moodle rollouts and implementations into a series of steps, this helps explain to others particularly management what is going on because I believe e-learning roll outs are slow iterative and almost organic process.

Step 1 – Getting it up and running, test it and setting up the look of the site

Step 2 – bit of content to get things going

Step 3 – cultivating your Moodle Champions

Step 4 – training, passing it onto your Champions

Step 5 – ramping up the user experience

Step 6 – users creating gravity

Step 7- retraining your Champions and getting them to pass on the knowledge

Step 8 -looking back and asking what has been achieved

Moodle, Wikis, and Blogs for teaching

This is a great idea for getting started with online learning in your classroom