Image Source: http://news-political.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/reject.jpg

Disclaimer: At the risk of attracting the ire of an editor and colleague, I found out recently that this proposed book chapter for Moodle had been rejected (don’t worry, I’ve written a whole other version closer to form required and I have higher hopes for it).

This version is an amalgamation of various items I’ve written for Moodle. If you’ve been following what I’ve written about Moodle in the past, you’ll recognize some items…note that this is a failed draft…it won’t be revised anytime soon, but may have valuable Moodle info all in one place for those not familiar with the originals.

And, one more disclaimer…it is a FIRST draft. There are some grammatical errors but I share them here in the interests of slaying the idea that everything I write is perfect (you have no idea how many times I get that, and I feel obligated to point out that my writing is flawed in many ways).

More on Moodle – http://mguhlin.net/moodle

Introduction
Access to free, web-based solutions–often in spite of school district network technicians best efforts to stop them–are changing how we work. Yet, access to these technologies in many districts remains a dream. School districts have worked to block our access to these technologies out of fear. Many educators are left trying to pick the “school district” lock that forces them to use only what has been approved by the “curriculum illuminati” in K-12 schools. In stark contrast to these restrictions, Moodle exists as a compromise, a trojan horse of Read/Write Web technologies, serving as a tool to develop engaging virtual learning opportunities for adult and K-12 learners. Are you Moodlin’ yet?

WHAT is Moodle?

“What’s a Moodle? Noodle?” asked a classroom teacher at a workshop. I laughed at her bewildered look as I explained that Moodle is a virtual classroom. You can easily arrangement instructional materials, activities, facilitate discussions online. Moodle allows you to create an online learning center for you and your students to work in that is safe and allows you to extend learning beyond the classroom walls. For many, Moodle is one-stop shopping solution for blogs, wikis, podcasts, survey questionnaires that print incredible graphs, quizzes; take grades, and institute online forums with attachments.

When the classroom door closes, teachers and students are able to teach and learn without prying eyes and interference. Changing standards such as those from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) require extending learning beyond the classroom walls. While there are various Web 2.0 tools that can be adapted for school use, one tool is of particular interest to teachers and administrators who need to ensure safe virtual learning spaces for their students. In a world where every education vendor has an expensive solution sure to break your budget, the free, open source Moodle can be one solution that transforms perceptions of online learning at the campus and district level. Many school districts are using Moodle, a course management system, that helps teachers and administrators move their learning conversations, engage learners–not just in the classroom but across the globe–with a variety of activities.

WHY is Moodle a useful tool?

For veteran Web 2.0 users–like many of our students who carry more computing power in their pocket–who “power down” when they come into K-12 schools, Moodle comes replete with blogs, forums, RSS feeds, wikis and more that enable it to be seen as an “absolute good” that opens the door, that enables powerful ideas to slay the fears that leaders hold. In many schools, it can become the technology that ensures communication, collaboration, and global learning do become the predominant learning tool, without losing that academic focus.As a classroom teacher conducting class, or principal leading a book study, I can engage students with a rich variety of activities built-into Moodle.

Every day we balance the unknown against the risks we know. The risks of putting children on the open Internet, appropriating virtual spaces for use with children is becoming accepted practice. “I don’t want to have that conversation,” told me one technology administrator speaking as a parent, “with my seven year old. That’s why we block,” she told me as I advocated the use of a Web 2.0 tool. Every time you ask school districts to “unfilter” a new Web 2.0 tool (and there are hundreds you can pick from), someone will ask you, “Is this safe? How are you going to use this to enhance instruction and district curricular objectives?” Inserting students into Web 2.0 tools can bring all these questions to the forefront in parents’ minds. With Moodle, that conversation has already been had. There are thousands of educators who are using Moodle every day with K-Adult age learners in a variety of situations, from public schools to private to higher education to business. When you have that flexible a tool at your fingertips, you realize that you are only limited by your imagination.

While teachers are locked away in their classrooms, in boxes locked tight by federal and state expectations, using Moodle to build online learning communities has had a profound impact. The impact has been on those of us who design and facilitate virtual learning experiences, but also on teachers who thought they had forgotten how to learn, who never imagined their district had the wherewithal to craft engaging, authentic, high-tech professional learning. I invite you to join us, not as expert designers of online learning, but as voyagers in virtual exploration.While teachers are locked away in their classrooms, in boxes locked tight by federal and state expectations, using Moodle to build online learning communities has had a profound impact. The impact has been on those of us who design and facilitate virtual learning experiences, but also on teachers who thought they had forgotten how to learn, who never imagined their district had the wherewithal to craft engaging, authentic, high-tech professional learning.

Moodle can also be used to enhance campus communications, district/campus level book studies, professional learning follow-up, facilitation of online professional learning, and more. Here are some examples:

1. Facilitating Online Learning Environments for K-12 Students – Teachers and students can experience the fun of literature circles online, communicating and collaborating with literature groups around the world. This is but one of the many uses Moodle can be put to in a K-12 classroom. Tomaz Lazic, an Australian, Moodle-using educator, shares several possibilities, such as 1) Quizzes (great for literacy, can include pictures and videos in quizzes not just text) for their instant feedback and possibility of scaffolding to mastery (probably ungraded); 2) Lessons that take students from one stage to another exploring things; 3) Wikis where students can build things together as a group; 4) Keeping a Journal (e.g. My Family); 5) Enable students to use a chatroom or forum to generate their own writing, creating the possibility of discussing responsible use of these tools; 6) Online display of class work, projects, video clips of ‘making cardboard city’ for their parents to see by using Webpage; and 7) Record their work or play on video camera and post it on Moodle (great for active kids! they do the funniest and sometimes best things when the camera is on).

   Some of the exciting ways that Moodle is being used in K-12 are exemplified in the links below:

1. Our Lady’s Catholic High School – http://vle.olchs.lancs.sch.uk/
2. MSD of Perry Township – http://bradley.msdpt.k12.in.us/
3. San Antonio ISD –http://intouch.saisd.net/opencampus
   
2. Facilitating District Communications – District leaders use Moodle to facilitate book studies with staff, build virtual spaces that enable communication that are restricted to district participants, as well as engage the community in dialogue about proposed changes to schools.
3. Creating Virtual Spaces for Support of Initiatives – Often, initiatives are launched in a school district and the only support you see is what you get through an impersonal web site and a monthly meeting. In contrast, Moodle’s discussion forums and feedback tools (e.g. modules like feedback and questionnaire) allow you always keep in touch with those responsible for the launch of a program. Questions are asked when they arise, and responded to, rather than a month later. One of my experiences was using the DimDim Module (http://tinyurl.com/cbr4fy) to present to over 80 participants–it looks a little like Elluminate, the commercial tool that is popularly used in K-12 Online Conference and Classroom 2.0 LIVE venues–about campus technology representative meeting content.
4. Facilitate Online Professional Learning Opportunities for District Educators – At a time when time to travel from one campus to another for training is becoming more of, let’s be honest, an inconvenience and an expense, Moodle can be employed for professional learning. In my district, we have an Introduction to Online Learning course that we are offering to teachers, as well as a host of other courses that are just now under development for in-house use. Instead of facilitating 30-hour courses (e.g. such as those we’ve purchased from PBS TeacherLine), our in-house courses are much shorter.
1. Bluebonnet Conference 2008 – http://www.edlink12.net/moodle/course/view.php?id=5 – This is a virtual learning space to enhance the Bluebonnet Conference held in 2008. Some conferences are now enhancing what they are doing face to face with online learning opportunities available through Moodle. This makes it possible to offer your campus, district, regional conference online as well as face to face with discussion forums, wikis, audio/video podcasts of presentations. Like Bluebonnet Conference Moodle, you can require people to login so you can easily track visitors and keep them up to date via the News Forum.
2. Lackland ISD – http://lacklandisd.mrooms.org/ – Note that I would avoid grouping all the content for K-12 students and adult learners in one Moodle, as this site has done. However, it’s not uncommon to see new implementations of Moodle in K-12 display this organization. At first, we all fall prey to “One Moodle to rule them all,” if you’ll forgive the allusion to Lord of the Rings.
3. Southern Education and Library Board – http://clounagh.org/
4. San Antonio ISD – http://intouch.saisd.net/plc

ENHANCING INSTRUCTION WITH MOODLE

Wondering how Moodle can be used to enhance instruction? Well, here’s a list that came my way via Ken Task in Texas, and to which fellow educator, Dan McGuire, volunteered to add more to. The following is a list of some of what you can do with Moodle, the free, open source course management system. The list comes from Ken Task, who cites ISTE Moodle Ning and Susan Sedro.

Scenario 1: Student Blogging
Students can record their impressions and reactions to events and activities presented throughout the school year. Reflection on what is learned is critical for both students and teachers. Using the built-in blogging tools, Moodle can be used to facilitate reflection of online and offline learning activities. Furthermore, these activities can be enhanced through the use of additional modules that can be installed on Moodle. For example, if you are working with second language learners, students can record audio that is embedded in discussion forums and blogs. Using Real Simple Syndication (RSS), this audio can be published as a podcast without any extra effort on the part of the teacher, aside from initial setup.

Of course, if this work is to remain between student and teacher–replacing those cumbersome folders and Mead notebooks–then the students and the instructor are the only ones that can see the blog entries. In other words, students cannot see other students’ blogs. This activity will be graded on a rubric and after the grading, students will be able to see other student blogs.

Scenario 2: Tracking Student Content with RSS
Many of the activities in Moodle have Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. RSS is critical to the idea of Web 2.0 because any content you can create, others can subscribe to if RSS is enabled. If you setup several discussion forums in a course, it can be difficult to track them across multiple periods, especially at the high school level. To facilitate awareness concerning new information in each of them, teachers, parents, and students can subscribe to the RSS feed for each of the forums. These can be managed in a locally installed RSS reader (e.g. Feedrocket for Windows, NetNewsWire for Mac) or a web-based RSS reader (e.g. Bloglines.com, Google Reader). Either way, instead of having to visit the discussion forums to see what has changed a la Web 1.0, interested parties can subscribe to the content and be updated when it changes via RSS.

Scenario 3: Podcasting with Moodle
This school year, an urban school district joined the ranks of many that are using iPods to facilitate second language learning. Using iPods or MP3 players, content can be loaded on those video/audio media can be loaded on these portable media devices. However, with a little planning, you are not limited to just loading content from sources like United Streaming and other third party vendors. Students can create their own content using the Audio Recorder Module in Moodle (there are other modules, too) and those can be shared as part of the RSS feed that students subscribe to. In other words, digital video/audio can feature student-created content–such as reflections on the instructional content being shared with them–alongside the commercial content, such as that coming from United Streaming. Using the podcast module in Moodle, both students and teacher can post podcasts that can be subscribed to in iTunes or via RSS readers (e.g. GoogleReader).

Scenario 4: Peer Review
Whether you are working as an English/Language Arts teacher or in a different content area, the ability to share work online and get it peer-reviewed is a valuable skill. While many of us are familiar with writing groups that review content, this idea of reviewing content in a safe, virtual space is foreign to us. Moodle enables this by allowing students to write something (e.g. personal narrative, essay) and allow peer review. Students are placed in collaborative groups and each student reviews the short stories of other members in their group. Each student can critique and offer suggestions to their teammates as well as be graded. When peer review is complete, students are encouraged to revise their written pieces and place them online for publication.

Using a wiki, student groups can collaborate on create resources for each other about a particular topic or learning objectives.

Scenario 5: Online Student-Teacher Collaboration
High school students often have a need to learn academic topic in a social environment. This can often involve students connecting after-hours in a Moodle course. Moodles built-in collaboration tools that are synchronous (e.g. live chat) and instant messaging that can be archived (as often required to satisfy safety requirements for use of chat in schools). In addition to student-to-student conversations, teachers can also host after-hours “office hours” online that can include audio conversations in a safe online environment. Modules and customizations (Tip: Use NanoGong) enable enable voice support for Moodle. For example, one module to facilitate this is NanoGong. Its authors describe it in this way:

The NanoGong activity is an exercise that can be put on a course. Every student in the course can submit several voice recordings together with optional text messages using the activity. Teachers in the course can then examine these submissions, give comments and assign a score to each of them.

Combining voice, text, chat communications can definitely turbo-charge your interactions with students. While you could use a variety of Web 2.0 tools to provide this kind of support, Moodle centralizes the tool-set that you use with your students in a context you can actually introduce at school.

Scenario 6: Connecting with Parents
Parents often seek information about helping their child in something. I want to allow parents of my students to be able to access my online class, see their childs work ONLY, and interact with me online during after school office hours. I want to do this inside the online system. Dan McGuire shares the following about his experiences using Moodle with 4th grade students:

As you can see from Dan’s experience, Moodle was able to involve people from within and outside the classroom, engaging all in a learning conversation that benefited students.

Scenario 7: International Community Conversations
No matter what your content area, students and teachers are engaged when they can connect to primary sources. One such activity can involve the teaching of History and/or Social Studies. Imagine how students from your class can participate in a telecollaborative experiment with a class from another school, city, state, or country. Both classes would be able to access a single History course via the Moodle course where they can contribute a local multimedia history of their community and share that information. Moodle makes it very easy for both classes to embed content, such as from ShowBeyond.com or VoiceThread.com, in discussion forums and/or group blogs (Tip: Create group blogs with the OUBlog module).

Students in the local class concentrate on the local history of their community, while those in the other locale concentrate their media-collection and organization efforts on their own community. Students in both classes are able to work collaboratively to construct a local history, as well as create a photo gallery (Tip: Use Lightbox Gallery module), podcasts, post video/audio clips of historical locations within their own communities. The students from either sister community will be able to ask each other questions and share information (as well as files) in a safe online environment.

Scenario 8: Administrator Oversight
When introducing any virtual tool that involves students and adults interacting online, there can be concern about digital citizenship. Simply put, are students behaving well online? Campus–and district–administrators can login to teacher courses to see how these interactions are occurring and then provide helpful feedback to teachers and students. Valuable insights can be gained, not only into the teacher, but also how students are interacting (appropriately or no).

Scenario 9: Interactive Writing Feedback

Students can draft their writing in a word processor, then paste it into the Assignment module. The teacher can not only score it, but also provide feedback online without having to print out the content. It can also be useful to involve local university students to provide this feedback to students as peer editors for student work.

Scenario 10: Learning Diary with Teacher Feedback

Using the Learning Diary module, students can write about a particular assignment and I can respond and provide feedback without other students seeing that exchange. This replaces the old paper journal where students write questions, reflections and the teacher writes back.

Update to Scenario 10 by Dan McGuiere:

This worked well with in conjunction with particular reading assignments. I would usually post the questions that I wanted students for student response. It is especially useful to then ask for volunteers to let me show their work on the projector and make comments in writing on the screen. This is one of the best writing teaching tools since the invention of the pencil.. Most students at this age are eager to have their work critiqued in front of other students. I’ve found they actually enjoy doing editing, which is certainly not the case when you ask a nine year old to rewrite 200 words they’ve just struggled to get on paper with a pencil. The computer gives them a power with making words that they don’t have with a pencil and paper.

Scenario 11: Online Literature Circles
When you think of literature circles, we think of kids sitting in a circle reading books and sharing their thoughts on it based on the role they are assigned. Discussing books helps children build connections, sets a purpose for reading beyond the intrinsic motivation we all prize, and motivates them. It also helps them, read, observe, question, discuss, answer questions, and write about what they are reading. It’s a fantastic activity, rich with opportunities for reflective learning. Students can post online book talks to persuade other group membes to choose their book for literature circles, vote on book selections, and they use the Moodle discussion forums to discuss their book, upload images, etc.

Update to Scenario 11 (Contributed by Dan McGuire):

I used both the forum module and the workshop module to do writing circles. The forum module is a little easier to manage. I found setting up the workshop module to be still a bit cumbersome. I hope to practice with it more this year because I think it has tremendous possibilities.

The trick to using the forum module was that students were required to write something new about each of the prompts that were the forum topics. This forced the students to read what others had written and then got them back into the text because I insisted on quotes from the text to support their opinions. Students were only permitted to disagree with another student if they proved their point with quotes from the text.

HOW do you get started with Moodle?

School districts and individuals get started with Moodle in different ways. Some commonly asked questions about getting started with Moodle include the following:

Is Moodle a district subscription type site or can one teacher subscribe? Response: Moodle isn’t a district subscription type site, although you can certainly go through a 3rd party hosting provider that will setup the Moodle for you and then help you get going. You can find some of them online at http://tinyurl.com/d75lpv . Please be aware that there are usually costs for doing this. I would encourage you to work through channels in your District and setup a server and get it installed. It’s definitely worthwhile to have your own server. In my situation, we have active Moodle running on servers that do other things. The servers we buy are about $6-7K each.

You can also hire a Moodle hosting provider. That is, they support your Moodle for you. You can find a variety of web sites that will host Moodle for you. Here are a few listed below (check Moodle.org’s list, which is where some of these come from):

• Alpha One Moodle Hosting
• ClassroomRevolution.com (about $150 per year)
• Moodlerooms, Inc.
• NineHub
• Remote-Learner.net LLC

And a free hosting provider:

• SqoolTools

What questions do you need to ask? Well, I’m not sure. Here are some I’d consider:

• Are you running the latest version of PHP/MySQL and Moodle?
• How easy it is for me to add…themes, modules, blocks to my current Moodle installation?
• Is there a per user limit? How about a course limit?
• Will I have administrator rights on the Moodle?
• Can I implement ReCaptcha to protect against email spam?

There are many mentions that Moodle is free – a distinction: it is OPEN SOURCE, that means that you can download and use the program but there are costs involved in keeping the program running, support and servers to host it Response: The word “free” does not mean “no cost” but refers to the ethic of free software(http://tinyurl.com/4zrk3). The distinction to keep in mind is that while this is Free, Open Source Software (FOSS), there are costs in implementing the solution as measured by capital outlay (e.g. server(s) to host it), technical support personnel, etc.
Is there a good Moodle course out there for a district to introduce Moodle to a staff? I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Response: Yes, actually there are several courses out there, as well as tons of printable documentation (just google “Moodle tutorials”). From personal experience, I would start small with a few key items and use videos (http://moodletutorials.org is a great place to start) to introduce the concepts and possibilities.
Are there free courses that can be installed with Moodle, just to get started? Response: One of the daunting tasks of using Moodle is course development. Whether you are designing for educators or students, knowing how to start and where to start is important. In my urban school district, you can find a variety of courses to get you started for professional learning. Links to those courses can be found online at http://mguhlin.net/moodle . Some other sites where you can find free Moodle content online include: 1) SOS-SIG’s Collaborative Moodle – http://sos.tcea.org/coloodle/; 2) K-12 Open Source Ning – http://community.k12opensource.com/forum/topics/moodle-courses; 3) Learning ISD – http://moodle.learningisd.com/moodle/course/index.php; and, 4) Moodle Commons – http://moodlecommons.org/
How can I change the look of my Moodle once I set it up?
Response: Customizing Moodle’s look is a matter of changing its theme. Change the theme, and you change the whole look of the Moodle without affecting your content. You can find Moodle themes on the web and, if you know a little about cascading style sheets (CSS), you can make your own adjustments. There are several places to find free Moodle themes. Here are some that I’ve used successfully:

1. Moodle’ Web Site
2. ThemZa Moodle Themes – I love this site, it has tons of education friendly themes. Many thanks to the ThemZa folks!
3. Foodle Theme – A specific theme that purports to look like Facebook. It doesn’t exactly, but is nice nonetheless…I’m using this one in several sites for it’s simple look.
4. Brightly Colored Themes – “brightly colored themes based on standard themes”
5. New School Themes – Here are the free ones they offer:
   Anomaly Theme
   Simplicity Theme

If you ever decide to make your own themes–a task I’m not up to yet and may never be–here are some places to start for online tutorials:

• Make Your Own Theme
• Creating a Custom Theme
• Theme Basics
• MoodleMan’s series of video tutorials

Since Moodle is customizable to what you need, I’m often asked, “What additional modules can I install into my Moodle to achieve greater functionality?” Below is a list of some of my favorite Moodle add-ons:

Top Moodle Modules
(a Youtube video on how to install modules)

1. Assignment Rubrics – Allows you to grade assignments using a rubric.
2. Book – Multi-page resource with a book-like format
3. DimDim – Dimdim is the friendly Open Source web meeting. With Dimdim you can show Presentations, Applications and Desktops to any other person over the internet. You can chat, show your webcam and talk with others in the meeting. All this is possible without the attendees installing anything.
4. Certificate – Prints student’s name, date, course name, activity or course grade, other text, a code number, the teacher(s) names. Can choose to add images such as seals, logos and watermarks. Can be delivered in the browser, via email, or downloaded. Email alerts can be sent to teachers or others when certificates are issued.
5. Exabis ePortfolio – This module enables both Professional and Student Moodles as a repository for users’ to store top projects and more importantly, to allow file-sharing to classmates/teacher for review, collaboration or comments. Check it out for broader use across courses. It allows for collection of files, notes, hyperlinks, etc. and exports to SCORM. Items can be shared to all site users, only those in a common course, or individuals.
6. Feedback – “The Feedback module allows you to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback from students. It is smaller in scope and easier to use than the Questionnaire module, and unlike the Survey module allows you to write your own questions, rather than choose from a list of pre-written survey instruments” (Source: Kineo).
7. Group Selection – allows students to select the group they want to be members of.
8. Learning Diary – This module is used to combine the many Reflections into one ongoing diary, a much more efficient and appealing approach for adults. There are so many individual activities in each section that the list appeared exhaustive. It’s a 3rd Party Mod not hosted on Moodle.org.
9. Lightbox Gallery – This resource allows you to create ‘Lightbox’ enabled image galleries within your Moodle course.
10. OU Blog – Provides user and course blogs with comments.
11. OU Wiki – Simple, easy to use alternative to standard Moodle wiki
12. Questionnaire – Allows you to create custom surveys with graphed results pages.

And another one that looks interesting but I have yet to try – OpenShare.

Top Moodle Blocks

1. Analog Clock – Displays an analog clock.
2. Birthday – Displays today’s birthdays for Moodle users.
3. Course Management – Block used to schedule backup and restores and delete multiple courses
4. Course Menu block – Adds the folder navigation hierarchy on left of the course ~ big advantage on courses with a lot of topics and/or scrolling.
5. Course Size Report – List of courses with disk usage
6. iTunes University – Access iTunesU podcasts from Moodle; Allows for direct links to podcasts stored in an iTunes University space to be accessed from Moodle in a block using a configured iTunesU login.
7. Login/Logout – Block to login and exit moodle.

Top Filters

1. MultiMovie Filter – This filter allows to display inline videos from youtube, google and teachertube using one easy wiki-like syntax inside every Moodle content (see README.txt for info about the syntax).
2. Topic Tabs – Displaying courses in tabular links, also grouping all blocks and administration into one tab,
3. VoiceThread Embedding for Moodle – This plugin provides a simple, clean way to embed VoiceThread content in Moodle resources, pages, etc. It has full supports for VoiceThread sub-sites (i.e. you school’s own site).

WHERE can you find more information about Moodle?

If you are hoping to find more information about Moodle, I encourage you to visit the following web sites:

1. Moodle.org – This is where you can actually get Moodle and all the extra modules, blocks and filters mentioned here. There are also discussion forums where you can find answers to commonly asked questions.

2. MoodleTutorials.org – At this web site, you can find all kinds of how-to videos on Moodle contributed by Moodlers just like yourself. This is a rich resource. Of course, you can always search YouTube.com and Edublogs.tv for how-to Moodle videos and stories.
3. Moodle Habitudes (http://mguhlin.net/moodle) – This is my own online resource area for Moodle and you’ll find a rich collection of resources there, including a series of tips for enhancing Moodle for use in schools.
   

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure