West Midlands Moodle Users Forum, 23rd January 2012
From RSCWMWiki
Contents |
Forum Hosting
Many thanks to our hosts South Staffordshire College for providing the venue for this forum at their Rodbaston Campus.
The next forum will be hosted by Stoke-on-Trent College, in May, date to be arranged.
If you would like to host the Autumn forum please email Allen Crawford-Thomas email a.crawford-thomas@rsc-wm.ac.uk
Moodle 2 Update
- Paul Dyson and Roland Sherwood, Solihull College, presented an insightful overview of their work flow and plans to update to Moodle 2.2 ready for September 2012: Creating a Moodle V2.2 Roadmap at Solihull College
Forum members discussed their progress towards implementation of Moodle 2
It was established that some favoured plug-ins from V1.9 would not function in V2 but that other new resources had became available. It is intended to produce and share a list of these plugins this academic year.
Other noteable comments concerning Moodle 2 were:
- the file picker is very different
- the wiki has improved functionality
- Themes for Moodle 2 seem impressive and move mobile Moodle forward considerably
- Despite the above statement issues were found to exist with Android phones
Other topics discussed included:
- Moodle security and issues with pop ups
- The use of ready made content open educational resources(OER)andSCORM packages (learning objects).
Your Moodle Stories
The predominant them in all our January Moodle stories centred on benchmarking standards, helping to address staff development needs both with the goal of providing quality in teaching and learning. All three stories that were discussed at this forum made use of criteria for standards, some of these have kindly been shared by their creators with the Moodle forum community. In line with Creative CommonsLicencing please acknowledge the orginal source of these resources when you make use of them.
- Moodle medals - criteria document created by Mike Green, Sixth Form College Solihull
- Moodle maturity - self evaluation criteria questionnaire and self evaluation standards, created by Richard Booth, Shrewsbury College.
- Creating a new course discussed
Case Studies relevant to the discussed Moodle stories
Free Resources for your Moodle
Using Moodle 2 - instructional videos from Newman University College on You Tube
One for later in the year ie the run up to Christmas (nothing like starting to prepare early!) The 12 days of Educational Technology resource Steve Wileman, South Staffs College recommended this at the forum, telling us it was extremely popular, he elaborates on why with this comment "The course is full of nifty tricks, websites and tools, that may help you embed Elearning into your delivery."
Jorum - JISC database of OER's for you to search. Also look at the feature resources on the home page.
For more on open educational resources contact me christa.appleton@rsc-wm.ac.uk
Creating Learning Objects for embedding in Moodle
Xerte online Toolkits free - easy for the non-technical to use.
Course Lab free without ppt convertor, convertor available in premium version
eXe learning free - requires some technical knowledge
ispring free PowerPoint to Flash Converter.
SWFPrinterPro Produces Flash SWF files (plus other formats) "ideal for fast to screen and protected status delivery" (Steve Blakemore)
Metamorphosis Commercial - enquire for costs, free 7 day trial available.
Contacts and keeping informed
You can keep in touch with other Moodlers via JISC mail: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/
- If you are not already a member we recommend you join the regional group Moodle-WM: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/MOODLE-WM
- There is also a national group: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/MOODLE-UK
- Moodle docs offers also offers a community forum plus Moodle news, help documents and downloads: http://moodle.org/
Moodle Books for Reference
A selection of books for teachers and technicians
