Here's a great post from a blog I stumbled upon:
One of my favorite default Moodle features is the Glossary. I've worked with classrooms that use it to highlight the "food of the day", student profiles, websites and resources of interest in professional development settings and vocab words and key terms in classroom settings. There is so much you can do!
You can offer a rating system for definitions and even limit the rating so that only teachers can reward the entries.Here's a course that I made to illustrate the Moodle Glossary and how you can hook up a "random Glossary entry" block to display a different entry every day, week, month during your course: Exploring the Moodle Glossary. Note that the course layout is made with Glogster, a free site where you can create dynamic, flashy-looking, interactive and embeddable web content.
One really nice feature is the ability for Moodle to analyse your resources (web pages, text files and forum posts) and if it finds words or terms in your glossary it will create a hyperlink to that actual glossary entry.
The 2009 FOSSed conference (Free and Open Source Software in Education) is only a few weeks away! June 24th - 26th at Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine. The school year is winding down and now it's time to begin planning for the future. Times are tough and budgets are tight, but we have the sessions and presentations to help you out! FOSSed has been providing excellent professional development opportunities for folks just like you for 7 years! Learn new ideas that can save your schools money, increase student learning and access to technology, and revitalize your technology offerings! Yes! You are entitled to professional development! Come, relax, and learn! FOSSed is a unique hands-on opportunity for you and your team.
Open 1to1 initiative
Today was the official announcement of the Open 1to1 project. Open 1to1 is an effort to provide technical support, expertise, professional development and a community to help schools that are tackling one to one netbook or laptop deployments. You can view the announcement here and visit the Open 1 to 1 web site here http://www.open1to1.org. This is an exciting time in technology! Open 1 to 1 aims to give folks the tools to make their netbook/laptop deployment successful. So....what does that mean for FOSSed? This year we'll offer several session for those who are beginning or considering a one to one netbook/laptop deployment. Imaging/deployment, care and use, server technologies, infrastructure/management....these will be addressed as part of our offerings at FOSSed to help get you on the right track for your project!
Sugar on a Stick!
This year we're excited to welcome Walter Bender and Caroline Meeks of SugarLabs! They will be showing Sugar the new operating system designed for exploratory education and how you can have your whole educational environment boot from a USB flash drive. From the Sugarlabs website: "Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. With Sugar, even the youngest learner will quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection, developing skills that help them in all aspects of life." (for those who are familiar with the One Laptop Per Child, Sugar is the interface for the OLPC) http://www.sugarlabs.org
Good news for ACTEM members!
At the recent ACTEM business meeting, ACTEM voted to add additional monies to the professional development budget to accommodate anyone wishing to take advantage of the $400 professional development benefit this year. Remember, the fiscal year ends June 30th, but that's just in time for FOSSed! ACTEM is a generous sponsor of FOSSed and encourages its members to take advantage of this membership benefit. The FOSSed conference is just $495 (on campus) and $455 (off campus) and the fees include everything! Meals, rooms, conference....everything. We take the worry and hassle out of attending...you just show up and bring your enthusiasm! The ACTEM web site has all the details! http://www.actem.org/Pages/ACTEM_ProDev/index
We're flexible!
Need special payment arrangements? Planning to be reimbursed, but can't go without your money for very long? Need to pay by credit card? Need special billing after July 1st? Let us know...we can help! We want YOU at FOSSed 2009....it's that important.... :-)
Teachers, techies, integrationists, admins....we have something for everyone! So...please join us this year for FOSSed 2009! Register today!
Visit our site at http://www.fossed.com for more information, flyers, pics, and more! Register soon....FOSSed will be here before you know it!
Here's a great presentation I found on the AuthorStream site (which hosts PPT presentations that have been formatted with free software called AuthorPoint Lite). I love the tool because it can create excellent flash based narrated PowerPoints (and it's free). This is important because flash can be played on nearly every computer (If you want watch YouTube, you can watch flash presentation) by default and it doesn't require any other software to open the files, which usually play right in the website like this one.
Here's a great post by Moodlerific.org on the topic of News Forums*. It's a quick, easy and no fail way to get ride of that News Forum for good.
For some people this might be a “duh” tip but I know there are some people who are wondering why the News Forum keeps coming back after deleting it or wondering how to get it back because I didn’t know when I was first starting out!
Please give a brief description of the business, in 100 words or less:
We are changing the way that students and teachers learn and teach online. Our network of elearning provides free classrooms to 1000s of teachers around the world where they engage 10s of 1000s of students through online activities and resources.
As a pilot in late 2008 we opened our network and quickly found a ready demand for our free classroom network. Since, over 60,000 individuals have registered with the system.
This year we will enable an unprecedented online learning marketplace by letting teachers, entrepreneurs and professional developers to sell their own courses through custom, individualized, branded elearning centers.
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Part 2: Description of the Information Technology Innovation
What are some of the innovative ways you use information technology (IT) in your business to better serve your customers? (Think beyond standard practices like email, Internet, computer hardware, computer networks, use of productivity or accounting software, etc.) Provide a description. (Maximum of 200 words).
We've taken the leading online learning software, Moodle, and extended it's code to provide a superior online learning environment. Instead of signing into vanilla, unattractive learning environments, students and teachers sign into a crisp, clean personal learning network. Instead of seeing general information intended for everyone they see only the courses, networks, messages and contacts that are valuable to them.
This allows any student and any teacher to connect with any other learner or educator around the world, with just a few keystrokes or mouse clicks.
At their finger tips are literally 100s of courses being developed. Teachers can collaborate to build courses together and students can engage themselves with additional online learning opportunities.
We've done this using a set of dell servers (5) which are configured to serve content, activities and real-time communication as quickly as our bandwidth allows.
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How has your innovative use of IT led to significant improvements in your customers' experiences with your business, products or services? Give two or three specific examples to illustrate your answer. Be clear in describing how your innovative use of IT produced this outcome. Please include web site addresses to showcase your work (if possible). (Maximum of 500 words.)
When we first unveiled out network it was a bit different. We had connected over 70 installations together through a shared database. This was a great extension of the software already, but it was bulky and difficult to navigate. There existed a site hierarchy which made it difficult to connect a user to multiple sites. To change this we eliminated the hierarchy of the sites and instead built the networks all on one site.
2nd, we've tinkered with the course creation process to make it easier on new teachers. The software we use can be daunting, and we believe it's one of the biggest barriers for teachers engaging students online. The simpler we can make the process of building online resources the easier it will be for us to change how people teach and learn online.
Finally, we've used our technical know how to build upon our foundation. We're adding additional capabilities that teachers can use to engage students: this includes better chat options, the ability to record video within the online classroom and the ability to create RSS podcasts within the classroom as well.
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How do you use IT to better manage your business operations? That is to coordinate with suppliers, contractors, and internally with employees? Please provide a clear description (Maximum of 150 words).
We are a wired company nothing we do from day to day is accomplished without IT. Luckily we have a young staff that if fully capable of bringing new ideas to the table to make us collectively more efficient and faster on the draw.
A prime example of this is the automation of data collection for our course evaluations. What used to take days to organize through data entry now is done automatically through an online form where all course evaluation information is collected. This is easier on employees and students alike and it's done wonders for our quality control.
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How has your innovative use of IT affected the success of your organization? Give specifics. For example: growth, profit, cost reduction, or market share increases. Be clear in terms of how IT actually led to improved performance results. (Maximum of 150 words.)
Without using IT to maximize speed on our network, we'd be left in the dust by competitors. We've taken a product that was once slow and have created a simple, fast and easy-to-use version for our customers. In just a few months we've signed up over 50,000 which we think is a huge success. We hope to hit 150,000 by year's end with our soft roll-out focusing primarily on schools.
Additionally, we took a gamble and instituted a programming framework (symfony) to make development much easier moving forward. This was a risk as it took our eye off the ball for 30 days while we implemented it. Today though we're much better positioned to bring new product upgrades and additional features to our customers, which will no doubt increase revenue, market share and growth. We're excited for the year to come.
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How is your company's use of IT unique or differentiated so that it sets you apart from your competition? (Maximum of 150 words.)
Our competition focuses on single purpose sites for each of its clients. We think this is flawed. Our approach is a community for education. Everyone is on the same platform so that everyone has the same opportunities for meaningful interactions through education. This creates efficiencies at the end user (they can connect to multiple educational opportunities from the same login).
We also are pushing the creation and sharing of resources. Teachers don't have a lot of time to create online resources (and some don't have the desire or capacity to). Instead, we can leverage our network to make content that is ready-to-use available to their classroom. We're changing the way that people teach and learn online.
Moodle.org publishes the top 10 Moodle myths as they've encountered them over the years, here they are (and here's a link to read them from the site of origin):
1. Once Moodle is stable, it will be put under licence. If it were any good, they’d already be charging for itSeriously great information to read up on so you can dispel the myths when you hear them from your administrators or teachers. Moodle is a well rounded and functional solution for elearning, and companies like ours are doing great things to lower the barriers to entry completely so that any teacher, anywhere can get their own classroom for free (amazing!).
2. Moodle needs a full time, php developer on your staff- or at least a lot of technical support to run it in house
3. Moodle won’t be compatible with our other systems/software
4. Moodle just doesn’t have the commercial experience we’re looking for
5. You can’t just use Moodle out of the box – the basic Moodle install just isn’t that sophisticated
6. There’s no documentation, training or technical support available – you’re on your own
7. The total Cost of Ownership is actually higher for Moodle than it would be with a wholly commercial platform
8. Moodle is just no good for an institution as large as mine
9. Moodle is just not designed to cope with my specific group of learners or customers
10. We have all our stuff on *******, it’s just not worth the hassle of switching to Moodle
