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Moodle Software

Any suggestions or ideas for learning to use Moodle Software and some of its functions will be appreciated. I'm reading about it but some practical applications will be very useful. Thanks, DLC.

Submitted by: DLC

 

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Moodle is an open source, E-learning software program (LMS, Learning Management Software). Open source software is free software. This is not to be confused with cheap software, in that it is a very valuable program for teachers and instructors. Open source means that it is built as a community project by programmers and developers who want to share what they have created for the benefit of the technical community. It also means that others can add to or customize the software. Moodle was launched January 2006, so its fairly new, but is already being used by hundreds of thousands of educators around the world! As for practical applications, Moodle allows for the development of customized Internet forums or web sites to provide training courses. In other words, it allows educators, such as teachers or company trainers, to expand their traditional classroom to allow students to take advantage of training via the web. So if you are in charge of training people, you can use the software to design your own virtual classroom. Instructors can create content to support their lesson plans, allow students to work in moderated forums or localized chat rooms. Or you can provide a virtual classroom for employees to study company courseware. If you have a new employee training program, you can use Moodle to create an online classroom where new staff can study at their own pace. You can download this free software (http://download.moodle.org/) to create your own online classroom to provide your students with all the learning material they need, including PowerPoint presentations, training videos, quizzes, workshops, lesson plans, grade scales, surveys and much more. This means that even when the student is home alone, they can still feel as if they are part of a classroom. And as a teacher, you’ll have an organized place to post all your training and progress tracking information where it can be shared with other teachers or company officials. As for learning more, you should go to the software’s main web site here: http://moodle.org/, where you can not only view demos, but also play around with the software and create some of your own material to sample how the program works. Note that Moodle will run on any PC/Server that supports PHP coding and MySQL databases. However, some folks have complained that the program takes up a lot of memory. Additionally, if you’re a teacher, be sure to check out the documentation here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teacher_documentation. This page also provides a scenario of using the software: http://docs.moodle.org/en/The_Good_Teacher. As a site developer or the system administrator who will support the teacher/site designer on a technical level, you can find the documentation you’ll need here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Developer_documentation. You might also want to check out this Moodle How To training site: http://howtomoodle.com/. And, of course, you can find books on Moodle by searching Amazon.com or searching Google.com for more information and sample sites on the program. AEAP on 12/11/2007 11:54:18 AM
I have used Moodle and found that the discussion boards on their main site and just jumping in and playing with the program seemed to be the best way for me to learn. Kathy Mikell on 11/20/2007 5:02:30 PM
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