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http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2007/03/vle-project-2-completed.html  Going by the transactions from the latest learning trial using Moodle, here at Bromley I feel certain that I will be looking at another successful outcome. There were 23 students taking part of which only 16 eventually completed the project and between them accounted for over 12,000 transactions in four weeks. For all those who did manage to stay the course, I presented feedback assessment for collaboration, and there is without doubt overwhelming support from them as well as a sense of achievement. However for students who’s engagement / attendance proved patchy before the project, the new approach seemed to be of little positive influence.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2007/01/learning-in-virtual-world.html  Just lately a lot of my time has been taken up with Second Life, if you have yet to try virtual worlds then let me recommend the experience. My principle reason for the whole venture is to see how this new semi-immersed virtual reality can be utilised for teaching and learning, even as an extension to our continuing work with Moodle. On Saturday 17th of Feb at 5pm I will begin hosting some presentation trials that will be looking at the Linden Script, that’s the language in SL, and comparing it with other main stream computer languages. So if you are free around that time and would like to come over for a short and small class and supply us with some feedback in another reality just click here and I will look forward to seeing you.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2007/01/video-beats-audio-star.html  At the start of this term decided to try using my PDA to record parts of my lectures, and these recording are in range of 3 to 4 minutes. The particular course that I selected for this is my High Level Programming for level 4 students, and to date I have made about 40 recordings. But I thought I would tryout something of an experiment by making these recording available in two forms, one being a straightforward mp3, while the other would feature a speaking CrazyTalk avatar. Although the speech content of the two media are identical, the CrazyTalk avatar version has attracted almost twice the number of viewings!
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/12/using-moodle-to-deliver-self-fi  I am hopeful that Moodle here at bromley College will begin to fulfil a commercial role following an enquiry the other day from company who required a course in Website Design for one of their employees. I have been running a very successful self financing course “HTML and JavaScript for Website Designers” for some time now, however it does require a minimum of 12 students to be viable, with the next one likely to start in January. This timescale was however too long, and I was asked if it could be run as a distance learning package, well maybe if I ran it through Moodle. As this will effectively be a trial, I have given the course for free in return for a comprehensive feedback and review. In fact when the boss came along to lookover the set-up, he signed himself up as well. The course can now run at the pace of the students, they will provide me feedback via the Journal, have access to resources using Block Folders, submit completed exercises as Assignments and keep in touch using Forums and Chat. Hey I may even be able to use Second-Life!!! I’ll let you know how it goes.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/11/podcast-or-videocast-which-do-y  Do you podcast you lectures? . I have started this in a small way but from the system logs the results were not encouraging. Anyway I started to give the whole idea some serious thought recently. From my own perspective, if am driving or travelling on public transport, then yes I would listen to a podcast, however if was sat in front of a computer, then I would appreciate something more visual. The feasibility of videoing and editing a whole lecture on a regular basis would for me be unrealistic. But do you really need the whole lecture, well no, and all I record usually are selected parts in audio using my PDA. Anyway I decided to pop one of my audio tracks into one of CrazyTalks avatars, the result, good, judging from the Moodle logs, the media is definitely getting a better response. If you would like to take a look just click here. Please feel free to feedback on your own experiences by posting to this blog.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/11/free-learning-resources-from-ou  free and open educational resourcesIf like myself you are always on the lookout for some quality e-Learning materials, then you simply have to take a look at the Open Universities Moodle site OpenLearn. The resources here are free to use and are of an excellent quality, well done OU.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/11/time-for-second-life.html  Just recently I decided that the time had come to put my money where my enthusiasm was, so I upgraded my membership in Second Life and bought some land and see how it could be used in conjunction with my work on Moodle. In fact I bought a small island from diddster.com, these are really nice properties and the company extremely helpful. In fact the whole experience was a bit surreal, as I had to leave my wife cruising around Diddsters Daydream island complex, made more stressful for her as she had not used Second life before, looking for a vacant plot and making the purchase. While all this was happening I was watching through a colleague’s avatar at work (Whoops), keep that bit to yourself. Anyway Jinxster of Diddster turned up and gave some very timely advice and we all had an extremely useful three way conversation. I have since acquired a building for my island (Shimmer Island) and begun accumulating some tools; whiteboard and media player, both of which were actually free. If you click on my island thumb nail at the top of this post, you will get a bigger picture.
Anyway I am off to my alternative reality now, but do stay tuned to see how things go.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/11/value-added-moodle.html  Keen as I always am to make use of our vle for course delivery, I am also very keen to find evidence on its effectiveness with regard to student outcomes. One of the courses that see particularly heavy use of the vle here at Bromley is my BTEC National Software Development. Just the other day I am informed that it has attracted highest Value Added in the country for this course, wow. How much of that is due to the vle, difficult to say, but I was asked to put my views in writing; 50 words! Anyway here is my response. We have an experienced subject specialist team delivering a wide range of software technologies that include VBA, VB6, C, Java, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP and SQL, and find attracts motivated students with an ambition for Software Development.
Our adoption and increasing use of the Moodle vle has further allowed us to explore a variety of teaching methods, that facilitate our students the opportunity for personalisation, to extend their learning beyond the traditional physical boundaries and time constraints of class based lectures.A bit Just a tad more that 50.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/10/second-life-from-dartmouth.html I hav e just looged out of the first Second Life conference for teachers, I think. I got into the conference from a French restaurant in Dartmouth via rather a weak wifi signal, in fact I am Blogging from here still. There were plenty of people and some interesting proposals for future projects, its all looking extremely promising, all in all a great show. Well done Optimus Paul.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-for-educators.html  This week, I guess with no great surprise, I find that those people at Google, who no doubt have been keeping a watchful eye on our surfing habits, have made an encouraging response by launching Google for Educators. My first impression is that this has the makings of a powerful and valuable resource that already features a growing repository of materials, tools, ideas and stories. I was particularly taken by the invitation that we can upload video clips, a timely offer, given that I have spoken to a few people recently who are showing some concern as to where they can place such materials given the limits that seem to exist for storage in some institutes.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/09/social-networking-so-far.html  I have some satisfaction and surprises reviewing the way in which my plans for introducing a social networking forum are working out with the courses this year. I have given the rounded figures in the table.
 A couple of points come to mind for me: 1 by far the most active group is the BTEC National General, but this is a year 2 group, so they already know each other well by now. 2 Though the HND group seem to have shown more activity than the BTEC National Software, in fact less then half, 9/23, of the HND have yet to actually post their own details, does age make you more cautious in these forums?
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/09/podcasting.html  Last week I decided to start using a podcast approach as part of my regular Moodle material. I have incorporated these as part of my level 4 groups work in Object Oriented Design. The course is delivered as a series of lectures accompanied by detailed course notes and assessed using a portfolio approach of exercises. It’s the presentation in class of these exercises that I have decided to make available as mp3’s. I have installed them all into their own folder and students access them through Moodles Add a resource/Display a directory feature. I decided against the usually highly mobile podcast approach, as I know very few of the students actually own one. I shall be sure to report on their popularity and utility in due course
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/09/tell-and-post.html  I started three new level 3 groups today and as a first exercise decided they should begin to make use of Moodle by posting lifestyle styles and ambitions to a forum. Postings could include links, particularly if they had Myspace, some did. I then asked them to reply to at least 2 postings, but not if they were already friends; I encourage this in support of the need to establish a virtual presence, after all given the diminishing requirement of funding bodies, students are only actually at College 2.5 days a week, so what happens the rest of the week? Well maybe it can be virtual, lets shall see. A significant proportion of postings were as I anticipated in youth code; medium is the message! I am reassured however given recent finding by Bev Plester and Claire Wood at Coventry Uni. Its early days but be assured I shall be collecting and posting feedback from the groups on these and other online activities.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/09/myspace-induction.html  The HND course officially started today with an induction. I had an hour to present myself and courses to them. This year has been really different though rather than explain courses in detail with references to handouts, assignments and grading, I talked almost exclusively about the part Moodle would play as a delivery platform in support of the collaborative leaning framework and assessment strategies that proved successful in last year’s trial. Upon ending the presentation rather than give out advice on pre-start of courses reading, I asked them to get a Myspace account, fill out all the categories and be sure to post comments to at least two from others. My plans are that the Social networking aspects of Myspace will not only form the first point for an ongoing trend of collaboration but be the foundation in forming an online presence and identity.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/09/save-n-forget.html  Things Moodle-wise here at Bromley are looking OK for the start of the coming academic year. The new vle is up and running and the old version for 0506 is now only available to staff. Just the other day I found that I am to be teaching on the OO Development and OO Applications courses (that’s all about objects to us programming nerds). The courses uses Java and so I decided to begin populating Moodle with some of my Java CourseGenie materials, but was unsure where they were, home, work, CD, usb? Then I remembered that I had uploaded all that stuff to our DSpace content repository, great, logged in found them straight away no problems, of courses no folders to navigate, because there are none, meta-data discovery is the way. Uploaded the content as a Moodle Scorm Activity, finished, isn’t this the way it should be though?
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/08/xbox-on-syllabus.html  I have a sense or resurgent enthusiasm again with regard to the place of games in teaching: re my posting to this blog on 3DML and Robocode, when today I read that Microsoft are to offer XNA Game Studio Express, a free consumer version of Xbox tools that will run on a PC. In fact my interest in games has taken an upward leap after discovering the Sleeper Curve in Steven Johnson’s book ‘Everything bad is good for you’ ( I can recommend it). The suggestion is that our pop cultures game playing has contributed to our ability in managing rising complexity and cognitive demands. I wonder what impact the mention of xbox programming would have on the syllabus?
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/08/coalescing-virtually.html  I have been working on plans to encourage students to adopt the idea of virtual learning communities for the coming academic year. But to be realistic there has to be some sense of virtual value! It occurs to me, that the usual start of course ice breakers of ‘who I am, where I’ve been, going, gone wish I hadn’t and wish I had’ , type soon forgotten presentations, are evolved out by a dynamic, sustained and even organic online presence through myspace accounts, accessed from the vle. I naturally intend being part of all this as you can see here. In developing an on-line presence, I have some confidence the social networking aspects will act as a mechanism promoting the emergence of groups to eventually coalesce into virtual communities; eventually, though according to Rena Palloff they can happen almost instantaneously. Interesting times ahead.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/07/interactive-white-boards-for-fr  I discovered a really promising web based application the other day that was promoted as an interactive whiteboard, not surprisingly it’s called Virtual White Board. I registered for an account and though you do not at this stage get all the fancy clipart and sound clips etc; its still in beta, I was impressed with the functionality. Here at college interactive white-boards, probably due to the cost just do not seem to have happened, though all our computing rooms do all have a master PC and projector. Using Virtual-whiteboard you can include text, images, files and notes, freehand drawing plus some symbols and clipart. Users i.e. students, can be invited in and authenticated via their email address; if they are remote, then chat is also available. Sessions can be saved, printed or exported as an image . My impressions at the moment are that Virtual White Board will be a nice compliment to the various tools that I am currently deploying through Moodle and intend trialling it in the coming academic year. If you decide to give Virtual White Board a try yourself please feel free to get back and make a comment for us all.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/07/elgging.html  In the last few weeks I have been taking a close look at elgg and trying to decide whether to promote it as part of my courses in the coming year. I set-up my account and began trawling through the various options and facilities, and came to the conclusion that it will be ideal for creating a personalised learning space. While on this subject, there is a whole debate going on it seems around personalised learning at the moment, so if you are interested in getting clarification you may like to browse this standards site; complete with quotes from David Miliband who started the whole thing, well almost. I don’t know about you, but with certain people, whenever I get into discussions on this one, the whole session seems to drift into customisation, which in turn takes you up the road of accessibility, definitely not the same thing. Anyway things could get even more interesting with elgg from my perspective, because it will also facilitate my ambitions for learning communities, which brings it very much into my sights regarding the JISC bid. So with that all said elgg is on.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/07/nine-mystery-guests.html  Well the JISC bid event with our partner colleges went really well, and now I am looking forward to seeing the whole project hopefully come to life in the New Year. The web-cast also worked and our network manager informs me that we had 10 IP addresses connected, though one of those was him, so I guess that leaves 9. Following my request for the web-cast to be set-up, a first for Bromley College I must say, it was reassuring to have evidence of it actually being used, and given the technical issues that had to be overcome, its top marks and thanks to the network team for that. While you may be thinking that this blog is likely to go quite given it’s the end of the academic year, I will now have the task of helping to write the actual bid and on a completely separate tack, preparing for a new venture as we develop our plans in forming a partnership with a commercial company in the deployment of the Moodle VLE beyond our more usual FE and HE sectors.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/07/change-of-stream.html  Just a last minute change to our streaming of the JISC bid proposal here at Bromley College this afternoon, the address is now http://keyhole.bromley.ac.uk please feel free to drop in.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/07/live-stream.html  Tomorrow we shall be presenting our proposal details to partner colleges for the JISC bid along the lines of ‘access to online content, and tools to support collaborative working and personalised learning experiences’. The network team have been working hard getting my request for streaming to work and this afternoon I saw it in action. If you are interested in looking in on the event, then click here between 2 and 5 gmt. If you do manage to view the webcast I would be interested in any feedback to this blog, for now I have a few finishing touches to the presentations to get on with, so I’ll sign off.
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2006/07/virtual-presence.html  A productive weekend with regard to Moodle and the bid. I completed the presentations, five in all for this coming Thursday, which not surprisingly has changed the agenda a tad. After some thought on the subject of on-line presence for participating staff, I have decided to use Myspace as the medium, its popular, easy to use and most will have heard of it already. I had seriously considered elgg, and had it already been integrated into Moodle would probably have plumbed for that, maybe if we get the bid and moodle-elgg integration runs to timescale then there will be some considerable mileage in using it for students. I met with the network team today and the possibility of us being able to stream the event look very promising, so stay tuned for the address of the webcast.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=68170 by Martin Dougiamas. After the longest testing period we've ever had, Moodle 1.1 has finally been declared "free of all bugs" and is now available from the Moodle download page as usual.
Institutions keen on the most stable possible Moodle should change to this version at once.
For full information about the features, see the Moodle 1.1 release notes show all the details!
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=68390&parent=30 by Jon Allen. Hello Everyone,
All of the audio from the presentations at the Moodle Moot in Albuquerque has been posted online at the 'Moodle Moot 2007' tab on:
http://www.immagic.com/
Links to the audio and slide PDFs can be found following each presentation abstract. Enjoy,
jon
Note: This message is also posted in the moodle.org lounge.
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=767
Type: Web article
Published: 4 April 2007
"...announced today were the winners of The eLearning Guild Member’sChoice Awards for Learning Management Systems (LMS). The Platinum Award goes to the top performer in each category, while a Gold Award goes to the other top performer(s) in each category. We base these awards on... data [as of] March 16, 2007."
In 6 categories, Moodle received a total of 4 awards: 3 platinum, and 1 gold. Moodle.com also won more awards than any other LMS system provider (Plateau and SumTotal each won 3 awards, and Blackboard won 2.)
"...Moodle enjoys both the largest market share and the highest satisfaction in smaller corporations..."
Added to this database by:
Keywords: buzz, moodle, news
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=68408 by Martin Dougiamas. The eLearning Guild has just released their Guild Research 360o Report on Learning Management Systems, based on a survey of 930 e-Learning professionals representing 840 different organizations world-wide.
The survey covers market share and satisfaction ratings in various key sectors using LMS products.
 Moodle took out the top platinum award in the following categories:
Market Share: Small and Medium Corporate Learning Management Systems (under 5000 users)
Satisfaction: Small and Medium Corporate Learning Management Systems
Satisfaction: Education and Government Learning Management Systems
 Moodle also took out the gold (runner-up) award in:
Market Share: Education and Government Learning Management Systems (we were second behind Blackboard)
For more details, see the eLearning Guild press release.
Now's a good opportunity to thank our worldwide Moodle community of teachers, students, researchers, developers and other participants who help make the Moodle project what it is. 
We also want to thank our Moodle Partners and clients of our commercial services who contribute to the funding of our core team of developers and keep the software Free. If you need Moodle hosting, Moodle training or any other Moodle services, please use an official Moodle Partner company (you can find them listed on moodle.com).
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2007/03/project-leon.html  Starting Monday 12th March ULCC are running London's first Online Conference looking at Web2 Technologies supporting 'personalisation' called LEON (London e-Learning Online Network). There are a number of strands to this project,and my own here at Bromley is looking to the potential of Second Life, where students can share a 3D space and presence in real time. The current project features a library with access for individual or group study, links to web sites, pod casts, movies, documents and virtual page turning books. Presentations and lectures can be delivered to groups or individuals using white boards, media players all delivered by the lecturer. The potential improvements for social engagement above that offered by the more usual first world experience of synchronous, asynchronous chat and forum seem boundless. If you are interested in joining us the go to the website and contact Philip Butler for enrollment details.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=67977&parent=30 by Sean Keogh. Excellent! Thanks for the pictures feed.
Sean K
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=94&parent=432 by OpenLearn Admin. openlearn now has over 2,000 hours of learning material available in the learningspace. The new units published in 2007 are:
Arts and History
Business and Management
Education
Health and Lifestlye
IT and Computing
Modern Languages
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=69207&parent=31 by Martin Dougiamas. The Google Summer of Code 2007 is under way with ten projects, see this discussion for more.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=69208 by Martin Dougiamas. I'm very happy to announce that we will again be participating in the Google Summer of Code Program (an annual event where Google pays students to work for three months on open source projects mentored by established developers).
We had 83 applicants for 10 projects! The projects cover a number of features and improvements that have been much requested by segments of the Moodle user community.
For full information about the projects, see the Student projects page in Moodle Docs.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=69243&parent=31 by Sandra Wagner. Hi everyone;
Doing a budget once a year does not allow for a whole lot of flexibility when great opportunities like a Moot come up.
I was wondering if we might have another discussion topic, where people can say early on that they are planning a Moot, approximate date, general location.
It would certainly help me and my staff get there!
Thanks so much,
Sandy Wagner (Canadian Moodler, but missing Athabasca's!  )
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=69243&parent=31 by Frances Long. Hi Sandy - we are also sad that you are not able to attend our FIRST Canadian Moodle Moot! Well... if we decide at this Moot to host another -- then we'll be in a better position to announce this earlier. In January we finally had the right partners come together, and began to promote it, the best we could! How did you hear about our Canadian Moot? Are you on our mailing list?
You and your staff might want to consider attending virtually. Each presenter is hosting an asynchronous forum (and several are doing webcasts)
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=69243&parent=31 by Sandra Wagner. Hi Frances;
I think I heard about your Moot when I was on the Moodle home world  looking for something else. We're not able to do the asynchronous / webcasting either - Board meetings, AGM and our national congress. if you have a mailing list, I'd be happy to be on it. What do you need?
but maybe next time
Sandy
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5869&parent=311 by Richard Schuley. have you gotten any hits yet? I have been "asked" to set up a moodle site for earth science for our school to be running by the beginning of next school year. Do you have any examples yet? thanks
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5869&parent=311 by Allen Ford. ...wait for me!...wait for me!!! I wanna join, too!!!! 
John (Isner), I too, was at NE Moodlemoot 2006...not doubt we crossed paths. Presently am in the MTC course with expected finish early June. Even though I'm from Upstate (RIT in Rochester) I would really like to be a part of things.
+Allen
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=787
Type: Newspaper article
From:
Published: 17 April 2007
German daily newspaper reports about Moodle at schools and universities and Ralf Krause (one of the german moodle supporter).
Added to this database by:
Keywords: buzz, moodle, news
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=788
Type: Report
From: WAITTA
Published: 27 March 2007
Added to this database by:
Keywords: buzz, moodle, news
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=789
Type: Web article
From: Edutopia (George Lucas Educational Foundation)
Published: 18 April 2007
Since the onset of the open source revolution in 1998, much democratized software has been developed, but our savviest readers rightly homed in on Moodle, a free course-management system expressly designed for educators. Downloadable to just about any computer, the software facilitates the building of what Moodle calls "online learning communities." The company claims 150,000 registered users in 160 countries, so the chances for such communities, like the software itself, seem wide open. Still confused? Moodle counters the muddle with demonstration courses to get you started. And the price is right.
Added to this database by:
Keywords: buzz, moodle, news
http://moodletraining.blogspot.com/2007/03/vles-and-poor-attendance.html  I was surprised by the concerns expressed in the recent HE Forum about VLE’s leading to reduced attendance. And so an emailed was circulated to a national list, not by myself I must add, to see if this is generally seen as a problem. The responses indicate the opposite. You will find a link here |
Going by the transactions from the latest learning trial using Moodle, here at Bromley I feel certain that I will be looking at another successful outcome. There were 23 students taking part of which only 16 eventually completed the project and between them accounted for over 12,000 transactions in four weeks. For all those who did manage to stay the course, I presented feedback assessment for collaboration, and there is without doubt overwhelming support from them as well as a sense of achievement. However for students who’s engagement / attendance proved patchy before the project, the new approach seemed to be of little positive influence.
