Serendipity35

Moodle keeps growing. It is being used in K-12 schools, higher education and by corporations and training organizations. I have been teaching with it since 2005 and it continues to improve.

Most of us have done a vanity search (searching for your own name), but I don't do that any more. Instead, I have Google Alerts set to automatically email me when my name, Serendipity35 or any of several URLs that I blog at or own are mentioned on a web page or blog. That's how I found that a slide presentation that I did in 2007 was embedded in a blog post called "Help! I need to learn how to use the VLE!" by a educator in London.

It's another serendipitous connection via the Net that I really enjoy making. That particular presentation has been on my Slideshare site for about two years and has had 13,791 views, been favorited 34 times and embedded on a web page 28 times. Hardly viral, but satisfying. Certainly a wider audience than I had when I originally presented at an NJEDge.Net Best Practices Showcase.

The Project eLearning site is described as "explorations of an elearning resource assistant" and the blogger, Pearletta, finds herself in a situation that many teachers face when they first encounter a course management system. (The fact that she calls it a VLE - virtual learning environment - rather than a CMS of LMS signals that she probably outside the United States.)

Off you went with good intentions of making your teaching and learning materials available online. This is the future you thought. This is elearning. Then you returned to your daily schedule and somehow you just never got back to the VLE until your manager makes it one of the tasks for the week that you make sure your resources are uploaded to the VLE.

According to the Moodle.org stats, there are 49,262 validated Moodle sites in 204 countries with 2,569,193 courses and 28,172,034 users.

You can try out Moodle on their demo site which has the most recent stable released version of Moodle
and allows you to explore courses as a teacher, student or administrator and see the features.

Moodle: Teacher Documentation is also available on the main Moodle site. There are actually many free
"manuals" available there (and some with a cost) for teachers and
students, and some are offered in languages other than English.A few samples:

• Moodle 1.4.3 For Teachers and Trainers  PDF, 2.4MB
• Using Your Moodle (1.4.3) PDF, 2MB
• Moodle 1.4 Teacher Manual PDF, 3.5MB
• Moodle 1.5.3 Teacher Manual - Original Documentation by Matt Riordan, updated to version 1.5.3 by Tom Marcais  PDF, 9.1MB

That Project Elearning post has a number of resources from the UK that I haven't seen before, so I'm reposting a few of those here with some annotations.

Moodle4Teachers  is a site that offers online learning units (accredited by OCN Wales) with each unit delivered over a 5 week period at 2 hours per week

Virtual Learning Environments some general definitions

Moodle Guide for Beginners a UK Moodle Provider offering the Moodle Learning Platform for schools (Hosting, training, support, branding, course management) There are partners around the world. I teach a course for NJIT using Moodle which is hosted by Moodle Rooms.

Moodle Girl's Blog a blog site maintained by Mel Gibb, a teacher in New Zealand using Moodle.

Training the Web Worker Way  a post on the WebWorkerDaily site which covers the future for people who use the web for work.

"VLE's Slow to Take Off" is a post from New Zealand that says:

There’s a saying I’ve heard repeatedly made at conferences around NZ in recent years; "It’s not the technology, it’s the pedagogy." Problem is, when it comes to support for ICT at a system level we still see a lot of emphasis on making the technology available based on the assumption that the professionals working in the field will have the pedagogical nouse to constructively adopt and implement it. Learning Management Systems (also known as Virtual Learning Environments) are a good example it seems.