Serendipity35

I'm seeing more and more schools in New Jersey exploring Moodle and I suspect that's true far beyond NJ. Word comes from Helen Foster of a new course on moodle.org called Teaching and Learning with Moodle. According to the welcome message, the main aims of this new space are to:

  - provide a clear, synthesized and relatively gentle 'intro to Moodle' to new users in education and training environments
  - serve as an organized point for great ideas and resources for new and experienced users alike
  - become a generator and repository of Moodle-related (in)formal research in the use and design of Moodle

I have been using Moodle for about six years, so the new space is kind of basic - but it would be a good way to begin using Moodle for newbies. All you have to do is register for a moodle.org account (free, of course). It's not really a "course" but a space to access documents and see Moodle in action. The Moodle site allows you to try out spaces and test drive in the role of student, teacher, designer and administrator.

Helen (from Belgium) is the very busy Moodle Community Manager. She helps with moodle.org admin duties and on some of the other Moodle community sites:
docs.moodle.org
tracker.moodle.org
demo.moodle.net
download.moodle.org
dev.moodle.org
and the new qa.moodle.net for Moodle 2.0 QA testing. That site is running the latest daily build and the database and files are erased and restored to a clean state every hour on the hour - so moodle around with it.

She also works with Moodle HQ developers.

Her blog is at http://helenfoster.wordpress.com

She is also the joint author of the second edition of the excellent Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System.



Also check out Moodle recipes for educators - a community cookbook for ideas on using Moodle in education.