Moodle Help Musings?

There are a host of Moodle resources out there for the novice Moodler but what is worth spending your precious time on? This was a question i was asked recently, where is the best place to go?

Although i must confess i haven't extended myself in the Moodle arena, since i came to grips with the basics of setting up and developing courses, these are the resource links i would recommend to others:

• WelCom clusters Moodle help page because Anton their ePrincipal is doing a fantastic job, always working with teachers on Moodle, i would be confident that this is all relevant to what your average NZ teacher is wanting to do;
• 2 Minute Moodles aiming for simple bite size Moodle help;
• Moodle for NZ schools NZ Moodle community, lots of screencasts, & forum, good to subscribe if you want to hook into some local expertise. 
• If you want a full reference you can download the Moodle book. It is free & published by the Moodle developers.

Your recommendations? Please share

Students Love Tech

It would be great to see what the stats are for NZ students:

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Password strength

Makes you rethink doesn't it? How many passworded logins would the 'average' person use?
What web activity does the 'average' person engage in? Would be interesting to know (if there is such thing as an average person).

http://xkcd.com/

Light at the end of the Broadband tunnel?

This release from Minister Joyce's office today gives us hope that we are soon approaching the light at the end of the tunnel for a level internet playing field for all of our schools.

"the remaining 60 schools that are located in very remote places will have access to improved terrestrial or satellite wireless broadband services...Contracts for the remote schools are expected to be entered into progressively over the coming months so that these 60 remote schools have access to the improved services by the start of the 2012 school year"

Wahoo :-) our online classes will work for us so much more effectively from 2012 if all goes as promised...

Core Foundation Awards

Check out the new Foundation Awards from Core Education. Take this opportunity to further your professional learning through this opportunity! You can see 2010 award winners and their submissions here.

CORE 2011 Foundation Award applications NOW OPEN!
CORE would like to enable worthy educators to pursue professional learning opportunities – we invite you to apply for the following:

1. The CORE Education Travel Scholarship
Recognises New Zealand teachers’ and leaders’ contributions to educational thought by awarding a travel grant to attend an international education event.

2. The CORE Education Awards for Professional Learning and Reflective Practice
Recognises teachers and institutions that can demonstrate how they have applied lessons from professional learning to improve their practice.

There are two types of award:
i. Individual Award, one each for:
• Early Years
• Primary/Intermediate
• Secondary

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ii. School/Centre Award, one award

Applications close Monday 29th August 2011
More information and applications: http://www.core-ed.org/foundation

Talkwheel – just another collaborative tool?

I came across this new tool this morning www.talkwheel.com as i was browsing through my rss feeds. I had just been talking to a colleague about strategies and online tools that would enable our students to interact more with each other in class, instead of just the teacher led discussions and interactions. I know there is no such thing as a silver bullet solution but could this be a tool that our students would be keen to engage in?

To me it looks like an old fashioned threaded forum but attractively packaged to be more visual than simple text flowing down the page. Though with any tool, it depends on the skill of the teacher/facilitator to engage students in learning - we can't and shouldn't rely on the 'gee whiz' factor of online tools alone to hook our kids into learning.