While working for GlobalClassroom.us I was collecting a vast repository of information (and tracking new information) on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, a huge majority of topics, sources and subjects were unusable (after all, why would a corporate blog trying to advance it’s own agenda talk about the great things that other companies and organizations were doing?).  Anyways, I didn’t want to sit on the data so I spend 15 bucks on 2 domains and 80 bucks on a hosting account with Bluehost.com (I am not at all disappointed).

I mapped the RSS to Twitter using Twitterfeed (great service), included some #tags in every post and was off to the races.  Literally.  Traffic the first month was up something crazy like 1500%.  After a predicted leveling off growth is still +100% month over month and this week was the biggest ever.

Here’s a taste of how things are rolling:

The jump this week (which was +1000 hits) was caused exclusively by the leaked photos of a Mobile app for Moodle (the first ever of it’s kind to be this crisp and well received.  Things will dip again a bit, but I’m thinking sustained growth will continue (albeit at a lesser clip).

Up and to the right!

Contact Joseph. He’s the moodle Guru in the state.

I am a guru.

Getting quoted by a reputable blogger/educator only helps me take the first baby steps toward that goal.  Enter Miguel Guhlin, a really skilled and experienced Director of Instructional Technology in TX who quoted me on his blog (woot!).  The quote, well, it was from my comment left on this really interesting post at http://connectivism.ca that discussed the future of education technology and the differences (shortcomings?) of Learning Management Systems (LMS, which include Blackboard and Moodle) and Social Networking Sites (SNS, Facebook, Ning, etc.).

Here’s my comment in full, the bold is what Miguel picked out:

Great article, I really liked the fact that Martin chimed in about Moodle’s use and its design. I’ve been using it for several years and over that time have worked my best to educate teachers about the social features that can be used (as simply as the discussion forums). But training apparently isn’t enough, as course designs/construction almost always defaults to a content centric approach. It’s no fault of any Moodle administrators or trainers, it’s just that the Moodle tools provide a very easy way to organize content (and it’s often the very first thing taught to new Moodlers).

I’m eager to see the new features in Moodle 2.0, however I’m not sold that they will accomplish the necessary change alluded to in this blog post.

On another note, perhaps my biggest gripe is that we’ve provided teachers this AWESOME tool to structure courses and content that could easily be used by other teachers, but the software locks it down (or at least, it provides tools that are easily configured to “close” the content to the outside). Sure there are Moodle course exchanges, but far and wide content is closed to outsiders, difficult to procure (even if a backup is available) and not available as OER. Imagine if all the content created in Moodle were open? THAT would be a great asset to the educational community and would be ripe to transition past the “build today use for 3 years model” to more of a social approach (where the best content floats to the top of social interactions because it’s freely available).

I’ve got a soft spot for Open Educational Resources (OER — and I mean really, truly open resources, e.g. no passwords, fees, indexed by Google).  Part of it is driven by the fact that I think we (the human race) should have access to every subject matter that we want to learn (for free).  The idea of paying for access to certain content just seems less and less acceptable as I get older (at least some of that stems from how spoiled I am by my personal learning network and the internet, which never fails to edutain me).

The other part is driven by the fact that OER makes education easier.  It’s faster to use content that’s already been created and in many cases, that content has a high probability of being higher quality and vetted (not to mention thoroughly checked and re-checked by those that have come across it before and used it likewise).

So…how might I become an expert?  Well, I think the first part is to continue contributing to the discussion about OER and how it should be organized, categorized, classified, etc.  The other way to turn out any and all of my content as OER (but I really haven’t found an effective way to do that either).  Truly open resources are hard to come by (but they are out there: http://www.oercommons.org/), I hope to make it my job to advance and grow OER.  (After all, that’s 50% of the mission of http://Coursefeeds.com)

Anywho, check out the site, looks like they have lots of questions but there were some good finds in their archives of posts.

Themza.com

My favorite is Binary Waves (simple, sleek and not overly distracting).

Click here to download the file.

I find it strange that a whole position could be created due to the complexity of something that’s supposed to make teachers more efficient.  Oh well…guess I should say “thanks” for that one.  

Here’s a new one: how to create assignments that are only accessible by a specific set of students.  I researched this because a teacher wanted to give two different quizzes to two groups of students (group A and group B).  

To get started, make sure you have admin access to your Moodle site (or that you have the ear of the person that does and they aren’t afraid of turning on something that’s still only “experimental”.

1. Login as admin, go to the Admin Block and expand the “Miscellaneous” area.  Click on “Experimental” and then enable “Groupings”.  This will give all of your teachers an additional tab on the Group interface and a few new advanced options in activities as they are created.

M-docs describes how to add groups to groupings below (but just to clarify, you’ll need to have created groups already on your site).

Adding groups to a grouping

Groupings

To add groups to a grouping:

Follow the groups link in the course administration block.

Click the groupings tab on the groups page.

If necessary, create a new grouping by clicking the “Create grouping” button on the groupings page.

Click the “Show groups in grouping” people icon in the edit column opposite the grouping which groups are to be added to.

On the add/remove groups page, select the group(s) you want to add to the grouping from the “Potential members” list.

Click the arrow button that points towards the “Existing members” list.

Click the “Back to groupings” button. The group(s) you added to the grouping will now be listed in the table on the groupings page.

Existing groupings can be edited and/or deleted using the appropriate icons in the edit column of the table on the groupings page.

via Groupings – MoodleDocs.

Then, to effectively give different students different assignments, set up the different assignments (this may be creating two online text assignments, or two different quizzes).  Next, on the setup/update pages click “Show Advanced” and you’ll be able to do two things 1. choose which grouping should view/have access to the assignment/quiz and 2. choose if it’s only available to this “grouping”.  

Check to make sure this works correctly by logging in as a test student (that is part of a specific group/grouping).  But if alls formatted correctly your two or more student groups should have experiences respective to their group.  

Note: All assignments you create will be shown in your grade book regardless of their designation to groups.