Teaching with Moodle and Mahara

Moodle and Mahara in the classroom

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#Ulearn was awesome last week there is not one other time in the year where I see so many friends from across NZ. To have so many like minded people in one space at one time creates a buzz and the highlight is definitely those connections. I received great feedback on my Moodle and Mahara in the Classroom workshop it was nice to hear that it was hard to get a place and also that users at very different stages in their journey got something from it. There were Moodle users, Mahara users and people who used both. It takes you through my journey of using eportfolios and websites in my teaching and through the evolution of using Moodle and Mahara together and how it is shaping up for the future. Let me know if you have any questions.

NZ MoodleinSchools Hub

The NZ Moodleinschools community is a project that provides a tested and up to date Moodle instance for NZ schools. It means that schools can download Moodle or chose to have it hosted by a Ministry Partner with the assurance that it is tested and safe. As it is community driven you will see that the website has contributions from schools who share their resources, stories, experience and direct its future.
One of the new developments this year that is new to the community and to Moodle 2 is the idea of a central hub. This means that Moodle sites can be linked to a central repository or 'hub' . Moodle.org have their own hub called Mooch. The idea of the NZ moodleinschools hub is for NZ schools to collaborate and share courses through the hub. This has not been forthcoming through schools getting up to date with Moodle 2, this being a trial (with 6 schools) and teacher training, but I'm sure term 4 will be a good time to remind lots of schools of the advantages. As a teacher this does flip my switches!
I linked my moodle instance to the hub (with help from Kristina - again!) and found it 5 minutes with of admin work and once a teacher has created a course it takes them less than a minute to upload or search for a course from the hub, as the video shows.