Moving to Moodle 2.x

If all goes as planned, we should be upgrading to Moodle 2.x at the end of December. Currently, the most recent version of Moodle is 2.1, but 2.2 should be released in time for our upgrade. Over the next few weeks, I will be highlighting some of the changes as we move from version 1.9 to 2.2.

I'm optimistic that the transition will be a smooth one. There are a variety of changes, but I think most instructors and students will find the next version of Moodle a little easier to use. Visually, the appearance is less cluttered and with the new dock option, all of the information currently displayed in blocks can be moved to the dock on the side of the browser window. When we make the move to Moodle 2.2, we will also introduce a single custom theme for our site and all of our Moodle courses. This should simplify things for everyone and although there may be some who prefer to choose the theme for their course, I think sticking with one theme will be best for our students.

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Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

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