If you are interested in migrating some or all of your classroom to the internets, you should be looking at Moodle. It’s open source, it’s free, it’s really, really good. In fact, if you haven’t seen a site that is driven by community, you should look at Moodle’s own site and you’ll get the idea.
Things to do: Read and visit the links under the “Welcome to Moodle!” banner in the middle. You’ll get an idea about Open Source and the pedagogical bent that Moodle was designed around. Then, get a cup of really good coffee (or any beverage) and have a look around the demonstration sites to get a range of possibilities. You might find that you’ll need to register on the site, but that process is painless. (The first module, aptly named: “Moodle Demo Features” will give you a wonderful overview about Moodle within the context of the CMS). Lastly, you may want to glance at the “Moodle Buzz” to find out what’s new about Moodle.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s probably best to try something out for yourself and if you’re interested in Moodle, why not give it a try? You might want to play around (or sandbox) with the Moodle CMS and OpenSourceCMS allows you to look at Moodle from the “student” side as well as the “administrator” side (where you as a teacher would do your adding and editing of various elements on your Moodle page or site).
Tomorrow in Part II, I’ll suggest a way to get your own Moodle site running.
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