Emerging Technology 2- Moodle

"Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites."

-moodle.org

As we develop the 21st century and prepare for the technology of the future, it's good to be able to apply new and emerging technology to education. Moodle.org is a FREE website that allows educators to create websites for their students to interactively use for class.

I think any teacher would find this tool very valuable, especially if they have personal or school goals to integrate more technology into the classroom. You can create libraries and catalogs to enrich learning in a certain subject matter, provide worksheets and assignments, chat spaces to discuss live with students, provide quizzes and tests and also collaborate with other students and teachers not only in the United States, but internationally! There are over 200 registered countries using Moodle.org. Students can use your website from their own home. You can also have virtual feeds with other schools who also use Moodle.

For those teachers who have students who are ESL, Moodle also provides Moodle Documents in a variety of languages for those students needing to be immersed in the English language. Perhaps you would like to have an international pen pal class. Moodle is just the place to find a cooperating class to work with!

Moodle is also a Professional Learning Center (PLC) where teachers can take 100's of online courses to earn their Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credit hours for license renewal. Moodle also provides many opportunities for teachers to attend workshops, seminars or conferences near or far by providing information.

Teachers also have the opportunity to collaborate with other educators through open-chat forums. Teachers can post problems, questions or even suggestions to an array of different forums to have answered or discussed with other "Moodlers."

Again, you run into the problem of student perhaps not having Internet access at home, so you will need to be able to provide an alternate assignment for some students, allow computer time in class where they could complete an assignment or quiz, or provide paper copies of what the student may need at home.

Here is a link to the main page of Moodle:

http://www.moodle.org/

Here is a direct link to Moodle's demonstration page:

demo.moodle.net

Here is a direct link to Moodle's statistics:

http://moodle.org/stats/