Martin and Me
by David Rumptz
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I was
able to attend the 2013 Moodle Majlis where I was able to meet and discuss
Moodle with the founder Martian Dogiamas. My presentation was on the work that
I have been doing with Moodle here at the University attended by Martin and
well received. The two big ideas that I walked away with from the conference were
the new features of Moodle 2.6 and
Moodle Readers.
Martin’s speech focused on the team
that builds and maintains Moodle and some of the upcoming changes in Moodle 2.6
and beyond. The biggest change is that from Moodle 2.6 there will be more
inherent support of mobile devices built into the Moodle site. Specifically the
Moodle site will automatically scale to the screen size that it is being viewed
on. He further explained that the Moodle App was for the use of Moodle while
you are offline. The Moodle App – for both Android and Apple devices—is built
so that you can download the content of the course you are attending or teaching
so that you can work on it while you are away from a wifi hotspot, when you
return to the a wifi zone the work that you have done offline is then synchronized
with the Moolde site. Another great feature of Moodle 2.6 and above is native
PDF annotation. In the assignment function
a student can had in work, and then the teacher can check the students work
with the PDF annotation function and submit it back to the students. The student then can revise their work given
the teachers notes and upload a final draft. All of the version of the work
will be saved on the system and you can grade it with the Moodle Gradebook
function as well!
One of the sessions that I attend was
the Moodle Readers, which has a real potential here in the University
Foundation Program. Moodle Readers is Hosted by the Extensive
Reading Foundation and is also being used by the Higher Colleges of Technology
in their extensive reading program. MReader was developed by the staff at Kyoto
Sangyo University in cooperation with teachers around the world. Supporters of
the program include Cambridge University Press, Cengage learning, Oxford
University Press, Pearson Education, Compass Media McGraw Hill Education, and Helbling.
The Moodle Reader contains Quizzes for about 2,000 books from the above
publishers from Beginners to Advanced. The quizzes and web site are made by English
teachers for English teachers. Once student log in the Student
Site shows the covers of books read successfully by the student and a list of
quizzes taken. Then the students can search for a quiz on a book that they have
read by title words and by the publisher as many books are retold by more than
one publisher.
