Teachers who want more tools for teaching at the primary and secondary levels should look into Moodle. I have family and in-laws working in the public school system and they tell me a teacher’s job gets harder every year. You get more rules, less options from administrators and lawmakers, and more parents who either don’t care at all or care way too much for their child’s own good.
In a wider context, you’ll hear that students don’t want to learn. To me, that’s the usual good ole day syndrome, where we assume kids don’t have any sense now, but they had so much better sense when we were kids.
Remember what it was like to be a teenager. I was a good student, but I suffered school like most everybody else. The kids who weren’t good students got frustrated and wanted to be anywhere else but the classroom, while those who were exceptionally bright or good learners often found classes weren’t challenging enough, so they often got bored and wanted to be somewhere else. Children, especially teens, tend to find education a bore.
Whenever a teacher can find a new way to reach students, that’s a major plus. Moodle is a way to reach the students in your class, especially if you teach middle school and high school age kids. The fact of being online gives them something to focus on. Being in cyberspace gives them a place to be besides the classroom, but Moodle makes cyberspace safe and controlled. That may sound like quite an introduction, so let’s get to the meat of this discussion.
What Is Moodle?
Moodle is an open source learning site with over 11.67 million users around the world. These students and teachers speak 78 different languages and come from 208 separate sovereign nations worldwide.
The Moodle community is a large collection of students and their educators, including the teachers, professors, and administrators at the schools and universities they attend. Moodle can be used by any educator, though the community consists mainly of primary and secondary teachers and their classes. Even if you’re what they call an “educational hobbyist”, you can use these resources to help teach others.
- Moodle Wiki Pages – A collaborative way for students to read about a subject, teach others about that same topic, and learn to collaborate for others by building information resources together.
- Moodle Database – It’s my guess these are created in much the same way that the Wiki pages are created, but I haven’t explored these in as great of detail.
- Moodle SCORM Packages – These are used to create lesson plans your students can access online. With these service packs, you can create distance learning from your computer. SCORM also helps you create quizzes and examinations students can take on the classroom computer. This is the portal to blended learning.
- Moodle Distance Learning – Blended learning isn’t the full extent, though. Instructors wanting to create a full electronic curriculum or free online course can use Moodle to create everything a student needs to learn online. If you want to be a teacher without a classroom, avoid live teaching and face-to-face instruction by creating a fully online instructional course.
- Moodle Forums – Scholars of all ages can discuss education questions which concern them and introduce new ideas to the community at large. These forums are designed for many different languages, so find the community chat in your native (or second) language and start corresponding and discussing with people like you. This is designed for both learners and instructors, so you can discuss learning tips for students or teaching techniques. Information is free, so start sharing it with those who need good information.
The forums are a big part of the Moodle experience, so I want to focus on the various language options for each Moodle student demographic. Forums are open for many different languages. In a few cases, a language has two forums, when a language is spoken by people separated by oceans (example: Brazil and Portugal).
Community Discussions on Moodle – Language Options
From my count, you’ll find 38 different languages or countries with their own Moodle forums. I suspect that number will grow in the coming months and years, as educators in more places around the world learn about open source learning. These are the options those studying and teaching have at the moment.
- Moodle Lounge for English Discussions
- Deutschsprachiges Moodle
- DK Moodleforum (Denmark)
- Polski Moodle
- Moodle in Estonian
- Finnish Moodle
- Svenska Moodle
- Norsk Moodle
- Icelandic Moodle
- Nederlandstalig
- Moodle en francais
- Moodle Euskaraz (Basque)
- Moodle en Catala
- Moodle en Espanol
- Moodle em Portugues
- Moodle in Galician
- Moodle in Greece
- Moodle in Italiano
- Moodle Brasil (Portugues)
- Slovenian Moodle
- Serbian Moodle
- Bulgarian Moodle
- Turkce Moodle
- Russian Moodle
- Arabic Moodle
- Persian Moodle
- Hebrew Moodle
- Bangla Moodle
- Tamil Moodle
- Sinhala Moodle
- Indonesian Moodle
- Moodle in Cambodia
- Moodle in Thailand
- Moodle tieng Viet – Vietnamese Moodle
- Moodle sa Pilipinas (Philippines)
- Chinese Moodle
- Korean Moodle
- Japanese Moodle
Teaching Live and Online with Moodle
Instructors here in the 21st century need twenty-first century teaching tools. Moodle is one way to get your students collaborating on projects and learning about the power of information.
Whether you want to give your learners a class project they can enjoy, automate your homework assignments, give your students pop quizzes online to keep them sharp, go with the blended learning approach, or have a full distance learning curriculum, Moodle gives you the tools to make it happen. Educators everywhere have used this site to tap the learning potential of the children in their classes, so give it a try and see whether the free teaching resources from Moodle work.