The Best Moodle Tools You've Never Used ISTE 2013

Presented by Michelle Moore
http://bit.ly/moorebesttools - slides from presentation.

Michelle's presentation is based on experience working with schools who are Moodle users. As she worked with each school she began to notice that there were tools that the schools were not taking full advantage of.

Using Moodle 2, there are several tools of which many schools are not aware. A short list she mentions includes:

Book
Lesson
Glossary
Workshop
Conditional activities

These are not plugins and are native to Moodle 2.0

Book:

When created, a book activity includes navigation buttons and a glossary.
This can be incorporated into 1.9 as a plugin. This tool allows you to provide content in chunks, it is easy to access, and easy to edit. Pages or whole books can be printed from inside Moodle. One benefit is that it provides multiple pages of content combined into one package rather than several individual page links. This reduces the number of links on a course page. It is more compatible with mobile devices as well. Students can automatically link to pages too. One step editing allows you to edit faster. No need to create a word doc, upload and then g back trough several steps to update later. Auto-linking is available for this tool, which means that as a title of an activity is created, Moodle automatically creates a link to it. Auto linking can be turned on in the admininstrator settings.

Ideas for the book module would be to include student generated content on the site. Student presentations can be created in this format. This is a great way to share public information on the front page of your Moodle site. In any case, books allow use of text, photos, video, and audio files.

Lesson:

Similar to book with additional advantages. It does show content in page format, but you can step customize the nav buttons. Content can include questions or a check for understanding along the way which can be tracked. This helps students understand what you think is important. This tool also allows self-directed learning, meaning students can choose the path they take trough the document. The biggest advantage is that this tool increases learner engagement.

Ideas for this tool include presenting student generated content, projects, or a project guide. A project guide allows new users in a course to utilize a walk-through for the course - Seamless orientation.

Glossary:

This tool is used to share terminology. This is especially useful for new users/students in a course. Also a good tool to share best practices, collections of web links, etc.... Items can be searched and rated by student users. Students can print and contribute to the glossary as well. Glossary terms are auto-linked. Glossary can be setup as a bio list of users. Use random glossary entry block to show new glossary items each day.

Ideas for this tool include we link collection, FAQs, forms database, biographies, etc....

Workshop:

Difficult to learn, but great tool. This is a peer review or peer assessment tool. Students can complete work, or answer questions, and submit to Moodle. Then the instructor can determine which students evaluate each other. The evaluation tool can be setup by the instructor. Students are forced to evaluate the number of students you determine and then the end result is that you receive a feedback grade based on peer review. Note: This tool was used in my graduate classes and works very well!
This could be used as an online evaluation for a face to face presentation.

Conditional Activities:

This item may be disabled by default, so you'll need to turn it on (admin leader). Conditions on an activity can be set by date or on completion of an another activity. Conditions can be set based on grade or performance. For instance, if a student scores 60% or below, a condition could be set to have them redo a previous activity. Wonderful for differentiated instruction or remediation. Could also be used for game play.


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