Using Moodle to Conduct Professional Development

Moodle (or Blackboard, Vista, Haiku, etc. for that matter) is a great tool to use to deliver learning content. About a year into my role as an academic technology integrator and as a Moodle administrator, I decided to use Moodle not only to administer my classes to students, but also to deliver technology training to my faculty. I've actually used Moodle to teach...Moodle! Course delivery systems provide a great way to augment the classroom experience. In the same vein, they also provide a great way to deliver content, interact with participants, and assess learning. I upload short videos to demonstrate how to execute a specific skill, or I link to videos I find on the Internet. Any instruction sheets that I create I also upload to Moodle for my faculty to access.

This year I am going to try something new with my faculty - we are going to actually try running a course. In the past all of the content has been up on Moodle for reference. This year I am going to interact with the teachers as if they were taking an online course. I plan to keep the learning online, but to offer as much contact time as possible. I welcome any comments on experience you have had or any advise you'd like to give me!


iPad Pilot Update:
We finally got the covers in and we are still waiting for the cart!!! We've had some problems with inventory being available (covers) and we changed our mind about the original cart we bought and changed to a desktop model (as opposed to a rolling cart). This put our project back a bit, and we had to return the original cart and purchase the new one. Oiy!

Pearson's OpenClass and Google Apps for Ed

I took a break from the iPads today and spent some time testing the new *free* LMS put out by Pearson called OpenClass. What interested me about it is that it was created to integrate with Google Apps for Ed and since our school is a GAFE school and we use a CMS (Moodle) I thought it would be good to see what OpenClass could do. I have been looking for a seamless solution that combines/integrates Google Docs and Moodle.
On the first pass I created a teacher (Instructor) and student account to play around with. Because I was playing the role of three different people (admin, instructor, and student), I decided to use Google Chrome and log in as the teacher in an incognito window. THIS DID NOT WORK WELL! I was unable to access the teacher editing tools until I logged in in separate browsers.
I have not read any manuals or watched any tutorials, so right out of the box there are some confusing features.
1-I have no idea how to create an assignment with a due date (like in Moodle) or even if it is possible;
2-the organization is confusing andi can't easily see how to customize it
3-what is the difference between a "submission" and the other "gradable" items?!

Snapshot from OpenClass

That said, some cool features I found is the ability for course participants to post on "the wall" and the icons on the top left that enable a user to see how many email messages they have as well as upcoming events taken directly from the Google Calendar.

Clearly I still have a lot of learning to do!