Moodle

I was hoping to use gmail’s chat feature for the adult students Computer Applications to communicate and collaborate with each other.  However, because our adult school is part of a K-12 school district the chat feature is disabled.  In my quest to find an alternative I decided to look at Moodle since my webhost, FatCow, supports Moodle.  Moodle is an open source “learning management system” (think Blackboard but free).

To install Moodle on my website I logged in to FatCow’s Control Panel and clicked on “InstallCentral” under the “Scripting and Add-Ons” section.  I found Moodle under the “More” tab.  I created a subdomain (ras.karenshade.com) and installed Moodle in a subfolder named moodle.  It asked me for a moodle admin username and password.  Once it was installed (about 5 minutes) FatCow sent me an email notifying me that it was complete.  I then went to the subdomain, logged in to moodle, and got started.  It was really that easy!

I found Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System documentation to be very helpful in setting it up.  I have set up the chat feature and am anxious to try it out in my classroom.  I am still working on setting up a polling feature and the feature that allows my students to submit assignments using Moodle.  I will update this post when I have installed those features.