Last time I posted about Moodle I mentioned my plans to test a third-party quiz application, and to try out the “database” activity within my fake Moodle class. I did both of these things and will now provide a brief recap.

Hot Potatoes is a quiz application that is probably mostly used in elementary and secondary ed. It generates quizzes and exercises of different formats. I tried making a crossword about potatoes.

This worked out nicely after I figured out the right format to save the crossword. The Hot Potatoes app doesn’t automatically plug in to Moodle, so I had to export as a SCORM package (SCORM is a standard e-learning specification). From there it was easy to get it into Moodle. I need to add more words next time – people seemed to think it was too hard since there weren’t a lot of words crossing.

I also created a “Database” in my Moodle course. This is really just a customizeable construct for your class. I created fields like Title, Genre, Picture, Date, and Description. Then each student enrolled in the class could add a record comprising all or some of these fields. In other words, this tool could easily be used to hand in complex assignments. Databases also allow the class to post comments on each record. This means the Database can also function much like a blog.

So far everything about Moodle suggests that it will provide an excellent set of tools to our Faculty for managing their courses. We still need to make progress in integrating Moodle with our Banner database, especially in order to synchronize class rosters.

I’ll be gone next week at a conference learning more about Luminis Content Management. I’ll try to post some interesting tidbits about LCMS while I’m there.