I've mentioned before that I teach a class of high schoolers how to program in Java. In order to make things manageable and to make the most of my time with the kids, I use Moodleto organize, store, distribute all of my course content. I've fallen in love with it! It can auto-grade my quizzes, serve as a file repository, allow the students to keep notes, and track student progress.
Praises
As this year's BDPA HSCC program has started taking off, I started looking at Moodle 2.0 and found some things that were quite attractive to me:
- New default theme. I like the new theme more than the old one. The menus are much easier to navigate and it has a nicer overall appearance.
- New wiki plugin. I started using a course to allow all of the coordinators to communicate. Within this course, I started a forum, a wiki, and a few file folders. Moodle 2.0's wiki is much nicer than 1.9's and allows for the use of Creole for creating and styling content, which makes it easier for me to collaborate with my fellow volunteers.
- New editor. Moodle 1.9 used a text editor that didn't render in Chrome without a manual patch. Version 2.0 features the use of TinyMCE. I've not only used TinyMCE on other sites before, but I've also sites that utilize it. It's a nice piece that's been well integrated into Moodle. The team did a really nice job with making sure that TinyMCE can correctly upload and display images.
- plus a bunch more!
Criticisms
I've criticized the Moodle upgrade/update system, and I'll criticize it again: WordPress has a model to copy. Moodle has taken some steps forward by allowing for upgrades from the CLI, but it's still not polished enough to allow me to try and throw away plugins. It's too much of a process to experiment with new functionality.
Bottom Line
So far, the new version has been running really, really well. The upgrade was flawless and the site is performing just as well as it did with 1.9. Another successful upgrade!
Comments
comments powered by Disqus