i am teaching a graduate class to teachers who want to learn to teach their own online class(es) so i am planning on being a little more mainstream in the tools i use this semester. i have previously been pleased with Drupal even though it’s not technically made with an education focus. but, i want to use tools that can be easily modeled by the teachers i’ll teach. thus, i am shifting to Moodle this semester. i’ve previously only used it in a quick 2-week summer course that met every day, all day. that experience was too quick to really get into the ins and outs of using Moodle. this will be my first semester really using the tool.
i am not overly impressed with the discussion forum built into Moodle. i am thinking about using phpBB forums, which i’ve used for much of the past decade. but i’ve also heard good things about MyBB so i plan to install it tomorrow and start exploring whether it’ll work for the two classes i am teaching. with all of these internet hosting sites providing free installs with the Simple Scripts and/or Fantastico it’s been a while since i’ve installed a MySQL database and MyBB is going to require that i do it manually so that will be a nice refresher.
but i plan to venture into exploring many tools so that my students can experience a nice variety. i want to use a Wiki for teaching one week. i also asked all of my students to already request a Google Wave account so we’ll see if we can’t even incorporate it. fun times ahead.