Moodlemoot Oklahoma: Day 1

The Moodlemoot for Oklahoma, hosted by Metrotech in Oklahoma City has been a success so far.

I opened the conference with a presentation on Moodle: What Students Want (or, reading between the lines). I had examined survey data from 4 institutions to determine some commonalities in student comments and further, how to use those comments to improve the student experience.

Afterwards we had a wonderful lunch, catered by Metrotech students, and broke into 4 separate tracks for interest sessions: moodle basic users, moodle intermediate users, moodle administration, and moodle technical.

I attended a session that was videoconferenced from France. Nicholas Connault gave us a review of the new gradebook in Moodle 1.9. We used Elluminate, but had a lot of trouble with the connection. We dropped at least 5 times, and that was frustrating for the audience. Other video sessions were technically more successful.  We used Elluminate for all of them.

Next, I went to a session on adding closed captioning to video. We learned two different techniques for accomplishing this goal. One was using free software, called MAGpie. The other was using Camtasia. I think Camtasia was easier, but for individuals with real budget constraints, the magpie method works well enough. The major problem, of course, is getting the transcription to begin with. Metrotech was fortunate in that they could hire students in the medical transcriptionist program to provide the initial text files. Once these were created, you could copy and paste to the appropriate program and then cue the text to appear at the appropriate point on the video timeline. When the video plays, the CC button appears and the user can selectively show or hide the captions. I have been interested in closed captioning for some time, and was delighted to find out about these new tools.

My session on E-Portfolios: Getting Started with Moodle was the very last one of the day. I was delighted to find that the room was full and there were many people interested in a simple way to get started with portfolios. I started with an overview of the types of portfolios one could use, and the benefits and costs of each type. I also pointed out that some types of portfolios (showcase/employer) were not very compatible with others (growth/developmental). The last portion of the presentation demonstrated a number of portfolios pre-service teachers from McMurry had created using a standard instance of Moodle.

The conference ended around 4 p.m., and I am looking forward to the sessions schedule for tomorrow. There are a number that I am very interested in, and I will give one presentation on using uploadcourse.php to create course shells as a batch process and end the day serving on a Moodle Panel taking questions from the audience. The highlight of the day, of course, begins at 8:00 a.m. when we are addressed by Martin Dougiamas from Australia.