We have the keynote with Martin Dougiamas tomorrow, first thing.  I expect him to talk about Moodle 2.0 and some idea about the future roadmap.

I had a great time listening to Patrick talk about theming moodle this morning.  Tomorrow I will attend Helen’s workshop on Moodle 2.0.  It will be nice to get a tour from an expert rather than trying to figure it out on my own!

I believe there are around 130 people attending, which is a slightly larger group than last year.

Then we got started with the planned sessions for the rest of the day.  The intro sessions were all held in computer labs, so participants there were actively working with Moodle and practicing skills.  These sessions were very popular as a large percentage of the conference participants are just starting with Moodle.

I was pleased to go to a Mahara workshop, because I have been experimenting with Mahara for some time but was interested in seeing how other people were using it.  Two other people from my institution also attended this session, and we are going to try to set up a pilot instance for one of my classes in the fall.

I also went to a presentation on outcomes, which is another thing I really want to work on this fall.  Right now, the outcomes can be set up site wide so that teachers in multiple courses can use the same outcome.  However, I don’t think there are really any good reporting tools to pull out information and aggregate it across courses.  So maybe we will work on that.  I think that all the information should be stored in the gradebook tables, so if we can figure out how to write the queries, we should be able to aggregate the information.  For general education assessment, this could be a great tool.

At the end of the day, we had a debrief and then dismissal.  We hit the road home about 4:30.  I enjoyed the conference very much, and I met some really nice people.  I appreciate Metrotech for sponsoring this even.  Maybe we will do it again next year!

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.