Jeff Utecht – Educator, Consultant, Author
Posts tagged Moodle
Finding Common Ground
Aug 7th
One of my biggest challenges this year is going to help the High School as a whole find some common ground on expectations for class work and interaction using our Moodle site. We use Moodle as an extension of the classroom. A place to handout work, to turn in assignments, and to have discussions via forms and chats.
This will be our third year using Moodle at ISB. Up until this year teachers had the option how they set up their course, if they used Moodle at all, what type of documents and resources they places there, and how they interacted More >
Preparing for the worst = opportunity
Sep 21st
There is more than one way to get a school to start looking at online learning as a way to reach students. As an international educator, I have found no greater motivation to get the conversation started around online learning than planning for the worst…..school closure.
In 2003 it was the attacks on the compound in Riyadh that led my school to think about how we were to educate students if we were to shut our doors. The following year we implemented Moodle and started training teachers.
In 2005 we moved to Shanghai, China and within weeks of getting my feet on the More >
First quarter reflection
Oct 12th
Friday marked the end to the first quarter of the school year at ISB. As my first quarter here comes to a close I’ve started to reflect on the experience so far.
There is a reason why international schools make you sign a two year contract. It takes at least a year to get your feet on the ground, to figure out where you belong in the school, and acclimate to the your new host country.
Personally Thailand is feeling more like home daily. Our stuff has arrived from Shanghai and our apartment is feeling more like home every day. We’re slowly More >
A Week of Just In Time Learning
May 11th
There is nothing like starting your week off with an e-mail from a teacher that simple says:
“Moodle is not working…do you know why?”
And then spending the next four days worried that you can’t fix it. It has been one of those weeks that I’ve relied on ‘just in time learning’ and my network of information to help me through what was a database disaster.
I wish you could monitor learning and knowledge over time. Because my graph for the past four days on how Moodle works and mysql databases must have doubled. Of course I can’t tell you what I learned, More >
Moodle, Twitter, and networks
May 9th
I feel sorry really for the 52 people that follow me on Twitter. Sometime Monday our Moodle installation decided that all the users are on a different server and it won’t allow anyone to login.
I’ve been twitting it since I started working on the problem 24 hours ago now. It’s been a great outlet for me as I know most of my twitter friends and followers are educational technology people that understand the frustrations when things all of a sudden break without warning.
The interesting part is some of my twitter friends have given me suggestions on things to More >
Looking for Dedication
Mar 7th
So what happens when you put 1200+ Moodle Users in 88 courses and 560+ WordPress blogs all on the same shared hosting server? You exceed your CPU usage.
We have been getting this warning for a couple of months now, but as we continue to add more blogs and users in Moodle, it’s happening more frequently. Yesterday I was trying to help a 5th grade class learn how to add pictures to their blog posts, while another class was blogging in a computer lab, and a class of 7th graders where blogging about their YouTube videos. Not one class accomplished their More >
Enough with Elgg moving to WordPress MU
Dec 6th
So in about mid October I installed our own installation of Elgg. I did it for two reasons:
1. It integrated with Moodle which we already use. That way if a student had an account in Moodle already, they could us the same username and login to get started using Elgg. The two would be linked giving more flexibility for blogging in Elgg but keep the Learning Management System of Moodle.
2. We were having more and more teachers wanting to blog and I was/am trying to find away to keep all those blogs in one place. We had 5th graders using Blogmeister, More >
Learning from the kids
Nov 22nd
I came home tonight looking forward to going through my aggregator and getting some other stuff online done. But I made the mistake of stopping by some of the online projects going on around the school. Needless to say my learning tonight came from a bunch of middle school students. I’ve spent the last two hours shaking my head. Why don’t more teachers see the power in these tools.
First a great project got started today called the International Environmental Symposium. It’s a Moodle course that we are hosting that involves some 153 7th grade students from Brazil, California, Saudi Arabia, More >
