Saturday, June 07, 2008

Moodling in Koper

Yesterday I attended 'moodle.si' conference in Koper, Slovenia. The event was organized by Faculty of Management Koper, School for Headteachers, Artesia, and Open Source Center - Slovenia This was the second time this conference was held there, the previous one took place in May last year but I somehow missed it. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting other Slovene moodlers. Presenters focused on various aspects - technical requirements, settings, usage, m-learning, testing students' knowledge, apps to use for subjects such as maths or chemistry, etc. A Slovene Moodle community is slowly being built up. Great!
J. Čač from the Ministry of Education talked about what the ministry does to encourage teachers to develop and use e-materials and e-classrooms. They plan to set up exemplary e-classrooms for primary and secondary school subjects so teachers could get a better idea how to use Moodle. Good. I remember how we plunged into Moodle some 3 or 4 years ago at our school. Had a quick few hour course to walk us through the technical part and ended up with a pretty vague idea how to fill up our classrooms... Technology is good, but you also need to know how to use it, the methodology. I am greatly indebted to my Webheads here for putting my feet a bit more firmly on the cyber ground.
The international part of the conference was fun too. V. Sulčič and P. Purg talked about their experience in using Moodle for e-learning, teacher and tutor-training, etc. C. Surridge from Korea, G. Rossini from London, England, and Daniel Livingstone, also from UK, talked about Sloodle, a Moodle module for organizing and tracking Second Life interactions. They all presented in Second Life, the event was hosted by Rockcliffe University. It was possible for F2F audience to participate in the Second Life backchat through the Sloodle WebIntercom. My iPhone unfortunately refused to log me in the chatroom, complaining I've got too many windows open... Eh.