OMG. I have been bouncing back and forth between my LiveJournal roots and Geeklog for over an year, being continually tempted that what I really needed was to bail on the blog and move everything to Moodle. Of course, all of this went to hell in January when I got back from Mac World in San Francisco and my site host was no more and I lost my beloved domain name. Shit. So I moved everything over to my long neglected dot.mac account and set things up using iWeb. I’ve been meaning to write about iWeb for some time. Let’s just say that if I had never done a website or blog than iWeb would have been a great experience. But for someone who has been using Dreamweaver, and WordPress and various LiveJournal clients, iWeb was a bit of a clunker.

godaddy So… this past week I finally upgraded my GoDaddy account (where I have my main blog, LumberingThruLife, hosted) and created a new WordPress blog to host my ed/tech journal. Given how bumpy the road to get here has been I was really surprised how easily and how well things came together. Click, click, my account was upgraded from Basic to Deluxe (Linux); click, click and my domain was redirected to a sub-directory that i’d previously created on my main site; Click, click and I was in the Metropolis wizard installing WordPress into the newly christened website. Only “clunk” in the process was trying to get my blog editing software, Ecto, to work with the new website. After reading through a couple hours of reading through various forums and blogs the solution was to just upgrade the blogging software from WordPress version 2.1 to 2.2. The process worked so well that I’m thinking of moving my lone LiveJournal hold-out, Jacob’s Ladder, to a WordPress/GoDaddy incarnation.

moodle-logo As far as the whole “moodle” thing, the jury is still out. i still need a website where i can upload class assignments and the class calendar and where students can upload their completed work. I tried to make this happen using just my iCal account and a drop-box folder on the school server. The short coming of this was that students couldn’t easily upload work to me from home and that it was a pain in the ass for me to get their work back to them. They could get their assignments online, but the URL was unyielding and there was no central location for students to go to get info or get their work. I guess I could have done something with the school website, but it’s already hidden behind a stupidly long URL: http://www.lbusd.k12.ca.us/demille, much less navigating to where ever it is that my stuff is hidden. Who the hell wants to go there?

I need to run some tests this summer with Diggication or a Remote Learner (a commercial moodle group). Diggication is free (at least at the moment) and has a lot of virtual classroom features, but it doesn’t have all of the community options available from moodle. If I were to get a moodle account at Remote Learner, it would cost me about $500 a year. If I can get all of the community features going: assignment download and uploads, tests and quizzes, list-serves, IM, online grades, and parent communication, than the $500 might be well spent. And getting things set up this way goes a long way toward making things much more project driven where students can work much more at their own pace and less teacher-centered. Onward and upward. JBB