FITS Newsletter Home

• About FITS
• About the FITS Newsletter
• Reflections of a Blackboard to Moodle Transition
• Moodle Events
• RSS readers
• Staff Spotlight: Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START

Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) provides consulting and technical support for faculty who wish to explore and develop uses of instructional technology in their teaching. Our mission is to assist faculty members in enhancing their teaching and their students’ learning through technology. FITS focuses on the pedagogical uses of technology. We consult with faculty members to determine what technologies best fit with the goals and objectives of the project.

Contact a FITS instructional Technologist:

Michael Gough
Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START
michaelgough@depauw.edu (x1093)

Veronica Pejril
Instructional Technologist/Coordinator of the Music Instructional Technology Center
veronicapejril@depauw.edu (x4389)

David Diedriech
Technical Training Coordinator
ddiedriech@depauw.edu (x6442)

Beth Wilkerson
FITS GIS Specialist
bwilkerson@depauw.edu (x6554)

FITS’ sister program, Student Technology Assessment and Resources Training (START), offers workshops for students using technologies and instructional methods that enhance learning. START can tailor workshops for class projects that use technology to support instruction. START utilizes ITAP associates as trainers to deliver instruction on technology. START also provides one–on–one consultation M-F from 8 am–5 pm for students to provide assistance with specialized software. START also has consultants to help students with basic technology issues, located at three service points: at the digital media lab (dml) in Roy O. West library, at the Prevo library in Julian, and at the Help Desk in the Union Building. These services are available Sunday through Thursday (times vary between 6:00 pm – 10:00 pm & 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm.

For more information about START contact Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START (michaelgough@depauw.edu or x1093)

Contributed by Michael Gough

Published monthly, the FITS newsletter contains information on emerging technologies, project spotlights, up and coming events, and other information relating to instructional technology.

Inside this “Special Moodle Edition” issue you will find articles addressing our progress transitioning from Blackboard to Moodle, our new open-source learning management system. Finally, we hope to get you acquainted with RSS readers in our emerging technology feature.

Some of you may have noticed that the FITS newsletter has a new look and format this year. We have implemented a new WordPress blogging system to publish our newsletter online. This change offers four main benefits. First it allows for a space where multiple people can edit and write articles online before publication. We no longer have to pass around drafts via email. Instead, we can use the system to collaborate and edit what has been written by our colleagues. Second, it allows for category organization with tags. You might notice that along the right side you see some category tags. As we continue to accumulate articles on certain topics throughout multiple newsletters, WordPress will keep track of all articles tagged with that topic. For instance, to view all articles related to Moodle, click on the Moodle Category link. Third, Word press automatically generates RSS feeds. This means you can subscribe to this newsletter and receive real time updates to your RSS reader. If you are already using a RSS reader, click here to subscribe to our newsletter. For more information on RSS readers, see the featured article in this issue. Lastly, we have the option of enabling comments on certain articles to facilitate online discussions on a certain topic.

You are always invited to suggest topics for future newsletter articles or even request to write an article. If you would like to contribute, please contact Michael Gough at MichaelGough@depauw.edu or x 1093.

Contributed by Veronica Pejril

This spring, I began using Moodle for delivering content to my students in Music 110, Introduction to Music Technology. At first glance, the new system seemed overwhelming; whereas Blackboard offered me a predefined, rather linear template for delivering content and managing online interaction with my students, Moodle presented me with new choices to make that I’d never had to make before. Many of these choices were cosmetic in nature, such as page layout and theme choice. It was easy at first to get bogged down in, and even annoyed by, the details of presentation, before I got down to business and concerned myself with the task of adding content.

I was pleasantly surprised that linking to audio and video content from within Moodle provided live media-players on my students’ screens without having to take the extra step of “serving” that content elsewhere, as I had to do the previous semester with Blackboard. This was particularly helpful for my class; I was able to quickly share my students’ creative music projects online so they could listen to, review and critique each other’s work, all from within Moodle.

Another tool I discovered was the RSS Feeds block, which I used to consolidate content from my class blog into the students’ Moodle page. In the end, my students had just one place to go for all their online course content and announcements. Blackboard didn’t offer a way to integrate that blogged content into the course management system.

By the end of the spring semester, my perception of Moodle changed quite a bit, and I started thinking of it as something of a Swiss army knife for learning management. When all the knife’s tools are folded out, it looks and feels unmanageable and overly complex; by hiding those tools I didn’t need for my own curricular goals, the tool became simple and quite useful for my teaching.

FITS has created a Moodle Resources and Documentation course for you to use as a reference.

http://moodle.depauw.edu/course/view.php?id=48

(log in as Guest)

Friday, September 14th
Moodle Users Group (MUG) Meeting
Oriented toward faculty members who are already using Moodle, bi-weekly meetings for everyone to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss ways that Moodle can be used in teaching and learning.
Noon-1:00 p.m. Roy O. West Media Classroom

Monday, September 24th
Moodle Users Group (MUG) Meeting
Oriented toward faculty members who are already using Moodle, bi-weekly meetings for everyone to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss ways that Moodle can be used in teaching and learning.
3:00 p.m. Roy O. West Media Classroom

Wednesday, October 3rd
Moodle Showcase
“Doing Blackboard like things in Moodle”
3:00 p.m. Julian Auditorium

Monday, October 8th
Moodle Users Group (MUG) Meeting
Oriented toward faculty members who are already using Moodle, bi-weekly meetings for everyone to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss ways that Moodle can be used in teaching and learning.
3:15 p.m. Roy O. West Media Classroom

Wednesday, October 24th
Moodle Showcase
“Doing ‘New’ with Moodle”
3:15 p.m. Julian Auditorium

Friday, November 2th
Moodle Users Group (MUG) Meeting
Oriented toward faculty members who are already using Moodle, bi-weekly meetings for everyone to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss ways that Moodle can be used in teaching and learning.
Noon - 1:00 p.m. Roy O. West Instruction Room A

Wednesday, November 7th
Moodle Showcase
“What I’ve learned about Moodle”
3:15 p.m. Julian Auditorium

Friday, November 16th
Moodle Users Group (MUG) Meeting
Oriented toward faculty members who are already using Moodle, bi-weekly meetings for everyone to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss ways that Moodle can be used in teaching and learning.
Noon - 1:00 p.m. Roy O. West Media Classroom

Saturday, November 17th
FITS Saturday workshop
Times and Locations TBA

Friday, November 30th
Moodle Users Group (MUG) Meeting
Oriented toward faculty members who are already using Moodle, bi-weekly meetings for everyone to share ideas, ask questions, and discuss ways that Moodle can be used in teaching and learning.
Noon - 1:00 p.m. Roy O. West Instruction Room A

Contributed by Veronica Pejril

Web-based content is becoming a mainstream fixture in many curricula’s arsenals of learning resources that faculty members provide their students. Because that content can include articles from scholarly journals, emerging stories in the news/blogosphere, or multimedia content such as audio/video podcasts or presentations, navigating through these data can easily overwhelm even a seasoned instructor or researcher. Controlling the flow and delivery of this information with an “RSS reader” can make this daunting task simple and manageable.

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a protocol that drives the delivery of subscribed content to you, or your students’, desktops. Instead of taking the time to fetch new journal articles, blog entries, news stories or podcasts from the websites they reside on, you can use RSS to subscribe to content streams you’d like fed to you or your students automatically.

Google Reader, Netvibes and Firefox’s own “Live Bookmarks” are but a few of the hundreds of free tools available for subscribing to RSS-delivered content. Some sophisticated RSS readers allow you to rank or filter subscribed content (e.g., subscribing to articles from a music-history journal, but only displaying content that features Mozart). Web-based RSS readers such as Google Reader are portable. Your personalized content is available to you by logging into an account, from any web browser on any computer, anywhere.

Faculty members can share RSS-based content such as journal articles, breaking news and audio podcasts via their course management system. Moodle offers an “RSS Feed” block, so a professor can provide automatically-updated topical content to her students.

If you are interested in using RSS for your research or instructional goals, I invite you to contact any of our DePauw FITS staff. Listed below are some online resources to help you get started.

RSS in Plain English:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

Tour of Google Reader

http://www.google.com/help/reader/help.html

Finding and Subscribing to RSS feeds

http://www.google.com/help/reader/feeds.html