Rowan O’Brien-Williams

The original Moodle will soon be no longer. Technology coach Renee Blake and the rest of the STA technology team are currently trying out Moodle Two with the accelerated biology class. Blake said that she and the technology team plan to launch Moodle Two for the entire student body the first day of school for the 2012-2013 school year.

According to Blake, Moodle Two is the newest version of Moodle. This new version offers many new features.

“We set up all open room schedules, lunch/activity schedules, help desk, lost and found, all those things are now on the main menu on the side rather than going down the middle,” Blake said. “Things don’t keep getting moved down to the bottom. The only thing in the middle is set up as forum but students can’t reply to it… the most current announcement is located at the top right now.”

Docking, another new feature of Moodle Two is more user friendly for both students and teachers.

“[With the current version of Moodle] classes are stuck [on the side bar] and are static,” Blake said. “[With Moodle Two] you can dock classes on the side of the page and they stay in the same place on the page when you scroll up or down. You can also personalize what you choose to dock.”

According to Blake, all the teachers have already been introduced to Moodle Two. The technology team encouraged teachers to switch their files to Google Docs so that they can link their files from Google Docs to Moodle. This will allow for better editing options come next school year. However, for the time being, the technology team continues to deal with some of the inconveniences of the original Moodle. They plan to work to fix these problems before they make the switch to Moodle Two.