Moodle Review

For my latest grad school assignment I decided to try something a little different. Our assignment was to examine the online course management system Moodle and develop a presentation using a digital tool of our choice. I decided to use a website called Xtranormal which creates animated videos to words that you supply. It took a bit longer to create than I anticipated, you have to create a dialog, pick a setting, choose characters, and give your characters hand gestures and facial expressions, but it was fun to work on.


The end product is, of necessity, not as detailed as you could make a website or does not have a point by point explanation using a PowerPoint or VoiceThread. Instead it has to sound conversational and the point needs to come across in that conversation. To that end I tried to throw some realistic elements into the conversation which is between two female students, one who just came from my class. These came in the form of some self deprecating humor, the use of my student shortened nickname Mr. Mo (I am stuck with it whether I like it or not), and a little interest in boys from the female students.

All in all I enjoyed putting it together and I do think Moodle is an excellent tool to be used both in and outside of classrooms. I use it myself in my current classes and I am going to be teaching a summer technology class to math teachers which will use Moodle as our base technology to explore online technologies for specific subject areas.

Here is a link to my animated video:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11550077