Moodle making

At last I have an opportunity to delve deeper into the back end of Moodle as I prepare for next year’s classes.  I have largely experienced Moodle as a student and often found the interface heavily text based and a tad dull in terms of it’s visual appearance.  For the younger audience or ‘digital natives’ (Prensky 2006) who have never known a time without the Internet, Facebook and YouTube I think our online classroom environment should be a visual feast of  engaging interactive media.  Take the new online pinboard site Pininterest.com that allows you to collate a visual storyboard of your interests and likes which can of course be shared with friends and other social media sites.  Maybe this could be a useful tool to share topic related sites with students?

I’m keen to look at making use of the many Blocks within Moodle and have already discovered the Random Glossary Entry Block which will provide students with a visual reminder of some of the new terms they will be introduced to.  I’m currently working on Building Lessons within Moodle to present information whereas in the past I’ve tended to use a web page.  Using the Lesson feature  can enable students to have more choice in how they view the lesson, pages can be linear, a slide show, non-linear, branching or a combination of or so I’m told.  I have yet to explore the possibilities and welcome feedback or advice from any other Moodle enthusiasts.