Monday, May 8, 2006

PRISM Moves to Moodle

We rolled out a major site update at PRISM last week. We switched over to using the Moodle Course Management System, which opened up an array of new features for teachers. While the web site is primarily for Indiana middle school math, science, and technology teachers, the new features are useful for a far wider group. Teachers (parents, and students) from many grade levels and geographical areas in and outside of Indiana may now benefit from the site.

Working with Moodle is very cool, also. Moodle has proved to be very adaptable for our purposes at PRISM. Since it's open source, the price is right. New and improved features continue to appear on the Moodle site.

Here's the press release we sent out:

The PRISM web portal has now integrated the Moodle open source Content Management System into its site. PRISM is a free, online Community of Practice. The heart of PRISM is its teacher-reviewed database of digital teaching resources for Indiana math, science, and technology teachers. It links Indiana Academic Standards for math and science, and to a lesser extent, technology, to appropriate web sites for grades 6, 7, and 8. The database is also searchable by keyword, enabling use by others outside the middle school grade levels or outside Indiana.

In PRISM’s communities, teachers may create their own classroom communities, either public or private, fully accessible by their students and their students’ parents. Teachers may post assignments (that get automatically transferred to their own community calendar), lessons, quizzes, online surveys, and much more. Teachers may also enroll their students as limited PRISM members (limited to comply with confidentiality regulations) and have assignment, lesson, and quiz scores automatically recorded.

An all-new How-To community has been created to supplement the already excellent Moodle online help system. Already available are step-by-step, illustrated directions on Creating a Community in PRISM (Moodle), Changing the look of a Community, Using the Questionnaire module, Using the Moodle RichText Editor, How to Post a Web Page on PRISM, the "How To" Glossary, Posting Events on Your Community Calendar, and Posting Assignments on PRISM with more on the way.

PRISM is funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment and is hosted at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Of course, PRISM isn't the answer to all teachers' needs. In the course of my job, I run across many similar, helpful sites for teachers. Two that I've found in the last few weeks are really impressive, although geared more to higher education or high school use. The Orange Grove from Florida showed up on my radar when I was hunting for a SCORM done right. It's totally free.

Wisconsin-Online also has a variety of excellent online tutorials. It appears most have a free link to them, although they offer to gladly sell you a CD version or their source code.

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