A taste of collaborative learning tools in Moodle

The way we communicate has changed in ways many of us could never have imagined. Blogs, wikis, and a myriad of other Web 2.0 tools offer additional possibilities for us as designers to creatively support learning experiences.

Moodle has many tools which enable us to design a range of collaborative learning experiences. This resource is just to give you a taste for what is there.

Take a look in Moodle.org which has great documentation and use the search option or the user blogs to find out more.

Moodle wiki

A wiki is a great tool for collaborative work if this work entails collecting input from different team members. Be careful if you use a wiki that the collaborative work aims at producing a defined output that needs ‘constructing together’. You may then want to combine the use of a forum and a wiki. The forum is used for the discussion of what goes into the wiki and the wiki is used for building the output with the components that have been agreed on. Why? Because we often don’t feel comfortable deleting other people’s work from a wiki. The negotiation is easier done in a discussion forum.

The Moodle wiki tool is actually very versatile and can be configured to work in many different ways; as an individual reflective tool or as a group tool.

This blog has a great video clip with an explanation of Wikis in Plain English.

Moodle Glossary

A much undervalued tool; the Moodle glossary can be used in a collaborative way by learners to build up a whole database of terminology within a course. The definitions can be commented upon and rated.

And a lot more?

This is just a start. There are many other tools we can use to support the learning process. As learning designers we need to keep informed about tools that can add value to what we want to do, and how best we can use these tools. If you find something you really like, share your thoughts about the tool with your colleagues in the Moodle for Schools Website!