Moodle and Jing

Welcome back! Delighted to see that you have once again navigated through the wide world of cyber-space back to my page. It has been awhile since I last posted something, now I have several posts for you I am going to be putting up in quick succession. The basic gist of them is that they will all have to do with the two new programs I am familiarizing myself with, those programs being Moodle and Jing.
Moodle, for those of you who are not familar with the program is, is an online course management system. Instructors can use Moodle to set up a web page for their class, that can supplement their traditional classroom teaching with features such as quizzes with instant grades and responses (excepting essay and short answer responses), upload documents, such as their course sylabus, etc. Be sure to visit Irina Gendelman's blog page "Curious" for more information about Moodle, or visit Saint Martin's Moodle and explore.
I also mentioned Jing. Jing is, for the time being, free for download, and a wonderful resource available for both Macs and PCs. Jing simplifies the process of explaining to someone that you cannot be in psychical contact with how to accomplish any given task on the computer. Where once we would have relied on emails full of step-by-step directions and pray the recipients understood our terminology, or perhaps the more technical may have included several screen-shots, Jing alows you to send videos. Jing is easy to use, and the site you upload it from offers help and tutorials on how to use it. You can easily record any actions that you do on your own computer screen, and use a microphone to record your instructions verbally. You can save your videos as a file, upload them to the site provided by Jing, or email them directly to your colleagues.
These past two weeks I have diligently writing scripts and recording Jing videos about how to add content to class pages on Moodle in an effort to help those who are not familiar with the program. To view some of the videos use the link to orient to SMU's Instructional Design page on Moodle where you can watch the videos or just browse the page for other resources to help you learn more about using Moodle. You can log in as a guest if you do not have a Saint Martin's log in. I will very soon be adding the full scripts as individual blogs to supplement the Jing videos.

More to follow, so stay tuned!