I have to say that for a long time I really missed the boat on Moodle. All this time I really just thought of it as a way to put courses online and distribute online content to students. While it is still those things, it took me a couple of weeks of heavy research to really figure out what the true genious of moodle is: The way it talks (and listens) to other things. Now, I am not just talking about the new integration between Moodle and Google Apps, although that is pretty cool. I am in fact, talking about the ways in which it can authenticate to many systems at once (Firstclass, LDAP, a drupal server, etc.). I am talking about the ways that it can accept content from many sources and formats and call it its own:
I believe that I have finally found the glue for our online school. Whether or not we end up using Moodle for our Learning Management System needs remains to be seen. But, the simple ability to have students go to one place to access all of their content and have it actually make sense. Well, that is just beautiful.
(Just to make sure that I am being as forthcoming as possible, the most beautiful thing for me is in the fact that students will be able to be created in Infinite Campus, automatically created within Moodle, then automatically created in Google Apps. The less manual entering of student I have to do, the more I get to play around with the future of learning.)
