Great, in depth post on the use of and potential of the Office Add-in for Moodle at Moodlea.blogspot.com today.  Ian Usher (@iusher) highlights a lot of the features and raises some great questions about the use of MS documents in Moodle classrooms (and the why and how of easy access).

Here’s the full post: http://moodlea.blogspot.com/2010/06/moodling-in-your-office.html

What I enjoyed the most though was his closing thought on the availability of a Office Addin for Moodle for students.  As is, the Addin is teacher-friendly only and provides only a hook into the file repository of a course for which the teacher has editing rights (Admins need a regular editing-teacher account for it to work).  Though useful for editing documents, presentations and spreadsheets on the fly without replacing files manually, it could spell a boon for uploading and posting assignments to Moodle classrooms if a student version was available.

All the Add-In would have to do is scan the user’s Moodle for courses that s/he is enrolled in as a student (similar to how the current one looks for courses the user is a Teacher on) and then look for any active (i.e. not yet closed) Upload a Single File assignments. It would know (from the Moodle userid) which area of the course’s moddata folder to create a new subfolder in and place the Word document in there.

Agreed.

Related:

• http://www.moodlenews.com/2010/oam/

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