Jings. Crivens. Help ma Boab! [that'll mean something to anyone who reads The Sunday Post] I'm flattered to hear my name mentioned so nicely. I am glad i was able to do even slight justice to the amazing tool that is MOODLE.
For the record I used princply the same presnetation i did at last year's Oxford MoodleMoot, with a few changes, including the introduction of Martins World Tour music - they loved it, broke the ice nicely - and the t-shirt pic with martin ("Moodle needs you").
Here, if you are interested is a wee bit more detailed reference describing the presnetation written by John Ingleby of Schoolforge.
"Moodle - educational tools at their best
Drew Buddie gave a highly entertaining talk about Moodle (http://www.moodle.org), based on his experiences of developing Merapolis (http://www.merapolis.co.uk/moodle/) at the Royal Masonic School (http://www.royalmasonic.herts.sch.uk/). In fact it was so entertaining that I made few notes, and you should view the slides! (It was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike any other presentation I have seen; excellent - SteveLee)
Most groups of pupils divide into three: those who participate a lot, those who participate sometimes, and those who don't participate at all. Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and the most striking result of using it is that more pupils express things they would never express in class. In a class using Moodle, the level of participation is much more evenly distributed across the whole group.
Moodle also meets pupils' need to work at Twitchspeed (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Twitch%20Speed.html) - author Marc Prensky's term for the generation that is growing up with game machines and computers.
Moodle is rapidly gaining favour over more expensive proprietary VLEs. Becta is actively investigating Moodle for the DfES e-Strategy (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/e-strategy/). The next version will incorporate the open source Learning Activity Management System (http://www.lamsinternational.com/) (LAMS) and be capable of handling SCORM (http://www.rhassociates.com/scorm.htm) objects. "
Everyone seems to like Prensky's 'twitchspeed' phrase - how I wish I had coined it!
Drew