Lounge

Greetings, Adriana--

Blackboard sets up a separate area for groups, and inside it the instructor can enable the file exchange, a chat room, and a discussion board.

Moodle treats these things a bit differently.  Instead of setting up a separate area of your course (groups and the groups button), everyone works out of the same area (the topic).  But you can set up activities to function with groups.  So, for example, you would set up a discussion board for the whole class but enable the group settings, then the members of one group could see only the posts by those group members. 

I think this works better than the BB system because an instructor can see everything by ALL the groups, whereas in BB, you have to make yourself a member of each group and go in and post or check posts for each separate area.  It is a lot more clicking!  And I like the fact that what you are doing is integrated with the instruction, not separated into a totally different area of the course.

Currently, in Moodle 1.5.3, you can assign a student to only one group.  I believe that is going to change in future versions. 

Here is a link to the documentation on groups:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Groups

The group settings are available on all the activities, as far as I know.  They are NOT available on resources although some of us would like that!

Hope that helped,
atw

Do you want to restrict access to certain activities and resources to only a select group of students? I have a roundabout way of achieving that if you are interested I can explain it.