Teaching with Moodle

I also start with teachers as students. I have written a couple of sequences of activities around topical issues, to promote discussion, with the aim of encouraging discussion. The 1st set was around the Iraq War; more recently I wrote something about the UK government's renewed issue in Nuclear power. Here's the structure of the former:

• Choice: a single question along the line of agree/disagree/don't know
  
• Forum: to start discussion
• Resource: Web link
• Resource: web page
• Glossary
  
• Quiz
• Chat (though now I'd probably encourage use of the messenger, subject to college policy
  
• Assignment

The idea was to show how a series of activities could lead to assessment, that they could keep coming back to the forum, and to show them the things they most commonly want to learn to start - web links/uploaded files/quizzes. Also, I think that list above is more than enough for a starter.

I really sell the glossary strongly, as a way to build interaction

I encourage them to start learning moodle as teachers following this route, as most of my trainees come from a background of publishing content (mainly files and web links) to an intranet:

1. Learn to publish existing content (resources, Learning Objects as appropriate)
2. Add interactivity (quizzes, glossaries, forums for general discussion, assignments)
3. Add collaboration (forums as specific exercises, wikis)
4. 'Design for Learning' - designing sequences of activities, using a range of tools
   

In practice, a morning on moodle will get a range of learners to step 2; they've normally moved further after individual investigation.

Cheers, Andy D