I am an instructional technologist at a community college that is considering moving to a new VLE. I have been a Moodle user and advocate since 2004 with virtuallanguagearts.net. I am trying to convince the college to use Moodle but the IT department seems to be siding with sharepoint.
The problem:
For some reason "political" my English instructors who teach in a brand new mac lab are teaching English with out a word processing utility. Students have been very uninterested in using Pages and the mac text editor which is understandable. Basically the "politics of the school" are trying to isolate the mac lab as a separate "environment" (must be afraid Vista will catch something that works
Solution:
I found a web 2.0 app called the zoho writer. its essentially an online version of MS word that allows documents to be saved and shared among users. I think integration of this into Moodle would not only help myself but countless k-12 students who do not have access to MS word and teachers who constantly have to open Wordperfect formated documents in word extra.
zoho.com has an open API that can allow the writer to be embedded or called from another application. Documents created with the writer can also be routed to a remote server. I think I can accomplish this but I get lost when I try to figure out how to tie the document to the user. This way students can save documents under their user account. I would appreciate any help, collaboration, or thoughts you may have.
here is the zoho site as it talks about the api: http://writer.zoho.com/public/help/writer.remoteapi/fullpage#remotesave
This is the Moodle installation I have been working on. please excuse the site I am working on ajax integration, i hope staff will see this install and choose it over D2L, angel, and Blackboard.
http://media1.jccmi.edu