Using Moodle in the Homeschool Environment Part 1: Installing Moodle

The new school year is upon us and I am always trying some new trick to get organized and get my son working more independently. Recently, some of his homeschooled friends have switched to the online public charter school K12. While that environment is not for us, I do see some advantages in the child's ability to work at their own pace but still have obvious assignments and deadlines.

What Moodle can Provide:

1. A detailed schedule (even for the whole year)

2. Deliver online content (videos, webpages, worksheets) all in one place

3. Record the student's activity and progress.

4. Exposure to the system that most colleges use for their online content delivery.

What Moodle won't do:

1. Plan the classes for you. For most homeschoolers this amount of planning may feel labor-intensive unless you'll have more than one student in a class.

Step One will be to install Moodle on a computer connected to your home network. I installed on an older machine running WinXP Professional. I will likely migrate to a Ubuntu server later and I'll let you know how that goes when we get there.

1. Point your browser to http://moodle.org/.

2. Click the Downloads icon (lower right hand side).

3. Download the appropriate packages. In this case, Moodle for Windows.

4. Follow the standard download instructions.

5. Extract your packages someplace easy to remember (the Desktop or My Documents perhaps)

6. Within the extracted folder double-click the icon labeled "Start Moodle"

7. Follow the initial set-up instructions, usernames/password assignments etc.

8. Open your web browser and type http://localhost, again follow any set up instructions.

9. Now you have your Moodle Server. From the local machine you will be able to type "http://localhost", from remote computers it will be the IP address of that machine (in my case 10.181.46.102 - yours will be different).

10. Start customizing your experience. There are lots of links to the left - Appearance, Accounts, Courses - start experimenting and have fun.

I think that most of the controls are fairly easy to understand and inputting the course information is relatively simple; however, there is a lot of planning to be done. So, crack open your child's textbooks and think about how you want the school year to be divided. All of our courses have been assigned a weekly period so far, but I may change to "by lesson" for Math in particular.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 - The Student Experience.