| 
microsoft publisher 2007 download company announced yesterday the availability of the Microsof company Office Add-in for Moodle! This add-in is available for download now and is compatible with Office 2003 and 2007! This, I need to say, is a really good idea!
publisher 2010's Education Labs group, much like their Office Labs group, creates prototypes of news tools around the Microsof company ecosystem, some of which make their way to the education vertical for bigger testing and operation! Any office Add-in for Moodle (OAM) is one such product and, once a teacher enters their Moodle server URL and logon information, adds "Open to Moodle" and "Save to Moodle" as options to the Office menu button!
As noted on the Education Labs site!
We focused on teachers and content specialists first, since we know most documents posted to Moodles come from teachers! We've gotten some asks for already about adding support for students and work, but we want to hear from you!
This is the sort of convenient feature that will help teachers who might otherwise be reluctant to use microsoft publisher 2010 to finally take the plunge! When adding documents to the learning management system becomes as easy as saving, the barriers to adoption certainly drop! I imagine we'll see even stronger integration in Office 2010 where the ability to save to the fog up (in the form of Windows Live) is local to the suite!
That, in fact, is what really impresses me about this add-in! Moodle suddenly becomes a document store just like a flash drive or a hard drive! The easier it is to add and modify documents in the fog up, a lot more likely teachers will be to share a bigger variety of content and ancillary materials! Why only post the PowerPoint show for the day's class? Why not also post the lesson plan, the notes, the ask, and a few exemplars submitted by students? Taking this a step further, Microsof company released a white paper at the same time displaying how to use SharePoint as the core file system for Moodle!
Such a integration between on-premise software and the fog up has been a key part of Microsoft's message in education for quite a while and with the OAM, the white paper, Live@Edu, and the upcoming 2010 category of software releases, the message is certainly coming to fruition! The question will be how well that message plays in the land of ipad, where the way we create and interact with content is moving quickly away from the desktop! Rich content creation, however, will still rely on desktop applications for the time being, and thus this is an important bridge to the fog up for educators and a great boost for Moodle which is increasingly rich in and of itself!
|
