New Office Add-in for Moodle saves teachers time

Picture this. You're a teacher. It’s a few weeks into the semester and one of your units is taking longer than expected, so you want to update the syllabus at Moodle* to push out the date for the unit test.

Yesterday, you’d have had to open up a copy of the syllabus, make the change, save it locally, go to the Moodle website, login, find the course, go into the files folder, click browse, find your document, and upload it.  Really, it shouldn’t be that hard. Today, with the new Office Add-in for Moodle, you can go to Microsoft Word, select Open from Moodle, select the course, select the document, make the change, and click Save. Done. All without leaving Microsoft Word.

The Add-in works with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  In addition to the “Open from Moodle” item that lets you open and edit documents directly from Moodle, it also adds a “Save to Moodle” option so you can save any document directly to Moodle without having to go through the Web interface. Bottom line: it’s faster.

My experiences as an elementary school teacher are never far from my mind. Uploading and sharing information was painfully slow if it was possible at all. Now, as a Program Manager on the Education Labs team at Microsoft, I help create technology to solve issues that many teachers, students, and institutions face every day. The new Office Add-in for Moodle makes it faster and easier to post Office documents to Moodle. It saves teachers time. 

*What’s Moodle? Moodle is a popular learning management system that many teachers use to post their documents. It’s basically a website where you can upload documents to share.  (Okay, it’s a lot more than that, but I’m focusing on the basics, since that’s where teachers spend lots of time.)  Office is one of the most popular pieces of software in schools, so teachers end up with lots of Office documents— PowerPoint presentations for lectures, Word docs for assignments and permission slips, Excel spreadsheets for tracking homework. Through Moodle they share these documents with students and parents. The Office Add-in for Moodle makes this easier.

Thanks to our friends at Northwest University and the University of Kent, we were able to try this out with real Moodle installations. We’ve gone through a few rounds of updates, and we think we have something that many Office and Moodle users will really love. If you’re a teacher looking for an easier way to get your Office documents into Moodle, check it out. Download the Add-In from Education Labs.

To learn more you can also:

• Watch this video about the Add-in, on Channel 9.
• Read what Christopher Dawson of ZDNet's Education blog has to say about the Add-in.
• Read Moodle's own announcement of the Add-in by Martin Dougiamas

-- Kate Mulcahy

Kathleen (Kate) Mulcahy was a Title 1 Math Specialist at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School prior to joining Microsoft to become a Program Manager in the Education Labs group.