Hintonblogger

Well I just got the exciting news that Moodle 1.9 has been released. The release notes for 1.9 look awesome and I'm excited to get the final release installed over at HintonWEB Learning Center to start playing with it. Here are the features that I'm most excited about having:

1. New Gradebook - the new gradebook looks like it has many of the features that are important for basic gradebook functionality and offers a good starting point to continue to grow the quality of the Moodle Gradebook
2. Outcomes - tying learning outcomes to educational activities is important, especially in an environment where so much emphasis is placed on teaching to "standards"
3. Enhancing the statistics module (and fixing its bugs), improving scalability, tagging, and the beautiful new curvy corners them by Urs Hunkler

I'm becoming more convinced that Moodle's blogging feature will be obsoleted at this point (especially considering the lack of addition of comments in this version). The integration with the Mahara portfolio system may offer a glimpse at how blogs best fit in, as pieces of a student portfolio developed over time. In playing with Mahara just briefly, it looks to offer an impressive, but simple way for students to aggregate different types of learning artifacts over time, including their blog posts.

Congratulations to Martin Dougiamas and everybody that helps make Moodle one of the best learning tools out there.