The Twittersphere is hot with news of the release of Microsoft’s free Office Add-in for Moodle.
The plug-in, which works with Office 2003 and Office 2007, allows you to open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents directly from Moodle, as well as save your documents straight into your course files area, bypassing the Moodle web interface completely.
Martin Dougiamas, the founder of Moodle explains how this was done (via Moodle.org):
“They’ve [Microsoft] done this by calling Moodle web scripts directly which is probably not as stable as using web services designed specifically for this purpose (such as the ones in the upcoming Moodle 2.0), but their approach does have the huge benefit that it works with any recent 1.x Moodle out of the box with no modifications to the Moodle site.”
It would appear from Jon Perera’s blog (Microsofts GM of Education Products Group) that teachers are the intended beneficiaries of the latest Microsoft Add-in:
“At the core of student success are teachers. However, teachers today are being asked to do more with less, and are continually looking for ways to more effectively help students learn.
Like Moodle, Microsoft Office is prevalent in classrooms around the world…So we explored ways to improve how educators can intuitively and efficiently use the two products together. What we developed is simple. The Microsoft Office Add-in for Moodle provides educators an easy way to find, open, and save their Microsoft Office files housed in Moodle..”
The Add-in is compatible with the current version of Office for Windows PCs, but not the Mac. Microsoft is currently evaluating how to support Moodle in Office 2010, which also includes browser-based Office Web Apps that run on both Macs and PCs.
The Add-in is free and available for download at www.educationlabs.com. You also can see a short video of how the new Add-in being used.
If you have any more questions on how to make sure your Moodle gets the most from the Microsoft Add-in email info@synergy-learning.com.
Tags: eLearning, Microsoft, Moodle, Synergy Learning
