14 DAY TRIAL // SkyDrive, Microsoft’s service that provides users with the possibility to save files into the cloud for fast access from virtually anywhere, is now easily accessible from Moodle.
The new option is available courtesy of a plugin for Moodle 2.3 that came out from the Moodle community, and which links the two together.
According to Dan Poltawski, lead maintainer of this repository plugin, all was possible through funding coming from Universidad Tecnológica de Chile (INACAP), and courtesy of work made by LUNS.
The plug-in is now available for download through the Moodle website, but it requires users to register their Moodle with Microsoft.
For those out of the loop, we should note that Moodle is a popular Learning Management System, which is widely used across education.
“And Microsoft's SkyDrive is also widely used by both teachers and students (although in some government systems, the access is blocked to SkyDrive when in school) as a cloud-based storage drive,” Microsoft’s Ray Fleming notes in a recent blog post.
He also welcomes the development of the new plug-in, especially since it can provide students with fast access to their files in the cloud from almost anywhere.
According to Fleming, there are at least three reasons for which this can be considered a great idea: - Let your students access work from home or school, on multiple computers, and even phones
- Reduce the amount of storage capacity you need on your own servers
- Give teachers more storage capacity (SkyDrive gives 7GB of storage per user in the Cloud), for all of those videos, fancy PowerPoints etc that are eating up your drive space!
To learn additional info on how SkyDrive and Moodle can be brought together, have a look at the Moodle website. There, you will find both documentation on the plugin and all the necessary download links for it.