As far as alternatives to Moodle, Edmodo is probably the best contender. Something that I really didn't like about Moodle is that students had to log into a separate world to access class content. It was great because it was password protected but it was a nightmare to get parents access (I might have been making it harder than it was, but this was my experience). I don't know if Edmodo will solve the parent access problems that I had, but Edmodo is still an alternate environment that students have to make an account for. The nice thing about Google sites (and Google classroom) for us is that all of our students now have a school assigned Google account and we work in the Google framework on a regular basis. I like, though, that with Moodle and Edmodo the content is password protected. With a Google site, it is pretty much accessible by anyone at any time.
Another site that I have been recently considering is Blendspace. This website has been brought up at other workshops, but at a recent workshop on the flipped classroom model, I got to see it in action. On Blendspace, you can arrange resources into groups ("lessons"). Students need to make an account for Blendspace, so it doesn't move you away from having a separate site, but students can create an account with their Google account, so as long as they are signed in to their Google account it should automatically log them into Blendspace.
One of my biggest concerns about losing Moodle is that there is a flow of information that is not preserved in a backup on your computer. I will be losing a lot of student work as well. Schoology is a site that seems to be a solution to the first problem, but not the second. Schoology was introduced to me by my technology specialist as a good alternative to Moodle. While I'm fairly certain I won't be using it as an alternative (for similar reasons to Edmodo), it is going to be my storage system. When you back up from Moodle and import into Schoology, you get a pretty close approximation to the order the information was listed on Moodle. It is the closest thing to Moodle I have found so far. Even the weblinks are preserved. To maintain the familiar look of my Moodle pages, I have taken screen shots of all of the classes in addition to making the backup copy of all of the files.
There are also some features that I am really going to miss--"choice" in particular. Google forms are a good alternative to choice, but it is not the same! The things I like best about choice is that I can see all of the results in a really easy to read table format and I can set a limit to the number of students that can choose a particular option. So far, I have not seen these on forms. I use this when having students select appointment times or choose topics. Below you see what the student sees (top) and what I see (bottom).
Student view
Teacher view
I came across a link that talks about how to "Dynamically remove choices" from a google form after they have reached a defined limit. I have not looked at this yet, but it could be one solution! Another way to have students pick is simply by creating a google doc that they can all edit. I have tried this and students acted maturely for the most part! It is definitely something that has to be monitored. If you are a GAFE (google apps for education) school like us, then you have institution assigned email addresses for students. You have the sharing option for the doc to only be accessible by those in your institution (with the link). Selecting this option forces them to sign in, which is very helpful because you can track edits and see who is responsible for any untoward edits :) If any of you use or know of something that is capable of what I described above (choice from Moodle), please share in the comments!!
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