Mindmaps are a great tool for collecting together the thoughts of a group of people. Creating and sharing mindmaps is the purpose of one contributed activity module.

The web is a great source of useful (and sometimes not so useful) information. It can be hard for a teacher to track down a decent collection of web links, so why not ask students to do this and make this part of their learning.

Moodle provides a chat facility, but it is removed from the general context of the course page. There is one block that allows users to write quick messages without leaving the course page.

The chat, forum, and blog facilities of Moodle are well designed and very useful for teaching. Students can be asked to use these facilities as part of formative or summative tasks, but creating an atmosphere where students want to communicate using these tools, can encourage far greater participation, and openness in a course. There are a few blocks that can be used to draw students into these communication activities.