On The Rhoads

Mission Aviation Fellowship-Learning Technologies Division (MAF-LT) http://www.maflt.org/index.html announces the release of another exciting Distance Education software tool. Portable Moodle makes the world’s most popular Internet course management system, Moodle, available to the word’s 1 billion people who have access to computers, but not the Internet.

Portable Moodle puts an entire course onto any portable media such as a CD-ROM, hard disk drive, or USB memory stick. Educators may now offer curriculum on media that students can plug into any computer anywhere – at home, at a friend’s, or in an Internet café. Portable Moodle immediately transports the student into a full-featured classroom offering course outlines, lesson text, pictures and diagrams, exams, and supplemental reference material as well. If appropriate to the venue, the student may also communicate with the instructor and classmates via email (if available) or regular postal service.

MAF-LT developed Portable Moodle to equip national church leaders, missionaries and international mission organizations with a tool to make the wide range of online, biblical, Distance Education material available to people without Internet connections. While MAF-LT developed this tool primarily to expand the reach of Christian education, it may also be used for the extensive variety of community development courses such as rural doctor training and community health promotion.

MAF-LT spent two years developing this tool to advance God’s Kingdom. Currently available in English, pending releases will soon offer Portable Moodle in Spanish, Russian and French. Portable Moodle may be downloaded at no cost from. Tax-deductible donations to cover course development and continuing support will be thankfully accepted. For more information, go to the Portable Moodle forum.

Susan has been spending a lot of time at the Peoria hospital with her dad. She has power-of-attorney for his medical care and has been working hard to communicate well with the rest of the family.

She met Dutch Huette from Global Conference Call at the hospital last week. They were just talking and Susan was telling him about our ministry and that she was about to make five phone calls to update everyone on her dad’s condition. Dutch said, “Hold on a minuet”, made a call and gave Susan a conference call number for our use with her dad and our ministry communications.

This has been a tremendous blessing. Now everyone is able to interact, give their input, and Susan only has to explain things once.

I’ve used other conference call services in the past and I’ve found Global Conference Call to be 2nd-to-none. I highly recommend the service. You can reach them at 1-800-472-6034.

We’re at 18% of our goal of $5,700/month. We just need 1 person to commit to 2% ($114) of our support to be at 20%. It would be really encouraging if we could actually hit 30% before the end of the year.

Perhaps you could consider an annual, year end gift of just $300. That would represent about 1/2 of 1% of our support.

Please pray for us too!