• Miriam Taylor, www.t-3consulting.com, @t-3consulting.com
• 10 years teaching.
• Began online teaching with second child.
• Now consults on using Moodle.

Moodle

• Used widely by millions around the world.
• Not so much in U.S. because affluence allows paying for Blackboard.
• Open source, so it is free
• Covering all basics
• A lot of work to setup, but content stays and tweaking later takes a lot less time.

Goals of tonight

1. Organizing your course site.
2. Add your own content.
3. Add Moodle tools to it.
4. Administrative things (can’t do with an empty site).
   1. Backup & Reset
   2. Gradebook
   3. Groups.

Notes

• moodle.muskegonisd.org is on version 1.9 (latest version)
• Must call Diane to create a new course. For instance if you start with “English-9″ and next year want to add “English-10″ you must call Diane.
• Moodle screen laid out in “blocks”.
• Participants block = members of the class
• Search forum
  • Useful if you have a lot of discussions.
  • Often turned off.
• Recent Activity
  • Extremely useful for the teacher.
  • very handy for a quick glance at what they did.
  • hyperlinked to the activity.

  Turn editing on allows you to configure the site.

  • eyeball hides content from students. Useful, but only one of several ways to hide content.
  • “blocks” can be deleted and added back later. Once “content” is deleted it is gone.
  • Moodle blogs are available to everyone on the MAISD site. Not very impressive.
  • Moodle wiki is as powerful as wikispaces. Very impressive.
  • arrows move blocks around.
  • Administration|Settings: Lets you make global settings.

Firefox enhancements are referred to as extensions or add-ons. You access the extensions by going to the Tools|Add-ons menu. You’ll see a window with a list of extensions already in use. It’s likely you have some extensions installed and didn’t even know it. In the bottom right hand corner is a link called “Get extensions“. The extensions I find useful are usually in the link titled, “Recommended Add-ons”.

On every computer I use, I install the following add-ons for Firefox:

Forecastfox, “Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.”

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, “Install Foxmarks on each computer, and it will work silently in the background to keep your bookmarks synchronized.”

Tab Mix Plus, “Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities.”

Download Status Bar, “View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.”

Be sure to explore more add-ons because your browsing needs are different than mine. I’ve added these add-ons to ravennaschools.org’s ikeepbookmarks.com service.

Website Requirements and Best Practices