moodle for teachersmoodle.montpelier-k12.org/pluginfile.php/477/mod... · gettingstarted.....2!...

Getting Started ....................................................................................................................... 2

Logging In ............................................................................................................................... 2

Editing Course Settings ........................................................................................................... 3

OnScreen Help........................................................................................................................ 3

Enrolling Students .................................................................................................................. 4

Importing Students................................................................................................................. 4

Roles ...................................................................................................................................... 5

Adding content to your course................................................................................................ 6

Content Sections .................................................................................................................... 7

Adding Resources or Activities................................................................................................ 7

Resources ............................................................................................................................... 8

Activities ................................................................................................................................ 9

Blogging in Moodle............................................................................................................... 10

Wikis .................................................................................................................................... 12

Forums ................................................................................................................................. 13

Blocks................................................................................................................................... 14

Some Tips ............................................................................................................................. 14

More Information................................................................................................................. 15

Recommended Reading ........................................................................................................ 15

Teaching With Moodle A NWOCA Training

2 © NBEC/NWOCA 2010

Getting Started This guide assumes that your site administrator has set up a Moodle site, and assigned you to a new, blank course where you have teacher privileges. Your students will be added later and will have student privileges.

You must be logged in in order to edit a course and use most of the features described below.

Logging In Here are the steps to access your Moodle site for the first time.

1. Go to your moodle site.

2. Login by clicking the login link

3. Use your Student/Teacher Login to login to the system

4. The first time you will be asked to complete a profile.

Make sure you add information to each of the fields in Red.

For email address you can make something up if you do not have an email address.

e.g. [email protected]

5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Update Profile

Congratulations you are now logged into Moodle.

As you will discover, your course may look a little different from this presentation. Moodle administrators can change the appearance of their Moodle server using themes. Themes can be enabled for courses as well, you can find many themes by Googling “Moodle Themes”

Most course homepage formats are broken into course sections (often by week or topic). Resources and activities are added to each section. When writing text in Moodle you have a range of Formatting options, including using HTML in Moodle. The Course settings are robust and offer different ways to enroll Students or format the course.


Editing Course Settings Once you have logged in and can edit your course, you want to go and make sure that your course has an enrolment key and you can setup your course format.

Click on Settings in the Administration block.

Make sure that there is a Full Name and Short Name for your course. The short name is what appears in the breadcrumb

navigation at the top of your course screen.

Choose either Topics or Weekly format for your Format depending on how you intend to use moodle. Topics format allows up to 52 slots for topics. Weekly arranges those slots into weeks based on a start date you specify.

Scroll down to the Availability section and make sure that there is an Enrollment key entered in that box. You can see what the key is by clicking the unmask box.

You need to give the enrollment key to your students

Scroll all the way to bottom and click Save Changes

OnScreen Help You will find on screen help information on pages where moodle requires some user input. Click the help button to view any help information for that item.

Many pages will also have moodle documentation that you can read look for this at the bottom of page.


Enrolling Students

Students can enroll themselves into courses. This is the easiest way to add them to your class.

They will navigate to your class and click on the course name.

They will be asked for the enrollment key. (see above) which you should give them ahead of time.

Once entered they will be automatically enrolled in your course.

You can manage enrollments by viewing the roles page. Click Assign Roles in the Administration Block.

Importing Students The alternative to enrolling students, especially where your students do not have email accounts , is to import them as users from a CSV file.

This is an example of an excel spreadsheet with the necessary fields to import a student into your class.

UserName The students username (could be Student ID) Password Make one up for each student. FirstName Student First name. LastName Student Last name. Email Student email address (make one up if necessary.-‐ must be unique) Course1 The Short name of your course in Moodle.


Roles Each user in Moodle has a role. When you are given the role of teacher for example you can then edit your course and add content, manage students etc. Clicking the assign roles link in the Admin block brings up your roles. To add or remove users from a role you click on the role name (e.g. Student) and add or remove them.

To remove a student click on their name in the list on the left and click the Remove button in the center of the two windows.

To add a student select them from the list on the right and click the Add button.


Adding content to your course

The illustration below shows a new course set up with topic sections in the middle column. In the right and left columns are a few of Moodle's many blocks such as "Latest News" or "Administration". Editing has been turned on. The teacher is ready to add resources and activities.

Example: Teacher's view of a home page of new course, editing turned on

When editing has been turned on, a variety of editing icons appear next to all editable objects in the course. Your icons may look different because of your Theme.. Below is a brief list of common icons.

Content Sections

Blocks


TIP: Some icons toggle (*). For example, the open eye indicates that the resource is visible to

students, while clicking it changes it to a closed eye, making it invisible to students.

Content Sections Depending on what you chose in the Course Settings (see page 3) you will either see either numbered sections or if you chose weekly format you will see the weeks listed.

With editing turned on you can choose to add either resources or activities to your course.

You can also add text (including links) to the Section Summary.

To add text click on the edit summary icon.

This will bring up the Text Editor

In the above example Headings are used to emphasize text in the summary.

Adding Resources or Activities To add or alter activities or resources a teacher must use the "Turn editing on" button on the course homepage. The same button will also turn editing off. Choose switch role to... Student allows the teacher to see the course page as a student would see it.

To add items to a section, you will use the pull down boxes for activities and resources.


Resources Moodle supports a range of different resource types that allow you to include almost any kind of digital content into your courses. These can be added by using the add a resource dropdown box when editing is turned on. Resources generally are your course “content”.

A Text page is a simple page written using plain text from a link in the course. Text pages aren't pretty, but they're a good place to put some information or instructions.

If you are after more options for your new page then you should be thinking about adding a Web page and making use of Moodle's WYSIWYG editor.

Link to a file or a web site – This is one of the easiest resources to add. You can either link to a website by adding a name and Location or you can link to an existing file that you have stored in the files repository.


Labels allow you to add more information between activity or resource links in your course.

Labels are the only kind of content that displays 100% on the course page. All other kinds of content will be on pages of their own or lead to new web pages.

Activities There are many learning activity modules that you may add to your course with the "Add an activity" drop down menu. Activities differ from resources in that they can be graded if desired. Grades are recorded in the built-‐in gradebook.

Communication and collaboration may take place using live Chats or asynchronous discussion Forums for conversational activities. You can also


use Choices to gain group feedback. Adding Wikis to your courses is an excellent way to allow students to work together on a collaboratively-‐authored project.

Work can be uploaded and submitted by students and scored by teachers using Assignments or Workshops. These modules have several assessment options, including instructor-‐assessment, self-‐assessment, and even peer-‐assessment. Online Quizzes offer several options for automatic and manual scoring. You can even integrate your Hot Potato quizzes by adding a Hotpot activity.

Lessons deliver content and offer ways of individualizing your presentation based upon a student's choices. Glossaries of keywords can be set up by the instructor, and can be configured to allow students to edit, add, or rate entries.

Surveys and Databases are also very powerful additions to any course.

If all of that isn't enough for you then you can also add any number of contributed modules that are not part of the official Moodle release! Popular modules include the Podcast, OUBlog and FLV modules.

Blogging in Moodle Moodle comes with a built in blog that is part of the user profile. Many schools will disable this feature as teachers have no control over the posting in a personal moodle blog.

As mentioned earlier there is an add on module for Moodle called OUBlogs that allows teachers to add a blog to course sections as a regular activity. This allows them to control the visibility of the blog and to edit or remove content if they wish.


Blogging is an easy way to get started with Moodle. Assign students to post weekly to the blog as they learn about a particular topic or read a book. Comments made by peers in blogs can be an excellent way to stimulate critical thinking skills.


Wikis Moodle has a WIKI module that can be added to any content section. Wikis are web pages that can be edited by multiple authors. Moodle WIKIs can be setup for use with a group or with a whole class. The main restriction is that only one person can be editing at a time.

The WIKI has 4 tabs View, Edit, Links and History.

The History tab shows the editing history, including all the changes made by all authors.


Forums There are 4 kinds of forums that can be used to post news, start discussions on topics. Forums are easy to setup and have the added advantage of email notifications for people who are subscribed to the forum. Forums are one of Moodleʼs best features. Well managed forums can stimulate a thoughtful discussion, motivating students to get involved and provoking unexpected insights.

In the above example ( a Q&A Forum) anyone can post a question and others will not see the answers until they have first posted their own answer.


Blocks Each course homepage generally contains blocks on the left and right with the center column containing the course content. Blocks may be added, hidden, deleted, and moved up, down and left/right when editing is turned on. Examples of blocks can be seen in the Getting Started image above. "Latest News", "Blogs", "Upcoming Events", and "Recent Activity" are a few examples.

Blocks seen by students

A wide range of over 16 different block types can provide additional information or functionality to the learner by the teacher. The standard blocks that come with Moodle are shown on the right. There are also many contributed developed by Moodlers that an administrator can add to this list.

Course administration block

A teacher with editing rights will also have a course administration block. This is an important tool for a teacher. It has sub menus for course: backup, restore, Assign roles, grades, activity logs/reports, Files and the useful Course settings.

A student's course administration block typically lists only Grades and Profile options.

Some Tips Use the navigation bar at the top of each page -‐ this should help remind you where you are and prevent getting lost.

Subscribe yourself to all of the forums in your course so that you can keep in touch with your class activity.

Encourage all of the students to fill out their user profile (including photos) and read them all -‐ this will help provide some context to their later writings and help you to respond in ways that are tailored to their own needs

Use many reports. Reports in the Administration block, Activity Reports (next to each name in the list of all people, or from any user profile page). These provide a great way to see what any particular person has been up to in the course.

Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for later -‐ do it right away. Not only is it easy to become overwhelmed with the volume that can be generated, but it's a crucial part of building and maintaining a community feel in your course.

Don't be afraid to experiment: feel free to poke around and change things. It's hard to break anything in a Moodle course, and even if you do it's usually easy to fix it.


More Information

There is some more information on Moodle and a list of links and other sites that will be helpful for teachers beginning with Moodle, available on my website.

http://mpleydell.nwoca.org/moodle

Recommended Reading Moodle Teaching Techniques: Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions

A good book for extending your knowledge of Moodle as it relates to Pedagogy and matching classroom activites with Moodle modules. Available at Amazon for $35.99

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide

This book will show complete beginners in Moodle with no technical background how to make the most of its features to enhance the learning and teaching of children aged around 7-14 Available at Amazon for $35.99

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