Messin’ with Moodle Topics: Changing appearance of front page. Uploading users. Setting roles/permissions. Link with Google Calendar & embed other sites. Double-secret probation tips

During the Webinar… Open another browser window to demo.moodle.org This is a fully-functional Moodle anyone can play with for practice.

A note before proceeding… We’ll focus on changes that can be made to a Moodle without having access to the actual Moodle server. Some of the ideas discussed require you to have an admin login to your Moodle website, but not the Moodle server.

Default Front Page

Ways to Change the Front Page Select a new theme Modify what you have already

Modifying what you have Add graphics Rearrange, add, delete blocks RSS feed

Uploading Users There are several approaches to adding users to Moodle. Self-registration – users create their own accounts and confirm them via Manually adding a single user at a time. LDAP - Looks up user information from a server you may already have. Uploading users via a file.

The upload file format username, password, firstname, lastname, aant, insect, Adam, Ant, cnorris, ranger, Chuck, Norris, jjett, blackheart, Joan, Jett, Must save as a plain text (.txt) file, not Word format.

Using Excel Save as a CSV (comma separated value) file.

Additional data username, password, firstname, lastname, , city aant, insect, Adam, Ant, 2009 cnorris, ranger, Chuck, Norris, 2010 jjett, blackheart, Joan, Jett, 2012 hmontanta, miley, Hannah, Montana, 2011 aeinstein, relativity, Albert, Einstein, staff Putting in graduation year will make it much easier to delete students after graduation! City is a field you could use for this purpose. Not all fields can be used to select users, but city is one of them.

Uploading

Assigning Roles Administratorcan do anything, anywhere Course creator can create a course - edit it, teach in it, delete it Teacher can edit a course, teach in it, but not delete it Non-editing teacher can grade assignments, but not create new ones Student can see assignments and submit them in a course Guest can see material in a course, if teacher allowed it

From the front page Don’t assign all your teachers and students! Best to just assign admins and course creators. You can also separately set Front Page editors.

Embedding Most web content can be embedded in Moodle as part of a web page within a course.

Cool tip Rather than giving a link to a page that is open to guests, add “&username=guest” to the end of the link so users won’t have to click on the guest link. See the link below with and without “guest”

Google Calendar Create a calendar, make it public Copy its embed code Create a web page in Moodle or make it part of a course’s main page Paste the embed code in Moodle as HTML

Youtube Copy the embed text from Youtube Paste the embed text into Moodle as HTML either as a webpage or anywhere in a course that accepts HTML.

Cool Tip – Save Animoto or other files to your local computer As you play a file, a copy of it is stored at C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files Find it by looking at the largest, most recent files in this folder. Copy it to somewhere else. Upload it to Moodle to make it accessible even if your school filters Youtube or Animoto.

A local media file (WMV, FLV, MP3, MOV, MPG, AVI, etc.) Upload the file Type in a word, such as “link” and create a link in a Moodle web page that directs to the uploaded file. Open the HTML editor <>, remove the text you used while making the link. Save it.

SWF files (such as Jing) Due to security restrictions, these can be trickier. Keep track of where the file is uploaded and copy that information into the embed code between codes after src (below).

iframe tag warning! The iframe tag, such as this from skrbl.com: Will crash what ever comes after it if you forget at the end.