Moodle courses - adding buttons

Spruce up your Moodle course with buttons

I have added some code to Moodle to allow for the easy creation of navigation buttons to Moodle courses and pages. Below is a short PowerPoint guide outlining the process.

Buttons can be created from images too - just insert a link and set the Class to 'button' in exactly the same way as for the text links in the guide.

A button with an image and text is only slightly more tricky, but is best done using the HTML editor - put the image and text inside the a tags, seperated with a br linebreak.

Visual Bookmarking and Sharing with Pearltrees

Create and share tiled bookmark collections with Pearltrees.

An excellent way to share links and resources with colleagues and students - collaborative lists can even be set up. One of the best features is the ease of sharing bookmarks using Pearltrees, with options to share to Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Reddit at the click of a button...

...and my absolute favourite, the ability to embed your bookmark tiles into a webpage:

ELearning Tools, by wgsbelearning
This can be done on Moodle too, allowing you to share links in a much more attractive and engaging way!

Getting Started with Moodle

The first instructional video for Moodle is out! We start of with the basics of configuring course settings, naming and organising course sections and uploading files.

Moodle: allowing self-enrolment

New courses added to Moodle will allow students to self-enrol by default. However, you may not always wish this to be the case. Similarly you may want to enable self-enrolment in a pre-existing course. In this case you need to enter the course in question. Open the Settings menu and expand the Course administration section, within the Users submenu you need to access the Enrolment methods section and click Self enrolment. Refer to the image below:



If the Setting menu is not obvious check the top left for a small vertical tab- the menu can be collapsed to a left-hand ribbon bar.

Moodle resources - uploaded files.

The way that Moodle 2.4 handles uploaded files has changed: files can now be easily embedded into a Moodle page for viewing. When uploading new files you can select how the link will behave, however some of you may wish to change the behaviour of an existing file. In the example below I change a .pdf file from being displayed embedded in the page to opening in a new window. Locate your resource on the course page and click the cog icon to edit ("update") the resource:

On the menu that follows you will see the resource name and a white box for a description- if this is empty you must enter something here- in Moodle 2.4 this is a required field as the resources will appear as a list for the course (if the name is self-explanatory I have just copy and pasted it here again on occasion).

Below the file selection area is the Options block, here you need to change the drop-down menu to your preference- in this example Open.

Click 'Save and return to course' and check that clicking the link does what you expected.

Word/Tag Clouds

Traditional word clouds can be really useful as a visual summary of a text, the size of the word depends on how often it appears in the text, allowing the key points to be conveyed quickly. I have used these traditional word clouds to convey the specification points for GCSE Chemistry units.

In an interactive word cloud each word or 'tag' becomes a clickable link. I have found that these clouds work best with a list of keywords and with maximum sizing rather than linking to occurrence. An example is provided below, with key words about spreadsheets. In this example clicking a tag will search for "spreadsheet" and the text of the tag.

Tags can also be fitted into shapes that provide additional visual stimulus- for this to be effective a larger word list is needed and trying to size tags by frequency of occurrence makes shape fitting awkward but good results can be achieved:

Try it yourself at Tagul (excellent for interactive and shaped clouds) or Wordle (best for traditional clouds)