Book Image

Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Schools, colleges and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren’t making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn – and with teachers under so much pressure day-to-day, they cannot devote much time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers to get up and running with Moodle, by turning their familiar teaching materials into a Moodle e-learning course.This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately – you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.The book begins by showing how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources – documents, slideshows, and worksheets, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them, and along the way plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn’t end there– you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and video. Throughout the book, the focus is on getting results fast – moving teaching material online so that lessons become more effective for students, and less work for you.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Moodle messaging


Forums and chats are primarily a teaching tool. Moodle messages, on the other hand, are the ideal course admin tool when you want to send out messages to your students. As we will find as we work through this section, students can also message each other, further supporting collaborative working, especially as we continue converting our courses to run online.

Note that I've left discussion of this topic to the end of this chapter because often Moodle messaging is turned off. Before reading on, it's certainly worth checking that messaging is enabled in your Moodle.

Sending a welcome message

I figured it would be good to send all of my new students a welcome message, thanking them for joining me on the Backyard Ballistics course. Let's see how easy that is now: