Let's learn how to configure an HTML block for our course page.
1. Click on the editing icon in your HTML block.
2. In the Block title field, enter something for use as the title of your block.
3. In the Content field, type a few words of welcome:
4. Click on Save changes.
We made a side block of our own! At the moment, it only has a couple of words in it (and a smiley in my case, although you'll only have one if your admin has enabled them). Later in this chapter, you'll add an image and we'll make it the 'Welcome' block for our new course. I like to use HTML blocks with images to brighten up the page—younger students appreciate this. You can even set them up so that you can click on the image to get to a particular website, which is both attractive and useful.
As we did this, we came across the editing box—which we'll call the text editor—for the first time, into which we can type text and add images. (It's sometimes called the TinyMCE editor or HTML editor too and is like some text editors you might see on blogs or online forums). We're going to investigate it further now as we venture into the middle section—the main focus of our students' learning.
Note
HTML is just a term meaning website code. An HTML block is one where we can add text that Moodle interprets as code, and displays as we wish. Likewise, in the text editor, we can type the words as we want them to appear, and Moodle will code them (with HTML) to make that happen.
We don't need to understand HTML in order to get Moodle to work for us.