Moodle for Dummies (not you of course)

Open the NPZ HS website (http://www.newpaltz.k12.ny.us) and under FOR TEACHERS open Moodle.

At the very bottom of the page find your group title heading and open it.

Username: the same network username you always use
Password: CHANGEME

You will be prompted to change your password to what you use for the network

Remember: The goal of the assignment is to help each other learn the APES material in an unforgettable way! (Keep the principles of memory enhancement techniques in mind!)

First: Use your textbook and review books as a guide and learn more about your topic. Do a web search and find out as much as you can on it. What is the most important thing for us to know about? Are there any cool, must-see websites you found?

Second: Present your material to the class in power point, photostory3, video, book or wiki through moodle. The lesson should be roughly 10 minutes long. Students must take notes so keep your points brief and interesting.

Third: Create and direct a fun interactive activity during which the class gets some hands on experience with your topic. Activities could include puzzles, plays, charades, competitive quizzes, jeopardy, labs, card games- your imagination is the limit!

Fourth: Ask the class to engage in a follow up activity for homework also on moodle such a quiz, forum (blog), glossary or wiki.

This project is worth a test grade. However, if you do not do another group's follow up activity, 5 point will be taken off your grade FOR EVERY ACTIVITY YOU MISS.

In order to get an A, the group must use at least 3 different moodle platforms in a creative and educationally rich way AND your interactive activity must be successfully memorable! B grades will be awarded to groups that successfully use 2 different moodle programs and have a “nice” class activity and C grade candidates would have only used 1 moodle choice successfully and a class activity that borders on lame.

ADDING a FORUM: (A Forum is an interactive discussion board where everyone gets to comment on a posted question.)

• The best way to run this is to have each student respond to the topic and then respond to each others comment.
• Answers MUST have substance!!! That means it can't come off the top of your head. You have to look up facts from a book or the web.

To add a forum:

• Click "Turn Editing On", and go to the topic or week section in which you want to create the forum.
  
• From the dropdown menu labeled "Add an activity", select "Forum". This will take you to the forum settings page titled "Adding a new forum" page.

Forum name
A short name of the forum, which will be displayed on the course homepage.

Forum type

• Select Standard forum for general use - An open forum where anyone can start a new topic at any time; this is the best general-purpose forum. Each person posts one discussion - Each person can post exactly one new discussion topic (everyone can reply to them though); this is useful when you want each student to start a discussion about, say, their reflections on the week's topic, and everyone else responds to these
  
• A News forum is a special type of forum that is automatically created with a new course.

Forum introduction

• Place the description of the forum here. It has the standard Moodle HTML editor toolbar to assist the teacher.
  Tip: It is a good practice to include precise instructions for students regarding the subject of the forum and what they should do.

Force everyone to be subscribed?

• NO!! If you put yes, everyone will get email notice of every single post made and you will be hated.
  
  

Read tracking for this forum?

• Optional (default) - students can turn tracking on or off for the forum at their discretion. "Read tracking" for a forum allows users to track read and unread messages in the forum.
  

Maximum attachment size

• Why not put max size- 10 MB?

• Select under aggregrate type: No ratings .

• Select: Don't block under Time period for blocking

Group mode

• Select: No groups

Visible to students

• Select: Show

ADDING a WIKI: (a wiki is a communal encyclopedia of information- like wikipedia but more humble).

• Everyone should be instructed to make ONE addition to the text and one modification/grammatical change to the existing text. Inital your changes so we know you've been there.

To create a wiki:

• Click the "Turn editing on" button.
• Select Wiki from the "Add an activity" dropdown menu in the course section where you would like to add the wiki.
• On the Adding a new wiki page, give the wiki a descriptive name.
• In the summary field, describe the purpose of the wiki and what you expect students to contribute (see above).
• Select the wiki type - student.
• Click the "Show Advanced" button to display additional options.
• Select the common module settings- no groups.
• Click the "Save and display" button.

ADDING a GLOSSARY: (a customized dictionary for your chapter- yeah!)

To add a glossary:

• Click the "Turn editing on" button.
• Select Glossary from the "Add an activity" dropdown menu.
• On the Adding a new glossary page give your new glossary a descriptive name.
• Provide instructions or background information, links etc. in the Description area.
• Select the general, grade options and the common module settings as shown below.
• Click the "Save and display" button at the bottom of the page.

General options
Entries shown per page

• Try 10. This sets the number of words and definitions that students will see when they view the glossary list. If you have a large number of automatically-linked entries you should set this number lower to prevent long loading times.
  

Glossary type

• Select: Main unless you want your students to edit the glossary in which case you should select secondary

Duplicated entries allowed

• Select: No. One is quite enough, thank you.
  

Allow comments on entries

• Yes/No- that is your call. Students and teachers can leave comments on glossary definitions. The comments are available through a link at the bottom of the definition.
  

Allow print view

• Yes, why not?

Automatically link glossary entries

• Yes. If site-wide glossary auto-linking is enabled by an administrator (see Filters for further details), then turning this on allows individual entries in this glossary to be automatically linked whenever the concept words and phrases appear throughout the rest of the same course. This includes forum postings, internal resources, week summaries and so on.
  Note: Enabling linking for the glossary does not automatically turn on linking for each entry - linking needs to be set for each entry individually. If you do not want particular text to be linked (in a forum posting, say) then you should add <nolink> and </nolink> tags around the text. Note that category names are also linked.
  

Approved by default

• Yes. That allows the teacher to define what happens to new entries added by students. They can be automatically made available to everyone, otherwise the teacher will have to approve each one.
  

Display format

That specifies the way that each entry will be shown within the glossary. The default formats are:

• Simple, dictionary style - This looks like a conventional dictionary with separate entries. No authors are displayed and attachments are shown as links.
• Continuous without author - That shows the entries one after other without any kind of separation but the editing icons.
• Full with author - A forum-like display format showing author's data. Attachments are shown as links.
• Full without author - A forum-like display format that does not show author's data. Attachments are shown as links.
• Encyclopedia - Like 'Full with author' but attached images are shown inline.
• Entry list - This lists the concepts as links.
• FAQ - Useful for displaying lists of frequently asked questions. It automatically appends the words QUESTION and ANSWER in the concept and definition respectively.

The table below summarises the different display formats.

* Will be shown in a pop-up window.
* * Attached images are shown inline.

Browsing options in alphabet display
You can customize the way a user can browse a glossary. Browsing and searching are always available, but you can define three more options:

• Show "Special" link - Yes. Enable or disable browsing by special characters like @, #, etc.
• Show alphabet - Yes. Enable or disable browsing by alphabetic letters.
• Show "All" link - Yes. Enable or disable browsing of all entries at once.

Edit always

• Yes.
  

Grade options

Allow entries to be rated

• Do not select, leave blank.
  

Common module settings

• Select under Visible: Show.
  

ADDING a QUIZ: (you should shoot for 10 multiple choice questions- it grades itself with feedback to the students. How cool!)

Adding A Quiz

•  Under add an activity, select QUIZ
• Name your Quiz
• In the Introduction field type directions to students for taking the quiz.
• Leave all the standard settings as is with the possible exception of overall feedback. See below.
• Now you need to create 10 questions in your question bank to add to your quiz.

Overall feedback

• Overall feedback is shown to a student after they have completed an attempt at the quiz. The text that is shown can depend on the grade the student got.
  For example, if you entered:
  Grade boundary: 100%
  Feedback: "Well done"
  Grade boundary: 40%
  Feedback: "Please study this week's work again"
  Grade boundary: 0%
  Then students who score between 100% and 40% will see the "Well done" message, and those who score between 39.99% and 0% will see "Please study this week's work again". That is, the grade boundaries define ranges of grades, and each feedback string is displayed to scores within the appropriate range.
  Grade boundaries can be specified either as a percentage, for example "31.41%", or as a number, for example "7". If your quiz is out of 10 marks, a grade boundary of 7 means 7/10 or better.
  Note that the maximum and minimum grade boundaries (100% and 0%) are set automatically.
  You can set as many or as few grade boundaries as you wish. The form allows you up to 5 ranges at first, but you can add more by clicking the "Add 3 fields to form" button underneath.

How to add questions to your Question Bank

• Go to the tab on the top of the screen that says EDIT
• Where it says Create New Question on the right choose Multiple Choice
• Give the question a title so you can recognize it later. This is only for you.
• Under Question text type in your Multiple choice question.
• General feedback leave blank.
• Now, type in the four possible answers to your question and feedback if you are feeling frisky.
• Very important- for whatever answer you deem as correct you must under Grade choose: 100%
• Select: Save changes

How to add questions to your Quiz

• This is way easy. Find the blank square next to each question name under action and select it.
• On the very bottom of the right hand side select: Add to quiz
• On the left hand side under Questions in this quiz- put in 10 as the value in each grade box.
• Now save changes and preview your work using the top tab.
• If you are happy, select: save all and finish!