Wrap Up
Over the past few weeks I went through my experience of implementing Moodle into our school district by breaking it down into 5 parts:
- Preview
- Part 1 – Idea to Reality
- Part2- Installation and Modules
- Part 3 – Customization
- Part 4 – Rollout
- Part 5 – Training
Overall, I believe our implementation was successful and a major reason for that was the grant. Of course, the money part helped, but I’m talking about the specific objectives and goals that kept us on track and gave us a focus.
I’ve already talked about those objectives and goal in earlier posts so I won’t bore you with those again. Instead, this wrap up is going to include my favorite tips and a few other links that will help others make their first few years of Moodle successful.
Personal favorite teacher tips
- [teacher tip] Make a “quick links” block…add an html block and create a named link to each section using the anchor names (#section-1) instead of the default “sections” block which only shows the section number. VERY useful for long Moodle courses – scroll of death.
- [teacher tip] Show teachers how to zip their current file directory (where all their current files are nicely in folders and organized) and upload it to Moodle so you don’t have to upload one at a time and you can keep the structure. (someone already mentioned this)
- I’m trying to move the objects in my course by dragging and dropping but they don’t stick after I refresh or I can’t “drop” the object – frustrating! (this is more of an issue with older versions)
- To stop this frustration go to your profile, click the “edit profile” tab, make sure the “advanced settings” are being shown and change the setting “AJAX and Javascript” to ‘No: use basic web features‘.
- Now you will see
instead of the the cross icon. Click by the activity or resource you want to move. It will load a page with many small dashed rectangles like 
. Click the dashed rectangle where you want to move the activity/resource.
- On the bottom of (almost) every page there is a “moodle docs for this page” link that will take you to the specific documentation for the page you are on.
- By every setting there is a
which you can click on and it will describe in detail what each different setting will do.
Personal favorite admin tips
- What version of Moodle am I using? Seems like a stupid question to ask but hey it’s useful.
- Ugh, how do I up the ‘maximum upload size’ limit?
- You’re able to edit and change words or phrases by going to Language | Language Editing
Other good resources
To wrap up – I hope you got something out of this set of posts. I believe how a district implements any kind of program or tool is crucial and having a good plan is where you start. It can be the best, cool program in the world but if the implementation lacks in support, training, etc. it won’t be successful. The great thing about Moodle is the large, friendly community, so it’s fairly easy to do your research and start with a good plan. Feel free to comment or contact me at Moodlerific or @moodlerific
