Moodle - Setup

[Hightower]

Happy new year all and welcome back to work (those unlucky enough to be at work!).

I have a nice shiny Moodle install on a testing server as I am in the process of trying to show the difference between this and Sharepoint. It's working very nicely with LDAP (and EduGeek theme of course), but now I'm stumped and not sure what to do.

It is literally sat at the default with no modifications and I'm just not sure where to start to get it looking like a schools VLE - it's all a bit daunting since I am myself used to Sharepoint.

Can anybody give any hints of the first things to do, how to do them, what extra features might be best for secondary education VLE etc etc.

[secretlife]

Go to site admin>front page>front page settings and tick add topic section. Then go back to the front page and turn on the editing and you could (just a suggestion) in the topic section you've just made, click on the hand/pen/paper icon and you'll get to an html editor where you could upload and display an image with maybe a description of the school. Other useful tool is to go to add block and select html block which lets you add text/code/images/hyperlinks of your choice. YOu can have a few either side of the main central block. There are other blocks too you could add- just, I wouldn't personally have the 'online users block' as it's similar to a visible stat counter on a website; not so much who's online but who ISN't online
Did you mean appearance or were you thinking courses?

[gaz350]

nice example Moodle (Newbury College Student Intranet)
(btw you can get their themes from moodle themes database)

[beeswax]

if you want to display some examples of what can be done in Moodle, there's a demo site here Moodle Demonstration Site which is interactive and you can download the course and upload it to your own moodle site for staff to play with. Our school moodle is here, but I don't allow guest access. PM me if you, or staff want to look round.

[Hightower]

It's more the appearance of the site - I want something attractive that has an area for news and announcements.

Moodle (Newbury College Student Intranet)

This link is fantastic and would love my site to look similar.

[beeswax]

try this link then - Moodle.org: Themes There are a few themes in there which may take your fancy.

[Hightower]

It's not so much the theme of the site though - I'm more looking at what sections I need to insert where in order to get a similar layout, with news, links to course etc etc.

I can worry about the theme latere - it's just I'm not used to Moodle and not sure how to add a section that allows news, or how to add a section that can act as the school diary etc.

[Hightower]

As an example, I'm logged on as myself to my testing server (which is administrator) and am adding some site news, but as soon as I log on as a pupil it says "No site news added yet".

I know this will be a simple solution to all you Moodle users but I can't see why this is happening

[beeswax]

I suggest you go to the Moodle demonstration site (see above link) and download the course and upload it to your Moodle site. Then with Editing switched on you can see how things are put together. For more detailed instruction try these Human Moodle tutorials (2 Minute Moodles) walkthroughs.

[Hightower]

Another thing I need help with is disabling the 'hide block' function. Users have the option to minimise a block - I don't want them to have this option, is this possible?

[Hightower]

Scratch that - literally found the option the second I posted.

[gaz350]

hey Hightower,

have you hidden the news forum on the front page? (you can edit the name of the news forum aslong as it stays as ID 0 and the name of the news section will also change from site news to say moodle news or what ever you changed it to)

we use 'Courses' to build up content on our VLE.
for example we have a course called 'Photo Gallaries'. this course holds, you guessed it lots of photo galleries powered by the lightroom gallery mod

Any public files you can store these in the site files and then link to these.

'Student Council' is another course and we have created a special 'student council role' which gives a couple of the very trusted members of the council ability to do what ever they want within the course.

Any areas/resources you want private, for example we have a staff area with policies etc is non enrollable but just incase also has a key. we also have a staff training course that is setup as a meta course of the staff area so that all enrollments are shared.

If your going down the route of the look and feel of the newbury theme, then its just a case of making sure your content is linked to in your theme (all the sub menus etc)

[Gatt]

Just starting to look at this now - literaly only just installed it and linked it to AD and not got a clue what to do next...

[secretlife]

As an example, I'm logged on as myself to my testing server (which is administrator) and am adding some site news, but as soon as I log on as a pupil it says "No site news added yet".
To get this to work you have to set the default front page role to student (site admin>front page>settings

[danIT]

May i suggest that if you have recently setup Moodle, which reading your posts it looks like you have, your default role for 'all logged on users' will be Authenticated Users. This is the default setting and works quite well as it allows you to have a specific user of the front page who has different permissions that the 'Student' role on the front page.

I like to keep the Student and Teacher roles as Course specific and use the Authenticated User role for Front Page, Blogs, etc....

Personal preference i supposse.....