Ted's Moodle Adventures: Chapter 4: My Free MoodleCloud site - Getting Started

Have you taken a Moodle class or studied on your own? Ready to try Moodle for real?

The Moodle organization has been nice enough to provide a free space for hosting your own Moodle site: MoodleCloud. Like most truly free items, there are constraints and catches, but these for the most part do not limit what you can do - and you can always move on to paid hosting if your site gets "too big" in some sense.

The first thing you do is to go to MoodleCloud and get your site (if you are reading this, you are reading this in English, but MoodleCloud offers other languages - see the dropdown next to the orange cloud at top right). In the big black box, you can sign up for your site - click Sign Up - or get more information first - click Wait, I Need More Info. I'd suggest clicking Wait first, read the info over, then sign up. 

The signup process now begins. You need to come up for a unique name - the URL for your site will be the-name-you-choose.moodlecloud.com. You will be set up in the admin role - "admin" will also be your username. You will need to also set up your password. Once this is done, you will be able to access your site.

The site is pre-built with several features. A small course, Introduction to Moodle, is included - you can, and should, add some courses of your own. NOTE: If you are taking any online classes (such as the Teaching with Moodle class I just completed) that allow you to backup your practice Moodle courses, and you need a place to restore the class to, definitely set up a MoodleCloud site for this purpose - I did, and it works!

Next up - navigating your MoodleCloud site.

Please note that all following CwDev Blog posts in the Moodle Adventures series that refer to MoodleCloud assume you either have created your own MoodleCloud site, or have access to someone else's.

Ted's Moodle Adventures: Chapter 3: Teaching with Moodle: Weeks 2, 3, 4, and Course Completion

The Teaching with Moodle class is done - I am happy to report that I successfully completed the course! 

Among other things, we:

• Set up a practice course (more about this in a future chapter)
• Worked with forums and surveys
• Set up quizzes and saw how quizzes are graded
• Set up self-enrollment
• Saved our practice course to our own Moodle site
• Used text, graphics, and links in our practice course
• Earned badges for our achievements
• Gained initial knowledge on how to navigate the main Moodle Website

Next up: Beginning to apply what I learned to my MoodleCloud site!