Ted's Moodle Adventures: Chapter 5: MoodleCloud Site Navigation

OK - you've created your own MoodleCloud site. Here are a few things you may want to do prior to creating your own courses, or restoring a course from a backup.

Note that, although this is a free site, it is a fully functioning Moodle site, so the home page should look familiar.

First give your site a name! 

• Under Administration, Front page settings: Click Turn editing on
• Click Site administration
• Click Front page, then Front page settings
• Give your site a name (and a relevant short name). Unless you want to do otherwise, leave the other fields as is. Click save changes

The short name appears at very top left. The full name appears in larger letters below the short name. Click Home at top left to return to the home page. Turn editing off for now.

Now notice that one course is created for you when your site is built: Introduction to Moodle. This course is actually the MoodleCloud cheat sheet! It is a reading course only - you are set up as the teacher, and you do not have to enroll (or enrol) in the course to take the course. I strongly suggest you read through this course, including the documentation section near the bottom.

Since you are an admin by definition, you will want to refer to the Guide to New Administrators - setting up a new course is relatively easy, setting up students and allowing them to take your courses is not.

Next up: Adding a course to your site - the easy way - restore a course from a backup, such as your backup from Teaching with Moodle. the hard way - creating a course from scratch

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!

IT Toolbox: e-learning-select group

Many of you know that IT Toolbox is a very rich and active IT-oriented community site. Among the many groups there is one devoted to eLearning, e-learning-select.

This group has many interesting discussions on it, for example, development product comparisons such as Blackboard vs. Moodle. Also, this group is in the Knowledge Management area of IT Toolbox - if KM interests you, there are a lot of other KM-oriented groups that you can join!