I’m heading off to Goshen, Indiana tomorrow for the first annual Midwest MoodleMoot at Goshen College. Since I signed on to participate in this moot early, I’ll be quite busy.
Presentations
A Quick Overview of Moodle Themes: During this 50-minute session, I’ll explain the files in the standard theme folder and share resources that will help locate and change the Moodle theme code. Just enough information to help get started with themes.
How to Structure Your Course for Reuse: Fifty minutes of me telling you what you’re doing wrong on the course page and why I’m doing it right! I see a lot of courses that are very unorganized and ugly. With time, this can get out of control for the teachers that use them (where is that file?). Moodle offers a great deal of flexibility but needs to be tamed to do the things that you want it to do. In this session, I will do my best to share my experience with Moodle: how I organize files, quiz questions, and course sections in a consistent, manageable way that has kept me sane for over four years. This was a really popular session at the Oklahoma MoodleMoot.
Five Game-Changing Activities Using Moodle: This session will highlight five activities using Moodle that get students working collaboratively and constructively on the content in your course. Basically a rundown of what I wrote about earlier this year.
Discussions
Computer Access Issues in K-12 Schools: It’s tough assigning homework on the web without knowing what sort of access your students have at home. During this session, we’ll discuss possible creative solutions to help bridge this gap in accessibility.
Moodle 2.0 – What is next?: Basic overview of everything coming with Moodle 2.0. I’ll be co-moderating this discussion with Paul Ortman from Goshen College, and he has installed a demo of Moodle 2.0 to show what we’re talking about.
Workshop
How to Create and Modify Moodle Themes: During this two-hour hands-on workshop, participants will create their own custom Moodle theme. The goal is to install the Stripdown theme and start making changes as soon as possible so that everyone feels confident enough to make their own theme when they leave.
Well, writing this makes me realize how busy I’ll actually be; I had better get back to work! If you’re going to the Moot, I look forward to meeting you. If you can’t make it, I’ll be twittering occasionally with the hashtag #mootin09. Be warned, though, that I’m more likely to tweet about lunch than I am to tweet about sessions.
I really enoyed all of your presentations. I fell much better about getting started with Moodle.
Thanks for all the inofrmation!
Patrick,
I’m also an educator using Moodle. I teach 6th grade Reading/Writing in northern Utah. I was wondering if you could help me. Do you know if there is a way to reuse a rubric? I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the 6+1 Traits for writing. Anyhow, it’s a rubric I use with my students. It’s a real hassle to retype the same rubric for every assignment I use the rubric with.
Thanks for any help in advance.
So I am seeking the holy grail, carrying a bucket list, jousting at windmills. But I hold out hope — and maybe you have the magic knowledge. My quest is to change a template so that the blocks on a Moodle site and all of its courses show as closed, top be opened by the student. For example, use the Activities block. Its default is open with all kinds of activities (Forums, Resources, etc) listed by type. I want the default to be a button with the word Activities and either a click or rollover for drop down to show the types on demand. Mostly I get blank stares.
In your estimation, can it be done? What level of difficulty is involve?
Hope you do some iMoot 2010 stuff!
M
Hi Mary,
Without a core code hack or a plugin (that I don’t know yet to exist), I don’t think what you’re after is possible. I can safely say that it’s not possible using themes alone.
My recommendation would be to post your wish on http://moodle.org.
Good luck.
[...] been set for July 26-28. Last year’s Moot was a great success, and I’m happy to have been so involved. Goshen College is only a 45-minute drive from my house. The facilities and catering there are [...]