This has been one moodlin’ month or two for me. I thought I “knew” Moodle, but apparently, there’s always a lot more to learn.

Here’s a quick round-up of lessons I’ve learned about using Moodle; I’ll be adding to these from time to time, so be sure to check back often!

My purpose is sharing these is to chronicle my journey through working with Moodle in a large urban school district rather than pretend at expert status with Moodle. Simply, I’m sharing what I’m learning as I learn it…and I’m having a lot of fun playing techie with some of these things.

Here’s the Moodle Lesson Round-up:

1. Session Cookies – Have more than one moodle on your server? here’s how to keep them from fighting over the cookies!
2. Copying Content from One Course to Another – A walkthrough of how to import content from one course to another. Saves time and energy to do it this way!
3. Adding a Photo Gallery – Walks through adding a photo gallery to your Moodle. Quite easy to use and impressive tool available.
4. Removing “Topic Outline” and “Available Courses” from your Moodle – It can be annoying to see these words appear where you don’t want them. Here are several approaches.
5. Empowering Teachers to Create/Delete Users – Give teachers the authority only administrators have to create and remove students from their course, without giving them full admin rights.
6. Quick Backup of a Moodle Database – Some tips on backing up your Moodle, especially on a Mac, using no-cost tools.
7. Keeping Moodle Safe – Some accumulated tips on how to protect your Moodle against spam, etc.
8. Moodle Cron Job Automation – Cron jobs make Moodle go. Find out how here.
9. Handling Student Accounts and Email – Here are some suggestions on what to do about managing student accounts and email.
10. 3 Tips for RSS Feeds – Want RSS feeds for your discussion forums? Want to remix Moodle Feeds or pull in remote RSS feeds? This is the entry to read!
11. Moodle-Google Integration – Find out about how to integrate Moodle and Google, to simplify account management for students and educators using GoogleApps for Education.
12. Finding Moodle Hosts – Can’t host Moodle on your own server? Use one on the web.
13. Reducing Spam Risk with reCaptcha and Spam Domain list – Some things you can do to protect against spam if you have to do email authentication/self-registration in Moodle.
14. Top Moodle Blocks, Filters, and Modules – Enhancing Moodle is all well and good but how do you know what enhancements to make? Here are a few that I prefer and I’m open to suggestions.
15. Free Themes for Moodle – As soon as I installed Moodle, I started looking for ways to “liven” it up and found a treasure trove of free themes.
16. Enabling Embedding of Video Playlists – This upcoming tutorial shows you where to click to enable TeacherTube, YouTube videos, etc. and videos from various providers in your Moodle sidebar (or anywhere).
17. RSS Feed Consolidation – This tip shows you how to take multiple Moodle Forum RSS feeds and consolidate them into one using free services, either as a new RSS feed to share or to display content.
18. Embedding FLV Videos in Moodle Labels, HTML Pages – This tip documents how to enable the multimedia filter so that FLVs can be embedded in Labels and HTML Resources.
19. Print from Any Page in Moodle – This tip documents how to set it up so you can print from various Moodle pages. It all depends on how much trouble you want to go through when updating Moodle.
20. Timed Posts in Moodle Discussion Forums – This tip shares how to mark a discussion forum post so that it appears at a specific future date rather than immediately.
21. The Value of Separate Groups in Moodle Course Organization – This tip shows you how to use Separate Groups feature with their own enrollment key to teach multiple classes using ONE course, rather than backing up and restoring courses for each class.
22. Optimizing Your Moodle MySQL Tables – Ever notice Moodle running slow? Maybe it’s your Moodle’s MySQL database need to be optimized. This tip walks you through the process.
23. Recording Audio into Moodle Discussion Posts – Learn how to record audio into discussion forum postings using specialized module.
24. Turning Off Moodle’s Messaging Service – Sometimes, messaging can be a distraction in Moodle. Learn how to turn it off.
25. Changing from User Authentication settings–from External DBase to Manual–en masse – This tip allows you to bulk-change user authentication settings that may need changing.
26. Learn How to Import ExamView Test Questions into Moodle Quiz Activity – This tip allows you to easily import ExamView content into Moodle Quiz Activity, great for working with prepackaged assessments. Includes video and screenshots.

Be sure to read the following Moodle articles…

1. Moodle Tips Roundup – a list of tips I’ve picked up in my Moodle journey.
2. Doing the Moodle Mambo
3. Moodle Habitudes: Constructing Online Learning Environments
   
4. Book Review – Moodle 1.9: E-Learning Course Development by William Rice
5. Why Moodle? A few reasons culled from around the Web using Google
6. Moodle-izing Education (due for publication in Education World…find it here in mid-March, 2009)
7. Moodle Questions during My Guest Spot on Classroom 2.0 LIVE
8. Moodle in the Classroom – My Notes from Tomaz Lasic’s Preso on Classroom 2.0 LIVE
9. How to Manage Your District’s Online Learning Opportunities (Education World)
10. 5 Essential Technology Tools for Administrators (Education World)
11. Why Moodle? A few reasons culled from around the Web using Google
12. Moodle-izing Your Education Enterprise (Education World)

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure