Mount Orange School (Moodle 2.5 demo)

Set activities in your courses, manage students and explore many other things in Moodle as Jeffrey Sanders, a teacher at Mt Orange School.

Below, we have listed a few examples you can jump to straight away. Steps:

1. Login as 'teacher', password 'moodle' (direct link here!)

2. Return to this screen (automatic!), logged in as Jeffrey Sanders.

3. Browse the example(s) you would like to see.

4. Then why not set  some activities up yourself and then log in as a student (username: student; password: moodle) to try them out?

Provide Learning Resources

• Upload a file (PowerPoint) in your course for simultaneous access by students.
• Make a folder of files available to students.
• Create  linked pages as a "book" for presenting information to colleagues (or students)
• Upload your own Private files (see My private files block) to use in different courses when needed.
• Set up a Lesson activity to engage students with the topic background.
• Insert an external online learning object (IMS package) for students to practise media skills,
• Set up a direct link to an external website for one-click access by students.
• Insert a useful course video from YouTube sharing site.
• Publish a forum discussion (Moodle activity) to an external site for later use (needs YOUR account, eg Google).

Assess and evaluate:

• Manage course badges and award course badges to students (NEW in 2.5)
• Set an assignment and submission deadline for students to complete
• Gave a grade, outcomes and feedback on a student assignment.
• Set up and use a Marking guide to assist students and colleagues 
  
• Set up a rubric to grade a student assignment
• Grade students in a group with a group assignment submitted collaboratively.
• Set up an assigment with "blind" marking. Students' names are replaced with a participant number. 
  
• Check the grades of students in your course.
• Comment and check the history of wiki edits to see contributions.
• Check for students' progress in the course by looking at activities completed.
• Analyse student answers in a Lesson activity to check for the level of prior knowledge 
• Set up a quiz and analyse the results to check student understanding.
• Set up and analyse a feedback form to improve your output.
• Complete a safety induction (SCORM activity).

Encourage collaboration

• Start a course forum to allow all students to start and reply to course-related conversations.
• Set up and participate in a Chat with students to give instructions from remote location.
• Set up a database for all members of the course to add and comment on items.
• Set up a glossary for students to create and refine as they learn more about the concept.
• Enable students to enter language audio clips in a glossary and comment on peers' entries.
• Invite students to jointly solve a mathematical problem.
• Create a wiki where students can collaboratively create great answers to possible exam questions (click highlighted page links, see Comments too).
• Set up a workshop activity to encourage peer evaluation (check different stages).
• Find a useful course on Moodle.net  to get ideas and collaborate with colleagues from around the world(see 'Community finder' block).
• Create an area that can be accessed only by colleagues in your department to share, ask, help and suggest.
• Access a staff-only area to share things with colleagues and access important documents.

Communicate

• Enter site-wide, course-wide and private notes about different students (confidential, seen only by selected users).
• Comment on the course page to inform students. (see Comments block)
• Set up a choice activity to easily gather responses on an issue.
• Send a private Message to a colleague
• Import a blog you already have online and then display its posts inside your Moodle blog
• Set up an external course-relevant news feed for instant access by students (see Water.org News on the page),
• Add Recent Activity block to allow students to see what has happened since their last login.
• Provide the latest written notices and instructions to students to cut down on procedural explanation time.
• Keep students up to date by entering events in the Calendar.
• Comment on a blog entry by a student.

Customise

• Customise My Home,  a personal dashboard of courses and reminders.
• Import a calendar from another source (like Google) into your Moodle calendar.
• Customise your My Profile page that others see.
  
• Set up groups of students depending on their answers in another activity.
• Find people with similar interests at school.
• Check the online activity of students to ensure safety.
• Set up a conditional activity that remains hidden until students reach certain criteria(course page, see info, students see it greyed out.
• Insert a customised widget (HTML block) on the course page for frequent use by students (see Clean Water Search Engine),
• Allow concepts to be auto-linked to students' explanations of the word or phrase in the Glossary.

No problem; full list of accounts is here. Most of these have little or no activity so you can get creative.