An easy way to make Moodle prettier

Just a quick note this morning, then I'm off for a run. A lot of people want to make Moodle look prettier... so they turn on the html editor and remember that the last time they did html was 1998 and they don't recall anything about it. And don't feel like relearning it.

Here's a quick cheat. If you've got a Google Apps account (and you should, because they're free,) you can create any type of tables or documents you want in Google Docs, copy them, and paste them directly into a Moodle field. Google Docs uses html formatting - same as Moodle. So make that pretty table in Google Docs, copy it, and paste it into Moodle. Works great.

Hmm. That came out much shorter than I'd hoped. Not much of a blog entry. In a few minutes I'm off - I run 5k every Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday, though I'm not really sure why. Thought I'd bang out a quick Moodle blog entry, but apparently what I had to say didn't take very long. This is a new blog and I'm not likely to get a lot of readers if I'm just killing time in paragraphs, sort of like the written equivalent of small talk.

Well. Let me just quickly chime in on the "hot debate" in the Moodle community about Moodle's value. Apparently some frou frou highbrows have declared that Moodle and other CMS are bad, or stupid, or whatever. And they cite various reasons. Some of my fave Moodle bloggers have stepped forward to debate it and stick up for Moodle. So here's my response to the highbrows... ready?

"Who cares what they think."

There you go. I oversee 80 different Moodle sites. I see everything from total non-use to total immersion with students. It's a great tool if you use it right. So do lots of staff development, reach the reachable, be prepared to accept that not everyone will be on board or use it correctly, and just do your best. It's a fantastic tool and every day in my District there are teachers doing fantastic things with it. That's certainly enough for me.

Moodle - Pet Peeves

Welcome to my new blog! My name is Richard MacLemale, and I'm the Moodle Site Admin for the Pasco County School System in Pasco County, Florida. We have about 80 Moodle sites in our server farm. I had another blog about ed tech but since I always ended up talking about Moodle, I decided to start a new Moodle only blog, to be updated every weekend. So thanks for stopping by!

So let's get started with a look at some of my fave pet peeves, not about Moodle but about how people use it. In no particular order:

I Have Ten Topics! - The number of Moodlers who put content only in topic 1 but don't hide the remaining topics is... stunning. It doesn't bother them that the numbers 2 - 10 are empty. It's like a room with furniture ONLY in one corner. Huh? Actually the reason for this is that newbie users don't realize you can change the number of topics in Settings. Moodle vets, however, have no excuse.

Look At My Bling! - There are, sadly, some web sites out there that will let you type in a phrase and then create an animated GIF file. So it will sparkle, spin in circles, bounce around, do all kinds of tricks. The only problem is that our eyes are attracted to motion, so visitors to the course are going to have a harder time concentrating on reading your page. The reason people do this is because they're not professional web designers and don't know what a distraction it is. So we can forgive them. And then we educate them.

I'm Going To Kill This Computer! - Don'tcha just LUV the clip art drawing of the guy getting ready to bash the computer with a hammer? Don'tcha just love clip art in general? Well, there's a reason why you don't see clip art on professionally designed web sites, and it's the same reason you don't use crayons on your job applications. The computer bashing graphic is especially nice because it maintains the culture of "technology is hard and frustrating!" Which is a crutch used by people who don't want to learn computers. "Oh, these things never work well for me." Yes, because you have three fingers on the track pad while you're trying to use it.

OK, OK, enough bashing the novice users. Here's a real pet peeve that is very common and very preventable - using Standard Forum when you should use Single Topic. When a teacher asks the students a single question, it's soooo much easier to scroll down a list of replies, all in one thread, than it is to read each discussion posted by other students. This might be the single biggest tip to give newbie Moodle users, because it's the biggest time saver.

And some folks think there's nothing wrong with clip art, animated GIF files, or yellow text on purple backgrounds. All I have to say is this - Professional web developers have worked long and hard over the past 10 years to find the best ways of doing things. We don't really need to be professionals to imitate some of their ideas, and we really ought to trust them, to an extent. There are many good reasons why they don't do these things, and once you understand the reasons, they really do make sense.

Now that I've offended half of the people who read this and possibly made the other half laugh... see you next week! I promise not to pick on anyone again.