Thanks for reading!

According to her note to Moodlenews,

I have elaborated a guide about how to set up a staging Moodle, as a replica of the production site, which I have shared with the Moodle UK community. I would like to share the guide with the rest of the community. Coming myself from an original Linux background, I think that the guide could be very useful for those administrators-technicians who have to start using Moodle in a windows server.

Within the PDF Mari Cruz provides the 7 steps in detail of how to copy your production Moodle site for staging and/or testing.

From gathering information to configuring the new installation it’s all detailed.

1. Basic requirements
2. folders structure
3. IIS configuration
4. Changes in php.ini
5. configuration of MySQL
6. Restoring Moodle from backup database
7. configuring Moodle

The guide also links to handy tools/resources to make the process easier.

Download the guide: Setting up a Moodle staging server (general version)

Watch the video here: http://vimeo.com/32160183 or embedded below. The video was created by Willard High School and was recently used in an Opensource.com post authored by Janetta Garton.

Use Labels to Create Menus in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

The Rocket theme by Julian Ridden (@Moodleman) is a customizable theme to make your site less Moodley (and it succeeds).  The theme has customizable logo, header images and category images and just simply looks great.  It just may be the least Moodley looking theme of all Moodle themes!

Check it out in some screen shots below and get your self a copy at Moodle.org: http://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=theme_rocket

The course focuses on opportunities to learn about mobile computing in classrooms (with current events curated through Scoop.it), videos and demos of Mobile courses, additional web resources, Free mobile apps, mobile ideas for your courses and more.

The ‘Mobile Ideas for your Course’ section is my favorite.  It pulls articles and ideas from sources helping you to learn how to use Google Goggles in the classroom, Google+ Hangouts, QR Codes, how to create slideshows and much more.

These resources and more are hosted at the Tempus-EFA project Moodle.

The book is a very easy read and is definitely for new teachers looking for a guide on how to bring their current non LMS based course online and into Moodle.  It’s full of tricks, hints and easy to understand tutorial information on making a smooth and positive move to Moodle.  Read more about the book here: http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-2-0-course-conversion/book

2 Ways to Enter
1) Head on over to the book page and look through the product description of this book and leave a comment below to let us know what interests you the most about this book (be sure to enter your email as well).
2) Tweet this post and ensure that the #MDL2CC hash tag is included (there’s a nifty little “tweet” button at the top of this page to help you out).

It’s that simple.

You may also want to follow the author, Ian Wild: @iandavidwild

Winners from the U.S. and Europe can either choose a physical copy of the book or the eBook. Users from other locales are limited to the eBook only. Enter by 1/31/2012 to be eligible.

Until now, course creation and content management processes for Blackboard and Moodle were similar: click intensive, minimal drag and drop, prone to page loads, etc.  Themes for Blackboard were far behind the flexibility that Moodle has offered historically (not counting the numerous non-standard themes available).  With SP8 the course creation and course aesthetic for Blackboard has been turned on its head,

• pervasive drag and drop
• obvious editing features
• rollover editing
• simplified tabs
• customize-able CSS (links, font change with themes)
• most features, menus are just 1 click away

The emphasis on fewer clicks, easier editing and improved aesthetics is obvious from the first glance.  Other Learning Management Systems should take note that Blackboard will not go quietly.  If you’re interested in checking out some of the Blackboard features (either as comparison or for ideas in a Moodle course) check out CourseSites.com which has some of Blackboard’s course innovations available already (themes and course layouts/types to name two).

The challenge: 
Recently I was using the Book resource to encapsulate articles on Sew What? Incorporated.  I was doing this work as part of my teaching of MIS at Stamford College Malacca, specifically a case study the Sew What Inc. So anyway, I discovered that I wanted to increase the width of the reading area of the Book resource. Why would I want to do that? I was embedding a Dell webpage into a book chapter and I found that

1. I couldn’t view the embedded webpage’s entire width within the book
2. the embedded content did not fit inside the right area of the book resource. The embedded website needed horizontal scroll bars (hmmm….) at the bottom of the display area in order for me to view the Dell site in its entirety.

When you click on a link on the TOC (Table of Contents) in a book, you would want to view the right-hand-side content easily, and with no fuss. In this case, using the mouse to scroll left was very irritating.

BTW, here’s the embedded code that I used in the reading area.

<table cellspacing="0" style="width:100% !important;background:#999 !important;padding:0px !important;margin:0px !important;border:0px !important;border-collapse:collapse !important"><tr><td style="background:#999 !important;padding:1px !important;margin:0px !important;border:0px !important;"><iframe src="http://www.dell.com/html/us/segments/bsd/case_studies/sew/index.html" scrolling="yes" frameborder="0" style="display:block !important;width:100% !important;height:400px !important;background:#D4D0C8 !important;padding:0px !important;margin:0px !important;border:0px !important;"><a href="http://moodurian.com/">Moodurian.com</a>; (iframes required)</iframe></td></tr></table>

The embedded code worked, but unfortunately the content did not fit nicely inside the Book’s reading area.  By default, the width of the TOC (located on the left) is 140 pixels.To solve this, I …(read more here) >>

1. First things first you’ll want to construct your course and have it all ready to work (or as close to it as possible).  If you’re using Moodle 1.9 or 2.x you can add the “Section Links” block which will use to copy some URLs.
2. Copy the URLs to each Topic section and paste them to a text document for quick reference.  The Topic link URLs will help student navigate to an individual section.  They generally look like this:

   http://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=2&topic=1

   The first part of the URL is your domain, then the course ID then the topic number.

3. Next we’re going to add a new label to each topic area (not including the Summary of the Topic Outline, this will always be visible).  The new label will include a snippet of HTML to create a single row, double column table.  In the left cell you can have just text or an image arrow which will be linked to the previous topic link, in the right cell you’ll have text or an image arrow linked to the next topic link.  This is the snippet for text only which you should add as plain text in the html editor (the HTML or <> buttons depending on your Moodle version):

   <table border="0" width="100%">
   <tbody>
   <tr>
   <td><strong><a href="http://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=2&topic=0">&lt; Previous</a></strong></td>
   <td style="text-align: right;"><strong><a href="http://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=2&topic=2">Next &gt;</a></strong></td>
   </tr>
   </tbody>
   </table>

   This includes the HTML for the table, links and text (“< Previous” and “Next >”) and the URL of the topic link.  This is important: for every previous and next just edit the topic number to represent the previous (if this is topic 1 you can just delete the “previous” text).

4. Continue adding labels to each of your topics and edit the HTML accordingly.

Once you’ve added all the labels the individual topics should look something like this:

As long as you’re not constantly reordering your course topics this is a simple and effective way to provide an easier navigation with no scroll of death to students without adding any new course formats or hacking the topics format with invisible resources and activities.  Here’s a quick video of it in action:

The Docs are available as a complete .zip download from http://wimski.org/docs/ and the 250MB download, once unzipped give you access to all of the Moodle docs for easy viewing offline.  According to the download site,

These packages allow you to browse Moodle documentation offline. Certain links, such as “edit”, “history” or “recent changes” still lead to the online version of the documentation. Packages are built using HTTrack website copier plus custom shell scripts for packaging the contents.

Download a copy today [http://wimski.org/docs/]!