Here’s the long answer and “how to” on adding images to MC answers within Moodle.

First, access your Moodle quiz or question bank within your Moodle classroom.
Select to add a new question,

And set it up as you would any other question (insert your title/question text, etc.).

When you’re ready to add answers here’s where your images come into play.  You must have either already uploaded images to your Moodle or to a 3rd party image hosting site like Flickr.  There are benefits to both, but for this tutorial’s purpose I prefer Flickr because it:

1. Doesn’t create any additional load on the Moodle server
2. Allows me to share/export questions so that they can be used by someone else in another classroom or Moodle (if they were hosted locally in my classroom the image links would break even if the questions were imported to another course in Moodle 1.9; the Moodle 2.0 file directory redesign however skirts the issue for course to course sharing, but not site to site).

Below you can see I’ve uploaded my images to Flickr already.

Clicking on any image lets me view it in full size and provides options to “Share”.  I like this option a lot because Flickr gives me the html code I need to copy/paste into the answer test area.

Simply copy and paste that code into the answer description area for each image/possible answer, or create your own using the URL of the image uploaded locally to your Moodle.

Note that <img src=”IMAGE URL”/> is all you need to make the image embed in the answer (so grabbing the urls after uploading them to your Moodle course, Flickr, etc. is easy if you know/memorize/have handy that code.  If you’re image is uploaded to your Moodle classroom it might be a URL similar to the following: <img src=”http://www.YourMoodleSite.com/file.php/10/images/c.png” />; where “www.yourmoodlesite.com” is your site URL and “10″ is your course ID and /images/ is a directory for pictures that I created.  ”c.png” of course is the image file name.

Here’s what the final product looks like:

Before reading this book I thought I had limited knowledge of Moodle themes and I gained it from exploring the PHP files, reading Moodle Docs and watching Julian Ridden’s wonderful screencasts. My experience in working with Moodle themes was mostly in testing and playing with non-production sites. I did use Patrick Malley’s Anomaly theme and modified it to include a navigation bar, use our district’s colors, logo, etc. Our district is currently using that theme but I want to do so much more and make it better – with the appearance and the functionality. If I could make our district’s Moodle site even 1/4th of what Leeds City College’s Moodle site is, I’d be a happy camper!

Okay, to the review! . . .

Initial reaction after reading the book

I give the book 4 stars out of 5 (5 being the highest).

My initial reaction was that is was a good resource for newbie Moodle themers and it focused on many of the same elements that I’ve read on blogs and Moodle Docs, which means the author did  a good job of pointing out the essential pieces of information when it comes to Moodle theming. Although, I was a bit surprised that overall the material was about 80% review for me, it made me realize that I knew more than I though I did.

What I liked

• Included essential and useful tools and programs for Moodle theming.
• Went over the most important topics in Moodle theming – was consistent with Moodle Docs.
• Started from the beginning so the reader had a solid understanding before moving on.
• Easy to understand.
• Chapter 8 (creating a navigation menu) was a favorite part of mine (for my own personal learning).

What I didn’t like

• There were several times the book gave instructions and explanations on other items that only indirectly related to Moodle theming. These items include step by step directions on downloading and installing Firefox addons, downloading and installing other browsers, step by step directions on adding a forum and glossary. It didn’t really take away from the book but it took up time and space. In my opinion is someone is learning Moodle Theming they know how to do the above tasks.
• As with any Packt Publishing Moodle book it would be nice to have colored screenshots.

Final reaction

I expected a little more content about php and CSS, or maybe I was hoping for that. Thinking about it now, it makes perfect sense to start from the beginning and go over small, but important tasks. I have to remember the author did not write this book based on my needs and as stated in the title it’s a Beginner’s Guide and like Mary Cooch said in her review–it is a Beginner’s Guide.

Although I think there could have been a little less focus or explanation of indirect tasks, the author completed the task of providing the material needed to give a newbie the knowledge and tools to create a basic Moodle theme. I enjoyed “Moodle 1.9 Theme Design” as it confirmed and created a solid foundation of knowing the recommended way to create a Moodle theme from scratch and best practices. Again, another resource that I would be totally confident in recommending to any Moodler beginning their Moodle theming journey!

Related

• Buy “Moodle 1.9 Theme Design”
• See what else this book covers
• Packt Publishing
• Other Moodle-related Packt Publishing books
• Follow @packtpub on Twitter

Here’s a link to Mel’s wrap up of the series: http://goo.gl/ZAcP

Since Mel did all the leg work already, we decided to convert the text into an easy to read book by using Lulu.com.  The book is available for purchase (paperback for 12 dollars and 8 dollars for the download) and all proceeds will go directly to Mel for her hard work.

http://stores.lulu.com/moodlemonthly

It’s our first attempt at a published paper from MoodleMonthly, so your feedback or requests for other topics would be appreciated!

If you like Mel’s other posts, check out her newest at IT4Educators.com about Moodle: http://it4eds.com/blog

Over the past few weeks I went through my experience of  implementing Moodle into our school district by breaking it down into 5 parts:

• Preview
• Part 1 – Idea to Reality
• Part2- Installation and Modules
• Part 3 – Customization
• Part 4 – Rollout
• Part 5 – Training

Overall, I believe our implementation was successful and a major reason for that was the grant. Of course, the money part helped, but I’m talking about the specific objectives and goals that kept us on track and gave us a focus.

I’ve already talked about those objectives and goal in earlier posts so I won’t bore you with those again. Instead, this wrap up is going to include my favorite tips and a few other links that will help others make their first few years of Moodle successful.

Personal favorite teacher tips

• [teacher tip] Make a “quick links” block…add an html block and create a named link to each section using the anchor names (#section-1) instead of the default “sections” block which only shows the section number. VERY useful for long Moodle courses – scroll of death.
• [teacher tip] Show teachers how to zip their current file directory (where all their current files are nicely in folders and organized) and upload it to Moodle so you don’t have to upload one at a time and you can keep the structure. (someone already mentioned this)
• I’m trying to move the objects in my course by dragging and dropping but they don’t stick after I refresh or I can’t “drop” the object – frustrating! (this is more of an issue with older versions)
  • To stop this frustration go to your profile, click the “edit profile” tab, make sure the “advanced settings” are being shown and change the setting “AJAX and Javascript” to ‘No: use basic web features‘.
  • Now you will see instead of the the cross icon. Click by the activity or resource you want to move. It will load a page with many small dashed rectangles like . Click the  dashed rectangle where you want to move the activity/resource.
• On the bottom of (almost) every page there is a “moodle docs for this page” link that will take you to the specific documentation for the page you are on.
• By every setting there is a which you can click on and it will describe in detail what each different setting will do.

Personal favorite admin tips

• What version of Moodle am I using? Seems like a stupid question to ask but hey it’s useful.
• Ugh, how do I up the ‘maximum upload size’ limit?
• You’re able to edit and change words or phrases by going to Language | Language Editing

Other good resources

• Administrator FAQ
• “3 Things I wish I would have known“

To wrap up – I hope you got something out of this set of posts. I believe how a district implements any kind of program or tool is crucial and having a good plan is where you start. It can be the best, cool program in the world but if the implementation lacks in support, training, etc. it won’t be successful. The great thing about Moodle is the large, friendly community, so it’s fairly easy to do your research and start with a good plan. Feel free to comment or contact me at Moodlerific or @moodlerific

In this post I will be discussing how we put Moodle into the hands of our staff. Who will have access? How was it decided? What was our vision of how Moodle would be used?

First and foremost, we did not force staff to use  Moodle. In my opinion, this was crucial – having people use Moodle and be at Moodle training because they want to not because they have to. My co-worker has this saying “there are 3 types of people at trainings – vacationers, prisoners and learners”. Vacationers – those who just want to get out of the building and don’t really pay attention. Prisoners – those who are there only because they have to and it’s mandatory. Learners – those who truly want to learn about the topic. We want Learners.

For our initial roll out of Moodle we made it available to a certain group of people in a program that we already had in place in our district. This program was the TICT Initiative which consisted of about 500 teachers who applied and were accepted into the program. Without going into too much detail if they were accepted they received equipment (an LCD projector and a wireless mouse and keyboard) and in return they were required to complete 15 hours of training and tech integration learning sessions. The reason we chose this group to be the initial users was because each member had a projector and could project large screen their Moodle course during the school day. We wanted Moodle to be used by teachers in school as well as students having access outside of school.

Our vision of Moodle was not just an online course that students access at home. Yes, we did want to extend the school day and have students work and collaborate outside of school but we wanted our teachers to use Moodle during the school day as well. It could be used for teachers to have all of their links and materials in one spot, showing embedded videos, showing students work, etc.

So TICT cadre members or anyone who supported TICT cadre members were the first to be able to create Moodle courses. Any person in our district’s system could log into Moodle as we use LDAP and active directory for user authentication for Moodle. However, for a user to be able to create a course I would have to give them course creator rights – so it was monitored.

If a staff member was “eligible” to get course creator rights they had to take the initial Moodle training. Mandatory training is very important and it will save you a lot of time answering “how do I” emails from staff. Also, in the training the blended learning model was discussed.  And before I get too far I’m going to abruptly stop because my next post is about training, so more on that later..

As far as the Moodle trainers there was one main Moodle trainer and I was there for more techy type questions. The rollout was further sustained and helped by Moodle Building Leaders. Moodle Building Leaders were staff who wanted to take on the Moodle trainer role for their school. It was voluntary and it was to help create more opportunities to staff to get trained since it was a requirement before creating courses. We made a Moodle Training course template for each school’s MBL and they customized it how they liked. This way there was some sort of consistency in training.

And again we get brought back to the training topic so I’ll sum up the Rollout topic. When we rolled out Moodle we started small but we had nice, quality trainings and we knew the staff wanted to be there and learn. We noticed that Moodle had sort of a snowball affect when teachers who had taken the training showed their Moodle work to colleagues. It perked the interest of their colleagues and created some excitement.

That’s it for now!

Key Points

• Don’t force staff to use Moodle.
• Mandatory training will save a lot of “how do I” emails you get.
  

Related

• “How we implemented Moodle” Preview
• “How we implemented Moodle” Part 1 – Idea to Reality
• “How we implemented Moodle” Part 2 – Installation and Modules
• “How we implemented Moodle” Part 3 – Customization

Next time on “How we implemented Moodle” – Training

In this installment I will discuss the process of installing Moodle and some modules you may want to install from the start.

Before installation I researched the best type of hardware and software to use. After reading documentation on Moodle Docs and looking through the Moodle Forums it was clear that the LAMP configuration was the way to go. Since our district had no other Linux servers it took a bit of convincing to use something other than Windows but after our network guy searched the web he came to the same conclusion we did. Even if your network staff doesn’t have a lot of knowledge of Linux (like ours at the time) I think it’s still a good idea to use a distribution of Linux because (1.) once you have Moodle up and running there are rarely (if ever) issues and (2.) there is a lot more documentation online for Linux vs Windows or Mac. Documentation meaning help if you run into a problem or documentation on performing tasks like tweaking settings.

For the actual setup of the server and Moodle installation we hired a consultant. I will not go into detail about the installation but one thing I will mention is the importance of user authentication, creation and management. Our district uses Active Directory so we used LDAP to connect and use Active Directory for Moodle user authentication and creation. I highly recommend using whatever information system you already have in your district instead of creating local Moodle users. It is so beneficial to use a system like Active Directory because there is only one spot to manage users and Moodle will reflect those changes (ie. last name change). Moodle can also pull information from your information system like building location, position, email address and anything else that you have in those fields. The other key benefit is that users will not have to remember another username and password. You have no idea how grateful staff are when we tell them “your username and password are the same as your network login and always will be.” You will get many “thank you, thank you, thank you!!” responses.

So, you have Moodle all set up – now what? We used Moodle pretty much “out-of-the-box” for awhile because we had to get started with trainings and I did not get ‘back-end’ type access for a long time. I was also not aware of the “I wish I would have knowns”. But I do now and here are some!

Two modules that I wish I would have included from the start are Book and Questionnaire.

Book is a great resource that makes it easy to create multi-page resources with a book-like format. You edit content like you would in a “Compose a Web Page” resource but it allows you to make several pages and it creates an outline on the left which can have indented or “sub” chapters.

Questionnaire is an activity that allows you to create advanced surveys. Moodle has the “Choice” activity which is in the core but it only allows you to have one question. With Questionnaire you can create some pretty nice surveys with several different question types.

Another tip is if you are or will be using Google Apps for Education. There is an SSO plugin for Google Apps which uses Moodle’s authentication. I’m not going to go into specifics but if you will be using both I recommend setting up the SSO plugin part during installation. That way, you won’t have to deal with issues for users when implementing Google Apps after Moodle implementation and you can integrate Google Apps into your training. For example, teach users to use a Google Doc URL instead of uploading a file to Moodle. Why? Because it skips the upload step and it allows the user to edit the file without having to delete the file on Moodle and then re-upload it. We chose to use Google Apps after implementation, so unfortunately we could not do this.

Key Points

• The LAMP configuration is highly recommended for a reason. Check out Moodle Docs and the Moodle forums!
• User authentication and creation is very important. If possible look into using your current information systems.
• Look through the Moodle modules and plugins and install them when installing Moodle, so you can train staff from the start.

Related

• “How we implemented Moodle” Preview
• “How we implemented Moodle” Part 1 – Idea to Reality

Next time on “How we implemented Moodle” – Customization

In this installment of “How we implemented Moodle” I will talk about a “Blended Learning Model of instruction“, “equipment” and touch on the word “sustainability” as it pertains to equipment.

As I mentioned in my preview post this Moodle implementation was guided by a grant which contained specific objectives, goals, budget outline, timeline, etc. Having a well thought out plan was tremendously helpful and allowed us to assess the implementation at the end.

The first thing done was choosing the right program to create a Blended Learning Model of instruction. Moodle was compared with other LMS and was found to be the best fit. I won’t go into deeper discussion about this decision because this type of implementation plan will work for most other LMS, with maybe a few differences in specifics. In later posts I will touch more on the Blended Learning Model of instruction but let’s move onto how we went from an idea to reality with hardware and equipment.

We decided that purchasing our own hardware (server) and housing it in our district was the best way to go. I was in charge of researching hosting options for Moodle. I looked into several types of off-site hosting options like Moodle Partners and another local company we use for our information systems. There are definitely benefits of those options like the ease of having someone else setup and maintain the physical server, software and dealing with any future problems.

The drawbacks were that we wouldn’t have full control over Moodle or the server. It would be more difficult (or not even possible) to customize and tweak Moodle how we wanted. The second drawback was that we would have to pay each year for hosting until we decided not to use Moodle anymore and not using Moodle anymore was obviously not in our plan! Sure, purchasing the hardware for a server is a lot of money up front, but after years of paying an off-site hosting company it will eventually even out and when that time comes you don’t even own the server, you will still have to pay the hosting company! Also, in our situation the funds for the grant were gone in 2 years and it would be difficult to sustain that type of model. As I mentioned before sustainability was part (a very important part at that) of our goal.

I highly suggest a district to purchase their own server. Of course, each district is in their unique situation and has to weigh their options. Our district, being pretty large (20,000+ students), having sustainability an important goal in the grant and having the funds at the time made our decision easy to purchase a server. We purchased a fairly robust server knowing that we will need this server to handle continued growth. I know purchasing a server for Moodle will not always be an easy option for districts but keep in mind the long term implications before making any quick decisions based on up front costs.

Key Points

• Having a well thought out plan with objectives and goals gives you a nice guide along the way and allows you to assess the implementation.
• Make “sustainability” key. One thing I have learned is that staff hate having a tool and then it be taken away after they spent a lot of time and energy on it. In every training we told staff “Moodle will NOT go away. The software is free and we have already purchased a server for it to run on. The only way Moodle will ‘go away’ is if no one uses it.” This will reassure staff that they are not wasting their time creating something that could be taken away and Moodle does take a lot of up front time.
• When deciding to purchase a server verse off-site hosting think long term.

Related

“How we implemented Moodle” Preview

Next on “How we implemented Moodle” -  Installation and Modules

Our Moodle implementation was funded and guided by a 2-year grant we were awarded. The grant stated: “This grant will provide training, installation, tech support, and equipment, to implement and sustain a Blended Learning Model of instruction for students.”

My co-worker and I were the two main people in charge of the implementation. My co-worker, Ryan Semans, helped write the grant and was the Moodle trainer. I worked with more of the “back-end” and technical tasks.

Over the next few weeks I will be breaking down our implementation experience into main parts. Of course, every district is different and is in a unique situation. We were fortunate enough to have funds provided by a grant. This is in no way the best and only way to implement Moodle but it worked well for us and I hope you are able to take something away from our experience!

Disclosure: These are my personal thoughts and opinions and they in no way represent those of Osseo Area Schools.

Next time on “How we implemented Moodle” – Idea to Reality (a blended learning model, equipment and sustainability)

Here’s a video created by Mel Benson (aka @Moodlerific) that shows how the reset option works for teachers that want to refresh their course at the beginning of a new “tri” or semester:

Note that the reset option completely purges your course of forum posts, students, student submitted files and any other type of information that is not your course activities and resources (those will be left as is).  Glossary items and entries can also be wiped out, so export any glossary items you want to keep before using the reset option.

For more information: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Reset_course