Website

I'm so excited about the work I did on my website. I've been wanting to improve our WHAP Moodle site for two years but I've never made the time. This assignment made me learn more about the capabilities of Moodle. While much of the evidence of how much I learned is on my website, I learned so much more that can't be seen in the final product. I figured out how to separate the students enrolled in the course into groups, learned how to use the assignment turn-in option, and learned a TON about troubleshooting in Moodle. One feature of Moodle that I really love is the Lesson function. I'd never used this before but it is great for self guided lessons (especially if you want the students to watch a video and do an activity). I also found a beta program from Microsoft that allows you to save documents straight from Microsoft Office to Moodle (this is an incredible time saver).

While Moodle has a lot of cool options, it does not generate the most visually appealing sites. In reading forums and books, I found there are many themes available for moodle sites and TONS of instructions for how to customize the themes in forums. However, using themes and altering themes requires administrative privileges for the site that I don't have. I asked my TIS if we could turn themes on and she said the district wouldn't allow it. She did suggest using tables and layering to simulate a theme. My TIS, a CIS from one of our elementary schools, and myself spent the better part of an entire day trying to get the tables to work. We finally figured out you couldn't put the image you wanted to use in a folder and your picture had to have a fairly small file size for the layering to work. Unfortunately, it still was not working 100%. As I worked at home that night, my husband suggested making the images I wanted in Power Point, saving them as jpegs, and loading them on my site. I tried it and it worked incredibly well.

Moodle's other major limitation is navigation. You have to scroll down to see all the topics and once you've opened a document, it can be difficult to navigate back to the main page. Where available, I've set my preferences so that links and documents open in a new window. This way, students can toggle between windows.

Another issue I ran into was the spacing in the Lesson mode. Some of my questions have the button to select an answer right aligned, but the answer choices are centered on the page. I've looked at the html and can't find anywhere to fix the problem.

My biggest nightmare with my website came when I tried to write html code. I tried to embed a website and instead the whole Moodle page redirected to the website. After two days of not being able to fix the problem (and lots of people laughing at me L), my TIS copied my site to a new site so I could finish my website. When also tried to replicate the code I wrote to find out what happened. When we used another website the code worked fine. However, when we used the website I put in (our textbook site) it redirected. We tried several more websites and everything worked fine. Out of all the websites in all the world, I had to chose that one…