Comments on: Life sucks.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:07:36 +0000

dan, we use the course id field, for the course number from the guidance department which is the official number for that course in the program of studies.

It may seem like this is useless information – does any teacher actually know the course number of their classes? But the benefit of doing it that way is the horizontal “tree” of folders that appears at the top of the page, underneath the banner. It creates another level of organization and makes it easier to move around the course.

Yes, the categories question is server side, but if I had to guess, the answer is yes.

Good luck

By: Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:29:45 +0000

Enjoy the peek… and in addition to calling on any of us for help, moodle.org is really well documented and the forums are a great place to search to see if others have had your problems.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:06:52 +0000

I’d go with Steve’s idea, he sounds like an organized guy. My suggestion was going to be to name the groups after famous mathematicians–OK bad idea. I’m glad Bud shouted out, I’ve got some Moodle issues, too. N.

By: Bud Hunt

Bud Hunt — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:05:16 +0000

Dan,

If you still need help, I’m administering both school and district level Moodles (Moodli? Moodlesses? Whatever.). I’d be happy to talk you through some of what we’ve done and why and how. budtheteacher at gmail dot com.
Good luck and hang in there. You will be a hero when you get folks going.

By: dan

dan — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:08:52 +0000

Steve, also, maybe this more server-side but I haven't done anything with categories and I mean that literally. I have the category field hanging out at miscellaneous. Is this what I need to do with that field? Set up categories for department & last name?

By: dan

dan — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:05:41 +0000

Hey thanks, esp. to Marcie and Steve for the behind-the-scenes peek. I crawled off the ledge of my highrise for a sec and this seems do-able. Steve, how do you mean "we also use the course ID number field"? What do you populate that with?

By: Steve Maher

Steve Maher — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:38:58 +0000

I don’t do our server side stuff but I can tell you that we set up two levels of categories, the first being department, the second being the teacher’s last name. The full name of each class section is: “CourseName (period #) – TeacherLastName”. We also use the course ID number field.

If you start adding different teachers and different classes, the home page of the Moodle gets crowded in a hurry. You can see our home page at http://moodle.chatham-nj.org/moodle/

Moodle is a open source alternative to Course Management Systems like Blackboard.
http://moodle.org/

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:15:41 +0000

Whenever you get a chance, what’s moodle? And are you scheduling?

By: Marcie T. Hull

Marcie T. Hull — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:31:06 +0000

The easiest thing to do is to get a print out of all the courses in your school that get graded. I am sure you do grading online. Every course is already set up with a name/section and a code. Use this as a guideline for your naming convention. I am sure if I ask Chris he will let me give you an account on our system so you can see how SLA is set up.

By: Peter Rock

Peter Rock — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:47:28 +0000

That would be a reasonable way to do it. Or if you were a teacher doing multiple sections of the same course you could use something like A, B, C…

Or you could have fun with it and provide some kooky names for each section… though the school registrar might have you reported for drug testing.