CC Day T4 2007: Installing and Using Moodle

This was very similar to a previous presentation given as part of the Tech KNOW Tour. However the Using Moodle presentation has some slight additions from Paul for a more technical audience and the spoken part of my presentation concentrated on a more technical side.

Some additional notes:

To use the DET mail server you can either add mail.det.nsw.edu.au to the mail section of your php.ini file or add it to the
Admin -> Server -> Email: SMTP Hosts section.
If you wish to restrict to sending to DET emails you can add following to the Allowed email domains : “education.nsw.gov.au det.nsw.edu.au“.
Make sure to test the mail server settings before adding any restrictions to domains.

If using Novell or Mac OS you will need to use a different LDAP browser as AD Explorer only works with Active Directory.
For Novell I usually use the free Windows program Softerra LDAP Browser (MSI).
There are a few Java based LDAP browsers that should work with Mac. A good Java based LDAP browser is JXplorer this should work on Mac, Windows and Linux. For some more info on Mac and LDAP look at this article on LDAP in Mac OS X Server from the Mac Dev Center, it is not fully applicable as it also has home drive mapping but it does contain some useful info.

Paul Ganderton has made his Geography HSC site avaliable for guests. You can also view some of the other course on our Moodle site. Look for this logo which means guest access is allowed.

Bulk Operations: Some people asked about bulk deletion of users and courses.
This section has been moved to Moodle: Bulk Deletion Operations.

Presentations:

•   Installing Moodle CC 07 (PPTX) (757.5 KiB, 3,312 hits)

•   Installing Moodle CC Day 07 (PDF) (946.0 KiB, 5,999 hits)

•   Using Moodle CC 07 (PPTX) (984.7 KiB, 2,692 hits)

•   Using Moodle CC Day 07 (PDF) (401.1 KiB, 3,068 hits)

•   SBHS Moodle Training (DOC) (37.0 KiB, 3,048 hits)

Plugins used by Moodle

Some of the items shown during talk are produced by plugins to Moodle. Below is a list of some of our favourites:

• Book: Allows structuring resource pages with chapters and pages.
• Gallery: Shows slide shows and generates thumbnails of images. You can upload a zip file containing an entire folder structure of pictures, and auto-generate albums and sub-albums from it.
• Course Menu: Creates a Tree Structure as a block on side of page to assist navigation.

•   SBHS Moodle Library Block (2.3 KiB, 2,223 hits)

  On the main SBHS Moodle page there is also a Library block that sends search queries to our Sentral library page. This will need to be customised by schools to point to their Sentral system or the new DET My Library system (only accessible inside DET WAN). Just modify the block_library.php file to point to your Library search page. To install place the library directory in your Moodle blocks folder.