Change, underestimated?

This is a quick howto on adding YouTube videos to moodle. It also works for other video sites, just use the embed code. The most important step is changing the editor to HTML mode before pasting in the text. But watch the video and it should be clearish.

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Over the past week I have been adding and I guess taking away functionality of the three moodle sites we are running in the cluster. Current changes are the removal of the chat and message facility at KKC as far to many students were using the chat in class, and more importantly the chat module was apparently slowing down the server speed.

On the positives I have added the ability to upload video files. Instructions to this are on the Katikati site here and also on the Katmat site here which all KKC Staff have access to with their usual logons and MMC staff will need to see me to get access.

One of the easy tools you can use to add some digital floss to your class moodle page is cooltext. Cooltext allows you to create some basic animated titles and other jpeg titles.

Another link of interest to some departments will be Electrocity. This website is an online game that is sort of simcityish for those who remember when a part of the Social Science budget had to purchase it.

One of the most difficult things I find about being a Teacher is the constant demand for new things. So I hope by now a few more people in the cluster have set up their Del.icio.us accounts. It was really great to see teachers sharing their bookmarks and being able to find resources, like the maths powerpoints page which has now been added by several maths teachers across the two colleges.

The next major step for us to do is get the teachers moodle site up and running. I have given the Katmat site a bit of a tidy up and given all users teacher rights to it. All staff members have been added as users and for Katikati the passwords are the same as email, for Matamata they will need to be changed from the default.

In order to get the most out of moodle the following links give you both grapics and text on what to do

How to create a course , How to add an activity and how to upload files and just to finish with a flurry the following video from Sir Ken Robinson is quite inspiring.

And for those of you contemplating the school balls later in the year here is a link to some great dance tips.