FAQ's (How to) - Personalize your Course
Once you've had some student time and are comfortable with the basics, you may wish to personalize your course:
FAQ's (click question to jump to answer):
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How to: Modify the Introduction Area?
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How to: Make an Intro Video?
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How to: Modify the Course Outline?
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How to: Add an Explanation
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How to: Add New Books?
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How to: Manage Projects and Activities?
How to: Modify the Introduction Area?
How to: Make an Intro Video?
Sample:
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Step 1: Watch the introductory video (left). You can also update your profile at this point (just click your name in the top-right). |
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| Step 2: Read the Course Outline and make sure you understand the course requirements. Ask your teacher if you have any questions. |
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Step 3: Make a schedule and get started on the course ASAP! Remember that regular progress is the key. |
How to: Modify the Course Outline?
How to: Add an Explanation?
How to: Add new Books?
How to: Manage Projects & Activities?
How to: Do I need to update my Course?
Updating techniques:
- If your program has yearly breaks, then easy to update each year during that break. Have your Moodle admin keep your old course around for an extra month so you can move over any personal items (the "Sharing Cart" plugin is handy for this). This is a great way to benefit from updates in an easy way.
- If your program is continuous, then it's a bit more challenging.
- Most common: start the new course and have all new students go into that, move over some of your students (early in the course over), and give the students near the end of the old course a month (or two) to finish up. It means that you'll have a month (or two) with two courses to watch, but smooth sailing after that.
- It is possible to backup students and grades and move them into a new course (along with their grades). It works quite well if all the quizzes and assignments align perfectly (all out of the same amount). Although some teachers/programs have used this method successfully, most report that it's too time consuming to ensure everything aligns perfectly, so it seems that most use the previous option.
How to: Wish Happy B'day to My Students?
If you agree that a small action that you can use to help establish relationships with students is sending a quick note wishing them Happy Birthday, then you might find this helpful. Basically, the following is what I used to extract data from the SMS and import it into my Outlook calendar. If you are looking to use data from MyEd and/or use a GoogleCalendar, then the process below might still prove helpful:
- Export Data - in this example, data is taken as "Achievement Data" from the SMS (.csv).
- Process Data.
- Open in Excel.
- Sort by teacher, then delete rows for students who aren't yours.
- Sort by status, then delete rows of dropped, withdrawn, and requested.
- Remove columns except for A=Last name, B=First name, C=DOB
- Insert a column after name (C) and insert =CONCAT(B1," ",A1,"'s B'day!")
- Copy C and paste back (with only values)
- Delete columns A and B
- Name column C "month", then enter =(MONTH(B2))
- Sort data by month
- D2 becomes =(DATE(2023,MONTH(B2),DAY(B2)))
- Copy D2 into all of the rows with month = 1-6
- Delete rows with month = 7-8 (also 9 and 10, since I'm doing this in Nov)
- D? (starting new group) becomes =(DATE(2022,MONTH(B?),DAY(B?)))
- Copy column D to columns B and C (only values)
- Fill column D with "Yes"
- Add Row 1 (titles): Subject, Start Date, End Date, All Day Event
- Save file to desktop (as a .csv), then ensure "Read-only" is not checked
- Import into Outlook.
- In Outlook, make a new calendar called "Student Birthdays (2022/23)"
- Select your new calendar > File > Open & Export > Import/Export
- Import from another program or file > Next > csv > Next > Browse File (Do not include duplicate) > Next