moodle 2 for students - wofford...

Moodle for Students 1

Revised: August 22, 2013

Moodle 2 for Students

Preferable Browsers:

PC: Chrome or Firefox. (Internet Explorer does not work well with Moodle.)

Mac: Safari or Firefox

Accessing Moodle

You will have access to Moodle through myWofford.

Click on the Moodle 2 link in the Systems Links

channel under the myWofford tab.

When you enter Moodle you will see a list of your Moodle-enabled courses. Not every one of

your courses may be on the list. If a professor has not set up a course in Moodle, the course will

not be displayed.

Click on the name of the course for which you want to see the Moodle Homepage.



The Course Homepage

What you see on the course Homepage will depend on what your professor has decided to put

there. The Homepage below is an example.

The Homepage has three columns:

Left: Menus

Center: Course Information

Right: Miscellaneous

Let’s take a look at a few items on this page. We will start with the course information in the

center column.

News Forum

The News Forum is a place in which your professor can post

general news and announcements. If you click on the News

Forum link you will see a list of announcements that have been

posted recently.



You can click on the title of a News Forum item to see

what it says.

Also, in the Miscellaneous column on the right you may see a Latest News

section (if your professor has decided to include it). If so, you will see the title

of recently posted News Forum items there. Click on more beside a title to

read the news item.

Documents

You probably will see links with icons corresponding to

Word or Adobe PDF documents.

Clicking on these links will display the document on the

screen. You can open the files to read them, print them out,

or save them on your own computer.



Attendance

If your professor is recording class attendance using Moodle, clicking on the

Attendance link will show your attendance record for the term.

You can control how many of the

class days are displayed (all, this

month, this week, etc.).

Assignments

A “hand holding a piece of paper” icon is the symbol for an assignment.

Clicking on the link for the assignment will display a web page describing the assignment.



Later when you are ready to turn the document in, return to Moodle and click on the link to the

assignment again.

On the assignment page, click on Add

Submission to find the file on your

computer.

You can drag

and drop the

file into the

“File

Submissions”

section of the

Assignment

page.

Internet Explorer users only -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE: Drag and drop will not work with the

current version of Internet Explorer. If you are

using IE, click on the Add . . . icon

In the “File Picker,” click on Upload a file

and follow the instructions to upload your

file.



In any case, once the file has been uploaded you

should see its icon in the File Submissions area.

Click on Save Changes.

If you are allowed by your professor to

submit a revision before the assignment’s

due date, you can click on the Edit my

Submission.

You will see the File Submissions window again. You can delete the file’s icon and then drag-

and-drop a new version of the file into Moodle.

Later, after the assignment has been graded, you will find the grade on the assignment page. The

professor also may include written feedback and a copy of the graded document with comments.



Participating in a Discussion

Your professor may include online discussions, called “forums”

in Moodle, as part of the course. Forums have the same “face-

to-face” icon as the News Forum. To participate in a discussion,

click on its link on the course Home Page.

The general description of the discussion is displayed at the top of the Forum page. The titles of

the specific questions designed to encourage the discussion are listed on the left in the

“Discussion” column.

Click on a question title to see the corresponding question.



After you have read a

question, click on

Reply if you would like

to post a reply.

After clicking on Reply, enter your response in the text box.

Note that you can attach a file, such as a Word document, by drag-and-drop..

I recommend setting the Subscription to I don’t want email copies of posts to this forum. You

will need to set this only once for each forum.

Click on Post to forum when you are finished with your response.



You next will see another page that double-checks whether you are ready to submit your reply.

You can click on Continue or wait 30 seconds for the submission to occur.

You now will see your reply posted below the original question. The default view is to display

replies in nested form with replies indented, as shown below. You may need to click on Show

parent to see the nested chain of posts.

You can edit your reply by clicking on Edit below the text.

Note that when you participate in a discussion, you can reply either to the original question

or to a response that already has been submitted. This allows you to make a variety of

contributions to the discussion – either by starting a new thread or by participating in a thread

that already is in progress.



You can display a discussion in different ways. The nested form is shown below.

The nested form has the advantage of showing the actual text of the replies. It also allows you to

visualize the course of a discussion, because replies are indented. The disadvantage of the nested

form is that it can grow quite long when a lot of class members are participating.

The Threaded form contains less information, but is more compact.



Viewing Grades

Your professor may use the Moodle gradebook for the course. If this is so, you

can see grades by clicking on Grades in the Settings menu in the left column

of the Moodle homepage.

If your professor has given students permission

to see the record of their grades, you will see a

display that looks something like this. You will

see only your own grades and feedback.

Docking Blocks

The right and left columns clutter up the page,

so you may like to hide them. Docking the

blocks accomplishes this by creating tabs for

the docked blocks on the left side of the

Moodle page.



Placing the cursor over a tab displays the corresponding block.

To dock a block, click on the small rectangular icon

in the upper right corner of the block.