Okay, it has been more than a week since my last post so I need to get caught up here.  Things have been a bit hectic so hence the extended absence.  At least it wasn't months like the last time. 

In todays post I am going to talk about a complaint that many of the teachers in my current school district have about Moodle.  Moodle is a great tool, but when teachers use it more like a content management system for a web site, or in many cases for what Moodle was designed to do, they say that the user interface is ugly.  They use terms like "too blocky" or "it doesn't look like a real web page" (whatever that means).  I have to admit, that in many ways I tend to agree with them.  If you create a list of activities, they just line up in a single column on the page in a way that really isn't too terribly appealing to the eye.  The bad part is that you can't control the location of these activities in as many ways as I or most teachers would like.  Yes, I know it takes more time to change layouts and such, but face it, appearance is still very important to folks in the K12 arena. 

So given the challenge of making Moolde less Moodle like, I have started building a number of demonstration courses from all grade levels that I am attempting to make a bit less Moodle like.  So, the first example is of a 1st grade teacher's site in my district.  This site is a pretty good example of the kind of site that lower elementary school teachers like to see.  Lots of graphics, very clean and simple. I have included four pictures of the site to show you what I have done.  The home page, a daily schedule page, a newsletter page, and a page that describes the themes of study for the year.

What I want you to notice is the lack of all of the links to the various activities or resources. You may ask, "How did he do that?" For starters, when you look at the site you will notice only one section in the middle of the page.  To do this you need to configure your settings so that only one section shows.  To get rid of the zero section, just remove all of the objects from that section.  The zero section will always show in editing mode but if it is empty it will not show in regular viewing mode.  This effectively gives you a single section on the page.  So where are all the links to the various activities?  They are in section two.  You can create all of your links in a different section than section 1.  When you only show one section, the section with all of the links is hidden but since you didn't actually hide it, all of the links are still accessible.  This means that in section one you can create links to the moodle links in section two.  This works really well.

So, to begin configure your settings page so that two sections are visible.  In section two add/create all of the resources/activities that you feel are needed for the course.  Now go back to your settings and change the configuration so that you are only showing one section.  Turn on the activities block so that you can now see all of the activities that you have created without showing section two.  Here it is now obvious why you want to put a description of each activity or resource.  Create your web page in section 1 using a label resource and then just create links to the activities you added in section two. I will post a more detailed description of this process at a later date, but for now I hope that this will get you thinking about how flexible Moodle can be for creating even the most basic web sites.  I welcome your comments regarding this kind of Moodle layout. Happy Moodling!