 Do many of your Moodle courses look like the scroll of death with loads and loads of links to files, et cetera, and hardly any images, and often presented in a way that kind of makes them very uninteresting for students to look at, and often confusing to access. If that is your problem, then this video is a solution. I'm gonna take you through a course that I'm currently developing and just show you some simple tricks and ideas that will help you to make your course much more organized, much clearer, easier to navigate, and not as overwhelming. Really hope you liked the video. As always, if you do, please like it. Please share it with other teachers. Please comment on it. Love to know what you think about my ideas. And of course, join me on my YouTube channel. Let's get started. Here we can see a typical Moodle course. I'm kind of scrolling from the bottom all the way back. It's loads and loads of links and loads and loads of files. There's hardly any images whatsoever. There's no use of video. You get the feeling that there's loads of information here that it's hard to work through. It's not necessarily very well labeled. And it's pretty demotivating to students. And yet actually that is the way that most Moodle courses have been developed. What I'm gonna show you now is one of my courses. Now let's contrast this to my course. This is unit one of the course. All the units look more or less the same. I'm actually working on unit two at the moment. But all the units look more or less the same. And you can see there's a nice image here at the top. Then there's a basic layout. But watch this little trick. I'm gonna click here to go to the first page of the course or to one of the videos that I want the students to watch. Then watch what's happened here. I've got a back button that you can click on. It's almost like a website. And it brings you straight back to the same page. So this is a really nice feature that I'm gonna show you how I use to make it feel more like a website and that it kind of interacts like a website. And also it just simply isn't a massive great list of tons and tons of links. And obviously you've got some video content here. So when you click here, that brings you to some video content. I'm gonna make that video a little bit bigger on the screen. And I need to add some more things. But then I can click back here. So each unit looks like this. And this is the opening of the actual course, the whole course. It starts like this with, I haven't finished this yet, but with a banner at the top and then a video, and then of course the actual content. I've still got a few things to do. I'm gonna concentrate on showing you some of the tricks here that I'm using, including we're gonna show you how I make that image super quickly using a completely free package that's on the internet. So the first thing I'm gonna do is show you how I make these images and then show you how I put these images in. So we're gonna look at the two red lines and that nice image there. I use a completely free tool. It's called photop.com. I honestly can't believe that this is free and it's on the internet. And there's no trick here. You don't need to pay at any time. It's completely free. Now what I want you to do when you come to here is simply click on new project. And I'm gonna take you through how I make the banner first. Now, any of you seriously into doing photography, editing, you should use this website. It's almost like Photoshop. All you need to do once you've clicked on new project is click on ads. And the one I would suggest you choose is leaderboard. Okay, click on that. And then basically you just click on any of these images that you want to work with. And all we need to do is change the text. So let's just quickly choose one here. You can see there's a huge selection. I choose this one here. I click on that. And that brings that up on the screen. And all I need to do now is edit the text. Now, as I said, this technology is actually quite complicated. Look at this, this image is actually layers. But what I'm gonna suggest you do first of all is click here on this layer and just delete it. We don't need that layer. So we're gonna delete that layer, okay? Now I want you to do is to click on this layer here. This is where the text is. Double click on the screen and just change that. So I'm gonna call this Russell Stannard Moodle Course. Okay, simply do that. Now, if you want to, you can click on it and you should be able to, let me just check. Should be able to, let me just click on the layer first. That's it, should be able to move it, okay? If you wanna position it somewhere else. All right, make sure you click on the layer and then you will be able to move it around. So I can move it and get it into the position I want to. Now another little trick that you can do is again, just double click on the text. Actually, I think click on this first. Click on the actual layer first and double click on the screen, that's it. Yeah, select first of all the layer then double click on the actual text and you'll see that it kind of marks it all out. And now what you can do if you want to is you can make it a little bit bigger. So for example, I'm gonna increase that in size and make it, that should do. That should be absolutely fine, okay? So then click off by just selecting another layer and you'll see now we've already made our banner. Now we need to save our banner, of course. So just click over here, file, come down to export as and a ping or a JPEG will work fine. I'll use a JPEG. So I'm gonna click here and then once you come onto this site here, give it a name. So I'm gonna call this new banner and then click on save. Now where this will be saved will be in your downloads. So I'll show you exactly where that is afterwards. Just click there and that video or that image, sorry, will be saved in your downloads. And now you can actually see that on my computer it opens up immediately. It might not on yours, but I'm gonna show you now where you can find that image. So all you need to do is to go over to your downloads on your computer, so I click here and I will see that that image is there, new banner. And remember I gave it a name which makes it easy for me to save. Now all I need to do is upload that into moodle. Let me show you how you can do that. So let me show you then how I add a topic. Simply go to one of your topics wherever you wanna add your image, click on edit. So one thing I just wanna explain, when you've got a topic section, anything that you add into that topic section will actually visualize on the screen, okay? It won't be a link that you need to click on. No, it will actually appear on the screen. So if I click on edit here, okay? So I'm gonna edit this topic, okay? So it opens up and then if I click here and then what I wanna do is I'm gonna insert a picture, so I click here. Now I need to search for that image. So I'm gonna click here and obviously I'm gonna go to upload a file, choose file. Now where is that file? Remember that file is in my download. So I go there, click on new banner and click on open. Now that file, if I click on upload this file will now be added on. And you wanna just say that it's decorative. If you want to, you can always put in a title if you wanna explain what it is and you can do that and then click on save image, okay? Obviously if you put the title, that helps people who are using systems to kind of read the screen. So now I've put in my first image onto the screen. Now what I need to do, if you remember I've got those kind of red lines at the top here and I'm gonna show you how I do that now. So I want you to come back to photo P and this time I want you to click on file and new. So it's gonna open up this screen here. Now I don't want you to choose any of the templates. I simply, and if you remember just a quick reminder if we go back to the template that we just used before we can see that it's 728 pixels across. That's quite important, you'll see why in a minute. So what I want you to do is simply click or make sure the width is 728 but this time we're gonna make the height just 10 or 15 pixels. Let's try 15 and I'm gonna change the color by clicking here and I'm gonna choose a kind of red color. Okay, so that'll do. I click on okay, I've got one there, actually click on okay. Now I click on create and that line is immediately created for me, okay? And that line is exactly the same width as the image and that's really important. So now I'm gonna click on file and export. I can do it again, do a JPEG if I want to. Give it a name and I'm gonna call this red line so that I know what it is and I'm gonna click on save. Now we've saved that red line now into our downloads. Just a really quick break from the video. Hope you're enjoying the video and if you are please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com. Loads more free videos that you can access. You can also find out about all my courses that are always advertised on the opening page and please sign up to the newsletter. If you sign up to the newsletter you get updated with all the blog posts, the webinars, the online courses and the videos. And at the moment if you sign up there is a 12 part free video course in using technology in teaching and I send you a video about every five days. Let's get back to the video. So we're gonna come back to topic five. We're gonna click on edit and just click here, edit topic and then what we're gonna do is just click there and click on enter to move the cursor down one level. And now what we're gonna do is click here and we're gonna again browse the repository, choose a file. This time we're gonna click on red line and we're gonna click on open and then we're gonna click on upload and then you might wanna write red line here just so that you're describing what it is and then click on save image and then you've got a lovely red line underneath. Now if you wanted to put the red line above then you should have made the image of the red line first and then put the picture underneath, okay? It's just much easier. But it doesn't matter, I like it either way, either underneath or above it really doesn't make any difference. Click on save changes and you'll now see that you've got your kind of opening part of your course. Now of course what we need to do is to put some information in and then I wanna show you how I make that idea where you can go to one webpage and go to another. Now the secret, if we just come back to unit one, the secret is that when you write out your content you make it kind of look really nice, okay? And if we just go back and look at and edit this one here, so we're gonna click on the edit here and click on edit topic, you can see how I did it. I just simply added a black line underneath the title, then I wrote what you will learn and then I put unit one here because underneath this is gonna be where the link start. And once you've done this once, the best thing to do is just to copy that, okay? So I'm gonna copy that text, simply do that and now add that into the new unit that I'm creating. So if I come back to the new unit, I click here, click on edit and again making sure that I first of all click to the end and click down one line and then click on paste and add that text in and obviously now you would change that. So this is for example unit five and unit five is probably gonna have a different title, okay? So you're gonna write your different title here but you can see the good thing about doing that is that once you've done title one for unit one then you can change it, you can copy it and then just simply change it but all the text will always look the same with the same size, headings, et cetera. And that's really important, you want that consistency so that the text always looks the same, okay? So you can see that that one looks very similar for example to that one. It can be quite a nice idea to have a different image for each unit because it kind of distinguishes the unit. Now what we're gonna do now is begin to add the content and this is where we click on add an activity or resource. Now in today's one I'm gonna do a really simple example by using just a very simple content which is a page but if you are interested for example in adding quizzes to your course, there's a link on the screen now where you can click on and learn how to do quizzes. There are actually lots of different types of quizzes. I'll also put them in the description so if you wanna jump over and learn to add quizzes then you can do that but what I'm gonna do now is show you how I did that video trick where you can click and add a page and then come back to the home page. So I'm gonna click on page here, that's what we're gonna add, okay? And what I'm gonna do now is I'll just give this a simple title and I'm gonna call this video content. Let's call it unit five, unit five video content, okay? Okay, and then what I'm gonna put here is a little description I'm gonna say just simply this takes you to the video for unit five and I will click here because I want that to appear. Now we need to add the video and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a video from YouTube. So there's a few things we now need to do. We need to, on this page, we need to add a button so that when you click on that button you go back to the home page and then of course we need to add the video because that's the content that we want here. So the first thing that we're gonna do is add a button and to do that we're gonna go back to photo P. So this is pretty simple, just go file new and what you wanna do is, first of all you might even wanna give it a name so I'm gonna actually call this button, okay? So and then what you wanna do is set the size and we're gonna do a button of say 240 pixels and we'll keep the height like that, that's fine. Now the color, actually I'm gonna leave that color. If you wanted to change the color but I want the color to be the same as the red line that I used earlier. So I'm gonna click on, I'm gonna have that as the color. You can change it, remember? Then just click on create and that's gonna create the button. Now you can click up view here and zoom in a bit. It might help you. Click now on text. So you click on that button there. Click on the screen and now you're ready to write your text. Now you might need to check how big your text is gonna be. I've got the color is white. I can even choose a different font if I want to, got absolutely thousands or hundreds of fonts that you can work from, okay? I'll leave it on this one for now and that font seems fine. So I'm gonna just write home and I'm gonna do it in capitals. Now don't worry about how it looks on the screen at the moment because obviously we're zooming in. Click on the text button to deselect it. Now click on the move tool, which is this one here. Just click on it and move the home button to the right size. Now actually thinking about it, that might be a bit too wide, but it will do, okay? So I'm gonna click on now file, export as, export it as a PNG file and I know it's called button and I'm gonna call it red button, all right? Because I need to know that it's a red button one and click on save. Remember that's gonna be saved into my downloads. Now I need to add that button onto the screen. So I'm gonna come back to my page and I'm gonna add the button in. So I'm gonna click here. I'm gonna click on browse repository. I'm gonna choose a file. Remember that it's gonna be there. There it is red button one. That's the one I want. Click on open and then click on upload. I can give it a name. So I'm gonna call it red button one. So I know that it's there. Click on save image and now that's on the screen. Now what I'm gonna do is click on the line. By the button, just click by it. Press enter to go down one more and then I'm gonna use the shift key and I'm just gonna put a nice line underneath that like that. Now I'm gonna press the enter key again to come down below. Now I need to add the video in that I wanna use. Now the video I wanna use, if I click over here on Moodle create, I've got a video that I wanna use. It's this one here and it's on my YouTube channel. This is a video about making forums in Moodle and if you're interested in this video, I'm gonna put it on the screen now. You can click on it but I'm actually gonna use this in my course. So I'm gonna click on share and all I need is that link. So I'm gonna click on copy. Come back to the page that we're editing. So there it is. Come over to here, insert video or audio. Click on video and just paste that link in and click on insert media and now we've also got the video added into the screen. Now one thing about that video that you might wanna do is you might wanna select that video and you can if I remember, in this case I need to click here, put it so that it's centered. So if I click there, then it will center. Okay, so I'm gonna save and return to the course now and we've got one final thing that we need to do. So I'm gonna click on save and return to the course. So that saves all of that and so now we've got a link here that will take us to the video content for unit five but there's one thing we need to do. So the final thing that we need to do is and to do this correctly, make sure you first of all click on where it says topic five. So just click on there because that will mean that this link here will go back to topic five and I want you to click on that and just copy that link. Then come back onto editing this page that we've created. Remember it's a page, click on that. Click on edit settings. Very simple to do this. Now all I want you to do is to click on the button, click on add link and paste that link in and click on create link. And so now that button when you click on it will actually take you back to the homepage. Let's see if it's all working. So I'm gonna click on save and return to course and there we are on our nice unit that we've kind of been building and if we were to now click on this content to go to that page. So we imagine we're actually doing it and then we were to click on this page to come back to the homepage. You'll see it all works perfectly. That's the trick. Now make sure that you always click on the topic before you copy the link because let me just show you that says section five. If I clicked here, it would change to section six. We always wanna come back to the exact correct section. So make sure that you always click on that. As you can see that it says section five, okay. Now one final thing I wanna explain to you you may have noticed that when we were putting up for example, the image here, the line, the text that was all visualized on the screen but when we added a page that become a link. This is one of the most important things is to understand what a label is because this is a label. Labels visualize content whereas if you add different kind of activities it will become a link. I'm gonna put a video on the screen that really goes through that in the detail because that's really, really helpful. It's on the screen now. I hope this video was useful to you and I hope it will help you to make your Moodle courses more organized. Really hoped you liked that video. Please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com loads more free content and you can see all of my courses on the opening page. Don't forget to sign up to the newsletter that way you get updated with all the latest blog posts, the webinars, the latest videos and the courses. Of course you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. Don't forget to click on the bell that way you'll get all the updates. And finally, if you do want to contact me perhaps about doing a conference or doing some training with your organization you can contact me from the website. Thank you very much.