 Database. Share content. Moodle's database activity allows you to build, display and search a bank of entries on a topic of your choice. These entries include files, images, links to websites, text and more, and may be moderated before approval, commented on and rated. Database activity entries can be displayed as a list, and individually, in single view. In this database activity, Marine Marvels, when the entries are displayed in a list, we see a name, an image, along with its geographical location. In single view, we can also see who added this entry and when, and accessing it with the teacher role, we see icons for editing, deleting and approving entries. All of these options and more can be set up when adding a database activity, so let's explore it now. Our teacher adds a database activity by turning on the editing, selecting database from the activity chooser and giving it a name and description, which can be displayed on the course page by clicking the box. Other settings can be expanded by clicking the links. Entries. Here, it's important to decide whether or not to moderate entries before they appear. Note if you set them to be moderated and never approve them, you can have a useful private sharing area between teachers and individual students. Should students be able to edit their entries and or comment on entries? Should there be a limit on the entries they must add before they can view others? Should there be a maximum number of entries they can add? Ratings. By default, editing and non-editing teachers can rate database entries, but if you want students to do this as well, access permissions from the gear menu in the database and allow students the capability mod data rate. Other settings are similar to other activities, but it's worth knowing that in activity completion, you can require a certain number of entries to be added before the database activity is marked complete. Fields and presets. Clicking save and display then shows a number of tabs. The fields tab must be dealt with first. Fields means the information boxes course participants must fill in, such as adding text, a file or an image. No fields defined means our teacher hasn't added any of these yet, so that's the first task. To save time, you could choose a predefined set, preset for short, which means a file of ready-made fields. Find out more about using presets in the Moodle documentation. And there are also a number of presets available on Moodle.net, which you can download and import for your own database activity. But our teacher is going to add fields manually, and so from the fields tab, he clicks create new field. And here are the available fields. Text input is useful for names of entries. And ticking required will force the student to enter something here. With picture fields, we can specify the size of the images for list view and single view. Usually, list view would be smaller than single view. Finally, we'll add the latitude-longitude field so students must enter the geographic location. Templates. Templates define how you want the fields displayed. Anything done to the list and single templates here will determine how they look. The add template will determine what participants see when they click to add an entry, and you can also set up an advanced search template. The simple way to set up your database easily is to click the save button for each template, as we're doing here with the add template. But you can edit templates also to improve their display. For example, if you want the list view to display as a table, you'll need first to disable the editor and then enter the code for the header and footer of your table. And if you're comfortable with the code, you can also explore the CSS and other more complex templates. Moodle's documentation will help. Let's make some simple changes to the single template. The items in brackets are fields. These are essential. The words in between hashtags are other actions or options. So we could add the user name and time an entry was added by clicking where we want it and then choosing the items from the list on the left. Remember to save the template. Now it's time for our student to add an entry, adding a name, uploading an image and entering a geographical location. To summarise, database allows you to build, display and search a bank of entries on a selected topic.