What's the best tool to use for creating graphics for Moodle courses or courses that
you're producing to teach online I'm going to show you a brilliant technology it's free and it allows
you to make graphics for banners for titles for the different units of your course and even lines
which I use to divide the different parts of my course up it's a free tool it's really useful it's
lovely to use and I'm going to take you through a whole range of different activities really hope
you like the video and as always if you do please like it please share it with other teachers please
comment on it and if you really like it please join me on my YouTube channel let's get started
so the sorts of things I'm talking about things like these images here which
is what we call thumbnails in YouTube or for example these kind of banners that you might
put at the top of the course or for example the banners that I create for each unit of my course
so this is the tool photo p.com it's completely free I'm going to start by showing you some
super simple examples I will show you slightly more complicated ones a bit later but let's do
something really simple just to show you how to create a banner I'm going to click on project and
then what I do is I've got to choose the type of banner that I want to create and what I'm going
to do first of all is do a banner that I often put at the top of my courses uh when I'm working with
mood and stuff like that so I can just choose a size I'm going to go for leader board then I just
double click on any of the images and it will open up onto the screen and now it's ready to edit so
you have to put up with the adverts there on the right hand side but this side site is completely
free they never ask you for any money and if you look here you'll see that this image is made up
of layers it's like photoshop it's actually quite sophisticated now the first thing we're going to
do is I'm just going to come in a little bit closer just so that you can see a little bit
better and if we notice here we've got this baby don't hurt me and I'm just going to click on that
and right click that layer and delete that layer completely now I'm going to click on this layer
and then I'm going to come over in fact what I can do if I click on the layers just double click
on the screen on the text and I'm going to delete that and I'm going to write
Russell Stannard I've probably zoomed in a bit too close here let me just come out a little bit
zoom out a little bit so you can see it okay and straight away I've now updated that and I've put
my imagine this is going to be a banner for example for my website or it could be anything
if I just again if I click here then double click on the screen if I wanted to call this for example
unit one yeah of my course then I've simply made that banner so it's that simple to do always make
sure that you've uh clicked on the um on the layer that you want and then just double click
on the screen to text now the other thing is just to notice this as well if you click off
the text and click on the move tool you could just grab that now and move it see because this is a
layer of this image then you can actually as long as you've got that layer and you're on the move
tool you can actually move it around everywhere so that is how simple I could create a nice unit
introduction and then all I would do is click on file and then come down to export as I'm going
to export this as a jpeg for example I give it a title so I'm going to call this my course banner
or unit banner, unit one banner and then I simply just click on save that will be saved in my
downloads so I need to go to my downloads to actually find that image there it is and now
I could use it so if I clicked on my downloads just to open up my computer for a minute come
to my downloads then that image will be at the top unit one banner you can just see how much I
use this technology actually you can see here I've been working with it in the last few days
and you can even see down here I'm always making banners and images for different things
okay so that was a really simplistic uh idea of how you could use photo p I'm going to show you
something more sophisticated now we're going to start working with the layers I'm going to add
text and I'm going to build it up and bring in pictures and I'm going to bring in more pictures
and I'm really going to kind of build this whole thing up just incidentally if you are looking to
learn more about Moodle and how you would then put those images into Moodle there's a video on
the screen now that will take you through working with Moodle and give you some really useful design
tips on using Moodle but let's move on now to the next part of the video so I'm going to show you
some more sophisticated ideas now working with photo so that you can start to see some of the
more things that you can do with it so let's start with a couple of ideas so I'm going to click on
new project again again I'm going to come down and choose ads now what I'm going to do here is
actually produce the header that we often have at the top of the course so not for the separate
units but at the top of the course so a good size for this one can often be to use what we call
billboard or large leader board okay or leader board they work really well I'm going to do large
leader board now let's do billboard simply because it makes it clearer so we'll click on that one now
we get again loads of images quickly scroll down and find the one that you want
okay one that I often I mean any of these will do a lot of them are nice because they don't
have images and perhaps you don't want to work with images you can actually click here
and just choose the ones that haven't got images in another one that's quite nice for
courses if you scroll down that I use quite a lot is this one here it's quite a long way down
it's this one here so I'm going to click on it so again just click once and it will open up
now remember we've got this text here and we've also got this other layer now sometimes you do
want the other layer so what I'm going to do this time is click on the first layer first I'm
going to double click on the screen and I'm just going to change this to to Moodle course all right
so let's imagine I'm actually building a whole course using Moodle now I'm going to select that
with the mouse okay select it with the mouse I'm going to increase the size slightly so I'm going
to make that a little bit bigger don't worry that it's covering up everything else click on the move
tool and then I'm going to shift that over to this side now I've got this other text so
I'm going to click on here I'm going to double click on the screen I'm going to change that to
Russell Stannard since I'm the tutor on the course and this time again I'm going to just select that
remember you've got it selected you've got that layer selected it's the great thing about photo p
so just hold your mouse down select it and again what I can do now is increase the size of that and
I could if I wanted to even click here and change it to another um font I'm not going to do that I'm
quite happy again I'm going to click on here now and then I'm just going to put that underneath
so really quickly there I've just produced a nice banner but this time I've used two layers now just
to make a point here if you wanted to add another layer of text you can click on the text tool
click on the screen and immediately you'll notice that a new layer is created now if i wanted to
add something else here let's say it was the name of the university so whatever university
or college whatever you could add the university name then click on there and then put that
somewhere else on the screen okay so immediately you've made a lovely banner for your course um
really really quickly and of course the last thing you need to do file and export as export
it as a Jpeg or PNG Jpegs are slightly smaller so click on jpeg remember to give it a name so I'm
just going to call this top banner and remember also when you click on save that that will be
saved in your downloads and there is our image and of course I can access it from my downloads
so now we're going to focus on working with our own pictures or working with pictures that you've
extracted from google and if you want to learn how to legally take pictures from google watch
the video that's on the screen now otherwise I'm going to show you how to use pictures with photo p
so let's go to another level this time what we're going to do is we're actually going to
open up our own picture so I'm going to click on open from computer now I've got lots of pictures
here that I've actually paid for or make sure that you use images that are on the internet that have
got a creative commons license okay or anywhere where you can get out images that are kind of
creative commons free so you are able to use them I'm going to click for example on this image here
let's work with this image in fact let's work with this image here quite like this one so I'm just
going to click here and open that image onto the screen now this image is too big but watch this
I can click here on the crop tool and then what I want to do is click on free crop and now what
I can do is I could kind of move this tool move this and then move this and kind of crop it
so I've got a completely different image now if I'm happy with that just click on the tick and now
I've got a completely different image okay I can resize the image afterwards if I want to now as I
showed you in the last video what I can do now is click on text click on the screen now I might want
to change this so I'm going to for example use kind of a white text and I can also if I want to
even change the font that I'm using etcetera I'm quite happy with this I'm just going to put here
Moodle course I don't know why it come out red I made a mistake though I'll just have to change it
but I'll do it afterwards of course with Russell Stannard don't worry about the fact that the words
are going off the screen because I can click on here move it onto the screen where I want it let's
say down here double click again on the screen I'm going to change that just make sure that
I've chosen white and I know I didn't do I didn't click on ok now if we click back on the move tool
so we deselect the text now we can see and we can kind of place it where we like I might put it over
there okay again if I double click on the screen I can always increase the size of it change the font
etc to change the font just click here you've got all sorts of fonts that you could work with
okay so if I for example let's say let's just change this one here
and then it will completely change but you notice it's now really big
so you would then probably need to resize it down a little bit again you could use the move tool to
move it so that would be another possibility I want to make sure it's nice and clear and then
again when you want to just you know click on the move tool and that will then allow you to move
it and there we are you've got um the image you want and of course what you would do then is go
file and export as and again save it as either a PNG or a jpeg and then you can make access
make use of it remember you can always add more layers so if again you wanted to have I don't know
the title of the university you could come down here and click again on text click on the screen
immediately adds another layer and then let's say you know university name and again you could then
place that somewhere else on the screen use the move tool move that wherever you want it to be
and of course if you wanted to you could change the font of that as well put it back to anything
else and remember to move the move tool might help to decide where you want to place it okay
just a matter of playing around i love these layers once you get used to them you'll see that
they can really help you because of course you could do the same if you wanted to add another
image as well so i have two images though normally with a banner i think one's enough
just a really quick break from the video i hope you're enjoying the video and if you are
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five days let's get back to the video here we can see a Moodle course that I'm currently developing
and you'll notice again that I've used uh photo p to make these banners at the top of each of
the units of my course but another thing I like to do is have these nice thick red lines that kind of
show where the course or the unit starts and ends and I'm going to quickly show you now how I do
that working with Photopea when you're working with Photopea you're not actually forced to
only use templates you can do anything from your computer etc what I'm going to do is just click
on new project and show you another little idea and in this case what I'm going to do is simply
have a black line so in fact we'll make it a red line and I'm not going to choose any
of the templates I'm simply going to say width 120 but the height here I want the height to
only be sorry 1 280 and the height I want to be just 15. so I'm going to make a nice long line
maybe it might be too long I'm going to set it to 800. so I'm just changing the width
simple as that very simple and I'm going to change the color I'm going to click here because I like
a red line so I'm going to click on that so I've now chosen red I'm going to click on ok and
now all I need to do is click on create and the red line is created it's that simple using photo p
to make these kind of quick images lines that I often use when creating a course
again you would now just need to save that so again click on export as export it
give it a name don't forget to name it and then click on save and that will then be saved
as a line that you can then download and make use of and it will be of course
in your downloads really hope you like that video please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com
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you can contact me from the website thank you very much on the screen now there are some more
videos that you might find useful all connected to working with Moodle and designing online courses