Hi this is Russell Stannard from teachertrainingvideos.com today I'm
going to show you some really simple design tricks that you can use to make your Moodle course look
a lot more interesting I'm gonna base it on a real example I'm gonna show you a real example
first I'm going to take you through a few of the things this is actually gonna be a two-part course
in this first part we're gonna look at making a really nice head and making it look really
consistent laying out the text in a nice way and then embedding a video from YouTube and also show
you how to resize that video so it looks really nice within the format of your course then we're
gonna go on to show you one of the tricks that's most misunderstood by teachers which is the book
format but that will be in unit part two of the course let's get straight into it really
hope you liked the video if you do please like it please share it please comment on it and of course
please subscribe to my youtube channel let's get started so a couple of really simple things that
I do here we've got a course so we got like an opening block I've just got some information here
with a nice logo at the top and then some writing and an embed a video and then if you notice each
Union what I do is with each unit it looks like this so what I've got here is a tire torn and
about these little lines and then I've got this logo in the middle and I do that on every single
Union and then I basically the it's like a kind of flipped classroom you've got like the video
here to add the content and then the exercises that you can either do a home or in class and if
we go to the next unit then it's exactly the same so that consistency's thing is one of the biggest
things when you're trying to design now I'm not a great designer what I can do is make a course look
solid and nicely organized and easy to navigate I'm just going to go through a couple of little
tricks that you can use to make your design look a bit nicer and I'm going to start by just going
through how I do this because I use this kind of method all the time so here we've got an empty
course in block mode we've got here kind of intro section of top then we've got three topics I'm
going to concentrate at the moment on the topics and all I'm going to do is click on edit and an
edit topic so it's that kind of block look at the top and how do I kind of make all this look a lot
nicer well the first thing I do is I do a line so I'm just gonna pull a line across the screen then
I'm gonna drop down one now I'm going to add in a picture but I always make my pictures exactly
the same size always for the introduction that's a hundred and fifty pixels wide so it's pretty small
picture so I'm going to click here and add in a picture and just jump and choose a picture now
if I jump to my to my images you'll notice see I have a whole box of what I call small images
and these are all built to 150 50 pixels wide I'm going to choose this one here and I'm gonna then
upload that image into the screen okay so now I've added this image in and the next thing I'm gonna
do is I mean if there's a couple of ways I can do this actually one way to be kind of do this very
cleverly is to just click here on the code bit and then underneath after the writing write whatever
title you want a bit you want to add so it will as soon as the images finish there you can just
write in so I'm going to put this here flipped classroom unit one you'll see in a minute why
and while I'm here I might as well just do this I'm just gonna copy that first line okay and I'm
gonna put it underneath here I'm gonna paste that in again alright and I'm gonna then just simply
update that and you'll see that up all updates on the screen now actually in this case let me just
check that there okay that and what I'm going to do is actually put that on the same line so if I
just click there I think click now the only reason I do that that sometimes it's really hard to kind
of click and get the text in so I always add the text when I'm just doing the titles always add
the text like that and just write it in myself okay now one thing here is that what we can now
do play around a little bit with the font try as I've said to always be consistent so I'm gonna
select that font and I'm gonna click here and then I'm gonna choose say for example heading two and
I'm always going to use heading to no often when I use heading two and I've put three pieces therein
flipped often when I use heading to I mark it out and also make it bold and it comes out nice and
thick then okay so there's the heading to my first unit now now another thing if we just come back to
that topic okay is that we can look a little bit into the colors as well for example if I select
that here and then I click on always get this wrong it's this button here we should be able
to change the color okay so let's say we I don't know what color we're going to use but let's just
put it into this color for now and I can do the same even with these lines here as well so if I
want to change those I should be able to change them to the new color as well as you believe let
me just checked and then I'll do the same with this one here as well okay just clicking on it
just to confirm so that way suddenly we've got a kind of atmosphere in terms of the font sizes and
the lines all been linked to the images and if you look back at that last example I showed you the
beginning that was also in a sort of light blue color so that's one of the ways that we can kind
of create a nice title at the top really easy to do but it really now what the thing the important
thing with that is that you would consistently do that with every single unit of the course so
you would need need need now to do the same of the second and with the third one and of course
now you need to add the content underneath so my next tip would really be around now kind of
organizing the intro if we jump back to the course slideshow we can see we've got this kind of part
of the top here which I've already showed you how to do then we've got some text in this case we've
got our video and that videos all been lovely kind of badged as well and then we've got these
two buttons here and I'm going to kind of kind of show this very clean look and how we can do
that okay so I'm just going to take you through adding up in a video but then also making these
nice buttons that link to content and I'm going to show you a little trick that we can do here
with the content by using the book format and I want to show you that I'm just going to update
these and choose better colors for these okay so I'm going to click here always clicking on this
button here I'm going to use this one yeah okay so I'm just timing all that up a little bit just
to make it look a little bit better okay so I'm gonna use that kind of blue softer nice assault
blue I use now when I'm kind of starting to build the content I'm always thinking in a really kind
of organized way so I'm going to write the word introduction here okay and when I write that word
introduction I'm gonna select it and make sure that we got header three so my introduction is
always gonna be the same header three okay and then I'm gonna add my text underneath now on
that new color story so I'm gonna select that there come again to here make sure everything
is consistent now the writing underneath I'm not going to put in the same color I'm just going to
paste in some text really quickly so just to save myself some time I've already copied some text so
I'm just gonna paste it in okay now that obviously that's all come out in the wrong side so I'm just
going to select that and set that all back to paragraph you want that to be paragraph and of
course in this case you don't want that to be blue you definitely want that to be black the text but
we got our intro there okay introduction all with a nice color and then that come down again and if
I've got say aims of unit again I'm gonna make sure this is really consistent so I'm going to
select that come up again always use these headers because it keeps it safe in terms of the sizes etc
again select that make sure to choose the correct color click in here on the side and then again
I would add my text in underneath here again I'm just going to copy some text really quick so I'll
just grab some text if I make sure I click on paragraph first before I post it in and I won't
get the problem that I had at the time before there now if I post it should come straightaway
in on the right one now the only thing is again to select that and this often happens come back
and make that sure that is heading three right we started to get a kind of nice look and feel
nothing special but nice and clear let's have a quick look and just save the changes and just
see a little bit what it looks like okay so see how the unit is building up now what would be
really nice now probably would be to have a video here and you can either embed the video from from
basically you can embed the video from you or YouTube channel or you can just upload the video
so I'm gonna just embed the video from the YouTube channel now again keep in mind what I'm doing here
I'm adding all this into that introductory part and this would be the end of it underneath then
I would have the links to the content itself so let's just add a video in very now it's pretty
easy to embed a video from YouTube I'm going to show you a couple of tricks just come to a YouTube
video it's the one from my channel I'm gonna click on share the share button underneath the video and
then I click on embed and then I click here okay and what I can do is I can copy that text and then
come back to my website sorry wrong page this one here and we're on edit so we're ready to in this
content we're gonna jump into the HTML code I'm just gonna come to right to the bottom and paste
that in now I'm going to show you a little trick here this video is 560 by 3 1 5 and I might want
to make that video a bit smaller it might be too big so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna knock off
about 20% of the size of video so that means I'm going to take off about a hundred ten percent of
that is going to be 56 pixels and 20 percent is going to be about 112 pixels so I'm just basically
going to take that down to about 450 it doesn't have to be exact and the same here so 10 percent
would be 30 2013 1 20 % would be basically 60 so if I take that down to about 250 okay so I'm
resize the video as well and now I'm gonna update really simple to do that and you'll see why in
a minute because just look a lot nicer because the video won't be too big on the screen there
is my first unit of my course where I've got my link here the tall and nice title correct colors
and then afterwards I got my first video okay I really hope so far that's been useful just very
simple things but they really do make a difference now what I want to point out to you now and we're
going to do this in another video is that what we can have here at the bottom is a button that takes
us to a book format and very few teachers use the book format when I do training in Moodle I often
find the teachers don't realize how the book works I'm just gonna show you a book example we've got
this course here that I was showing you earlier and if we come down to the first Union and click
on this first button it takes us into a book and a book basically means that we can go through the
pages of content and then once we've come to the end we can go back again and the only thing that
we need in the book is the ability to come back to the home page that's all you need so a book
format allows you to have various pages and if you'd like to learn more about the book format
I'm gonna offer you a link now the top of the screen and at the end of this right at the end of
this video to go on to part 2 and to learn about the book format and again we're going to try and
make it look quite nice so really hope that was useful and if it was please like the video please
share the video please comment if you've got any questions about Moodle and please if you can
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