eLearning journal

Here's a good way for sharing web resources and reference material with your students using the RSS feeds tools available in Moodle. For example, you can collect bookmarks for your course in delicious (tagged with a name specific to your course) and then set up a feed into your Moodle course that automatically updates as you add more bookmarks.

Here's how to do it:

1. In your Moodle course click the Turn editing on button.
   
2. Find the Blocks editor and add a new 'Remote RSS feeds' block.
3. Click on the editing tool (hand tool) to configure the Feeds block.
4. Click on the 'Manage all my feeds' tab.
5. Find the RSS Feed logo on the website (that's the small orange square shown at the start of this post, labelled RSS or RSS Feed). Right click on the logo and select Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut. Paste into the space provided to Add a news feed URL. Click the Add button. This feed will now come up in the Feed block on this page.
6. Click on the Configure this block tab.
7. The feed should now be available to select (there may be several feeds shown here depending on how they have been configured in other courses), select your feed/s with a tick. Choose how you want to configure the feed, for example give it a title, provide each links description, and display a link to the original site. Click the Save changes button.
8. This feed will now be displayed and updated automatically in your course.

In tonights social media class Leigh said:

Have you been caught without your WYSIWYG editor yet? You know, when you're leaving a comment on someones blog, or trying to add a description to a photo and the text input box doesn't have the button for creating a link, making bold, or making italic.

Wondering about WYSIWYG? This is the editing toolbar where "what you see is what you get", (aha now the picture makes sense!). If the editor is lacking a few of the essentials you can still add links, formatting etc if you know a bit about html.

So we did a Google search for "what is the HTML for a link?" and W3 gave us all the details on how to do links and more.

Here's some info from W3:

HTML is a language for describing web pages:

• HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
• HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language
• A markup language is a set of markup tags

HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages:

• HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags
• HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angle brackets like <> but with no spaces between brackets and text
  
• HTML tags normally come in pairs like <> and < /b >The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
• Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags.

Angle brackets and key letters are just about all you need. We practiced links, bolding and italics by commenting on the social media blog, and turns out it's not as hard as it looks.
eg (but with no spaces between brackets and text)
< href="url">Link text< /a >
<>Italic text< /i >
<>Bold text< /b >
< scr="image url .jpg">