Login Go to the Moodle website: http://hyvaope.net/moodle. In the middle of the page you find RTE. Click that, and enter your Basic user account and its password and click the Login button. The main page of RTE-Moodle will now appear. Log out: When you are leaving Moodle, click Logout in the top right corner.

Changing the language You can change the language of Moodle by using the drop-down menu of language selection in the top right corner. Choose a language from the list.

Editing your profile In the Administration box you will find a link Edit profile. You can change your own information here. You can access your user profile at any time by clicking on your name (Alice Wonderland in the example) or your user picture. Moodle will then show your profile such as the other users will see it. For example:

To change your password, use the Change password button. Give yourself a new password, if you had not done so already You can change the information in your profile, by clicking the Edit profile button in your profile or the Edit profile link in the Administration box in any course. When you have clicked the Edit Profile button, all profile options will open as shown below:

Check that your name is spelt correctly. With the E-mail digest type you can set whether you want to receive separate copies of every discussion message posted in your course(s) (setting No digest), or whether you want to receive one message per day that lists all the messages (settings Complete and Subjects). For the item Forum auto-subscribe choose: No (It is better to choose later from which forums you wish to receive mail). If you select Yes for Forum tracking, every forum in every course can list and highlight unread forum posts (if the teacher enabled this setting). Continue with your personal information (town and country) and set the language of your choice. This will be the interface language that will be automatically selected when you log in. Note, though, that you can override this automatic language selection by using the language selector on the Moodle front page. Fill in a short description of yourself, so that your fellow students know a little bit who you are, but remember that all users of Moodle can read your profile, so do not get too personal. The optional items are not needed to create your profile, but they can be useful. If you upload a picture of yourself, or an avatar, to give a face to your profile, you will come across more as a person to the other users.

To add a picture to your profile, click the Browse button. Look up the picture you want to use and double-click it. The link to the picture will appear in the browse box (note that the picture file must not be too big, 50 Kb or less is usual). User pictures will be automatically resized to fit the picture box. You can now click Update profile at the bottom of the page and you will see your updated profile. Note that you can always return to your profile and make changes in your selections and personal information when required.

The Forum tool The bulletin board tool, called forum in Moodle is the most important tool and central to all courses. It is very flexible and teachers can link glossary entries, multimedia and other content into their forum messages. The forum therefore warrants a detailed description: The forum tool (Moodle icon =

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The forum works like any bulletin board in that it allows users to post messages and (often) to respond to each other’s contributions. You enter a forum by clicking on its title. The forum displays itself with a short description and a list of one or more topics (separate threads in the forum):

When you click on a topic title the thread will open. The standard form of display is nested, i.e. all messages are displayed in full-text and in threaded form (underneath the message to which they replied). However, users can choose different display forms, which may be preferable if the amount of messages in a topic becomes very big:

A very simple message in Moodle can look like this:

The options on a finished message include Show parent which will move the user up the discussion thread to the message that the first message replied to. If you use the search function to find forum messages, you will also notice a link called See this post in context (not shown here), which allows you to jump from your search results to the discussion in which the message you found was posted. The Edit option is available for 60 minutes after posting the message. It allows users to proof read their text and make corrections if necessary. If users are subscribed to the forum, a copy will be sent to their e-mail after the edit time is up. In the teacher view the options on a message will also include Split which allows the teacher to separate a part of a discussion thread and move it to another discussion. Delete is an option that users see only on their own messages, while the teacher also can delete messages posted by others. Note that messages can only be deleted, so long as no answers have been posted to it, which can be done by any user clicking the Reply option.

The Messenger The messenger is a private one-on-one communication tool so the messages you send are visible only to the people you send them to. Once you receive a message while logged in to Moodle it will popup in a separate window (check that your pop-up blocker is not on). The messenger tool can send e-mail to users who are off-line. If you click the messages link in the Messenger block, you will see a pop-up window with three tabs displayed below:

Once you have selected a user, you can send them a message: