Moodle Admin. course

I am taking a moodle 2.x admin. course through Remote-Learner. It's helpful to write key points that speak to you when learning something.  I will build that list of speaking points here.  This is an admin. course, but lots of other perspectives are being offered.

First, the approach to this online course is collaborative, naturally. There is a facilitator who is helping promote discussion and sharing of experiences and questions, via moodle tools such as forums.  There are framing questions that get participants to reflect upon.  The questions are intentionally open ended.

There are a few questions that are also used to engage the user.  The course wants to avoid the "read it, read it, read it, reflect upon it syndrome".  Use the moodle activities to engage the users, creating an active experience.  Thinking that most of the learning that occurrs is from other students, not from the facilitator or even the course materials.  This is at the heart of the social constructionist pedagogy behind moodle.  In a nutshell, its what I have preached for years.  If you want to learn something, better to do it than to listen to it or read it.  How bout this:

Activity   - Retention %

hearing -  10%

seeing -  20 %

doing - 50 %

teaching others how to do - 75%

The idea is to engage in the course, be active, learn from others, explain things to others.  This is the key, not to sit back on your seat and just passively listen.  Sit forward, engaged actively in what is going on, respond to others, help by explaining and clarifying ideas, questions, assertions.  CREATE THE KNOWLEDGE in the course.

In each of the course topics or sections, there is an activity titled Learning Community with a question asked that is reflected upon in a Forum. Good, consistent method to get learners talking and reflecting, engaged and motivated...

One of the students asked, how to I add a logo header to my sandbox site?

A couple options:

• You can use an HTML block and paste an image into it - not exactly the top of the site, but can place block in upper corner.  A decent workaround.
• Choose a theme with an option to include a logo, like arialist.  I first uploaded a logo.png to my private file area in my home then used it as the logo.png in the arialist theme.

The 3rd way, which is how I had manipulated the theme was to actually open the layout.php and related .css files on the server.  This is the direct approach, but the administrators may not wish to do that, they may not have programming or familiarity with css.