Limiting student options...

No always the best idea.  In general, leave options alone, users will eventually use them, or at least, its their choice.  Don't remove the choice.  A little idealistic to be sure.

My customer, whos customers are mainly high school students, wants to limit some options in the moodle interface.  Mainly, he wants to remove the settings block, which contains superfolous options.

After thinking about this a little, I ended up editing the permissions of the Settings block.  Turn editing on and click on the Assign Roles icon in the Settings header.  That produces a Permissions link in the Settings block.

In the Permissions block, remove the Roles that have permission to access the block.  Think roles, context and permissions....

Once I had removed the authenticated user from the Roles with permission, the student, who is an authenticated user was not able to see the Settings block.  I have to ensure that my other roles, manager and teacher can still see the block, although, we may decide to remove the option for them too. 

In moodle, its all about roles, content and permissions...how many times have I said that over the past couple years....