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Font Awesome and Moodle, Part 1 – The basics

Do you know how you can use Font Awesome with Moodle?  Or even what Font Awesome is!

In this series of posts, we will be exploring how you can use Font Awesome in your Moodle courses.

By way of a simple and foundation explanation of what Font Awesome actually is, let’s  look at what Wikipedia says…

Font Awesome is a font and icon toolkit based on CSS and LESS. It was made by Dave Gandy for use with Twitter Bootstrap, and later was incorporated into the BootstrapCDN.

Hmmmm – well unless you are a geek that description is completely meaningless right?  So let’s explain it in more common terms.

Font Awesome is a popular and easy to use set of icons. The font contains several thousand icons, that can be coloured, sized, and styled in many other ways.

In fact, Moodle already uses Font Awesome!

From Moodle 3.5 the Atto editor uses Font Awesome icons for all the buttons … and every menu icon you see in Moodle is a Font Awesome icon now. So you see, you are probably looking at and using Font Awesome icons every day 😉

What many teachers do not realise is that you can use Font Awesome icons anywhere in Moodle that you can enter text. In Labels, Pages, Quiz questions, Forum posts, etc. etc.

Because Font Awesome is designed for the web, it means you can use these icons to create a professional and flexible appearance in your courses (no more annoying animated .gif’s, lol).

Starting next month we will be guiding teachers in how to use Font Awesome in your Moodle courses to really give them a facelift, and explaining and exploring some of the very cool and interesting ways this can become a part of your course design.

See the full collection of articles on using Font Awesome with Moodle within this dedicated (open and free) Moodle course on our ElearningWorld Academy.

Stuart Mealor
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Stuart Mealor

Stuart is interested in all things e-learning, with specific interests in Moodle, e-learning strategy, and business development. His experience in education over 30 years, MBA in International Business, and knowledge of e-learning systems implementation, together with graphic design background, give him a unique skill set for e-learning projects.