Moodle Markdown editing – hidden treasure Part 3

Part 3 of our series of post on Markdown, and how to use it in Moodle.

In part 1 we looked at what Markdown is: https://wp.me/p8KJp1-No

Last month in part 2 we looked at how to change your Editor preferences, how to change the editor input format, and entered a few brief lines of Markup text: https://wp.me/p8KJp1-Nx

Before we look at some more Markdown, it’s worth explaining the Editor input options we saw. Once you have changed your Editor preference to ‘Plain text area’ you saw that you have various options for the type of text you can input.

Let’s quickly explain these:

• HTML format – you are free to use HTML tags
• Moodle auto-format – this allows you to type plain text, the same as you might in an email, but you can also use HTML tags if you wish
• Plain text format – useful if you want to write HTML code that will be display as written, and not changed (good for programming or web design courses)
• Markdown format – an excellent choice when accessibility of the page is important

We will explain these more clearly in a future post.

Anyway, for now, change your Editor preferences to ‘Plain text area’.

Go back to the Label you created earlier (or add a new one) and choose Markdown format from the dropdown menu.

Last month we saw how the following text:

*italic*
**bold**
***bold italic***

Create the text: italic bold bold italic

It might not be so obvious that emphasis can be added to single words, a sequence of words, or even parts of words like so:

a *single* word
***a sequence of words***
in**distinguish**able

This produces the text: a single word a sequence of words indistinguishable

Note that an underscore character can be used instead of the * if you wish:

a _single_ word
___a sequence of words___
in__distinguish__able

You might wonder why?

Well, remember that the point of Markdown is to create text that is easily readable, so you may feel that underscore characters leave the words easier to read than asterisks, but it’s really a person choice.

Final this week, if you wanted the three lines of text as separate paragraphs, and not one continuous piece of text, you just need to add a blank line as you enter the text:

a *single* word
***a sequence of words***
in**distinguish**able

That’s all for this post, but watch out for the next in this series which will

• About
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Stuart Mealor

Managing Director at HRDNZ

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.

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