‘Do the simple things well’ was an adage of a former headmaster of mine. Unfortunately, sometimes with Moodle people tend to do the simple things  in a far more complicated way than is really necessary.  For example: one of the first successes  of any newbie Moodler is to be able to upload  Word documents, usually homeworks, for pupils to access.  Very useful, I agree. However, the keen teacher will then continue to add  ALL content to Moodle in exactly the same way – typing into Word first and then uploading the file, even when it is merely a short set of instructions that  pupils just need to read and follow.  The pupil then needs to click on the file, make that choice to download save or open and only then gets to read it. On my Moodle travels ,I have downloaded, saved and opened Word documents that merely say ‘design a poster to advertise bla bla’ or ‘this terms football fixtures are…’. Their author has generated far more work than they needed to, and at a time when VLEs are gaining ground fast and teachers are complaining that they just don’t have the time to populate their Moodle, it is a shame so many of them are stuck in the middle of Word. The answer? If it’s just simple instructions, why not type it straight into Moodle? I am trying to encourage this with teachers I train; I suspect they are frightened off by the term ‘compose a webpage’ and do not realise it  is something useful to them and that they could easily achieve.  So how do you do it? Go to ‘add a resource’ then ‘compose a webpage’, type in what you would have typed into Word, save and you’re done! (pretty  much). If it is basic text you could even copy and paste something you’d ‘made earlier’. The advantage is that you are taking fewer steps to your goal – getting the work onto Moodle – and that your pupils are but one click away from accessing that work. Click the image above or click here to watch a screencast of how to escape from the world of Word into the wonders of  webpages!