mod/studynotes/view

Features | ]

• Students can take notes related to any page in a Moodle course.
• They can note anything that comes up in by writing text, drag and drop content or search notes of other students.
• All notes can be annotated, tagged and shared. This way, problems in understanding course material can be solved quickly and collaboratively.

Typical uses | ]

Using Mediabird Study Notes is divided into two steps: Taking notes and reviewing them later on.

Taking notes on any page | ]

While you're on a page such as a resource, forum post or quiz, you can note down anything that comes up in your mind.

• Click on the note taking button.
• Wait for the overlay to finish loading.
• Drag and drop content from the course page or simply enter your notes.
• Navigate between your note sheets using the yellow buttons at the lower left corner of the notepad.

Reviewing existing notes | ]

• Click on the review notes button in the lower right corner of the notepad overlay.

Sharing notes and collaboratively working with them | ]

• Click on the community button
• Click on more... next to Sharing
• If you want to create a new group:
  • Click on Create Group
  • Enter a name and click on Create
  • Invite friends using the Invite friends button
• Click on Share note folder
• Click on Create

Accepting invitations and finding shared notes | ]

You can accept group invitations using the Community button

You can find shared notes using the Search button

Setup | ]

The basic setup is very simple.

• Download the Mediabird Study Notes packages.
• Extract the archive into the moodle folder of your installation.

>>>> rename the directory /mod/studynotes/lang/en-utf8 into /mod/studynotes/lang/en <<<<

• Log in to Moodle as admin and go to the admin page.
• The activity should set itself up now.
• After the installation, add the Mediabird Study Notes activity to a course.

Setting up in-place note taking (recommended) | ]

If you want to take notes while studying, you can enable the in-place note taking function that displays an icon on all pages of a course. Clicking on that icon displays the Mediabird notepad and allows for taking notes in-place. These can be reviewed in the activity later on.

Note: You need to adjust your theme as outlined below to enable this feature.

Setting up the equation editor | ]

• Install a LaTeX distribution (see below for more specific instructions)
• Make sure the dvipng helper application is installed
• Make sure you have installed the LaTeX packages AMSFonts, AMSMath, xypic
• Locate dvipng and latex executables and specify their paths in the activity settings in the admin panel

Windows | ]

• Install MikTeX and check for xypic, everything else should be included in the default setup
• Both dvipng.exe and latex.exe usually are located in C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\miktex\bin or similar

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) | ]

• Install packages texlive, texlive-pictures and dvipng
• The paths will usually be /usr/bin/dvipng and /usr/bin/latex

Theme adjustments for in-place note taking | ]

Using the included theme | ]

If you don't mind about the theme you use, you may easily

• go to Appearance in the admin panel
• select Theme Selector and choose standardmediabird

Note: If the theme does not appear in the list, make sure you've extracted it from the Mediabird Study Notes packages into the theme folder of your Moodle installation.

Using a custom theme | ]

If you are using your own theme, all you need to add is the following line in the file header.html from your theme folder <?php

 include_once($CFG->dirroot.'/mod/studynotes/ext/overlay_snippet.php');

?> after the line

Source: docs.moodle.org/503/en/mod/studynotes/view — MoodleDocs (GPL) · Imported 2026-11-10.