Hi Jason,
Welcome to Moodle!
The best place for help is on the Support Forums (this is a Social forum). But I can get you started, then if you have further questions, go to "Installation Problems" forum to post them:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=28Yes, you need to put Moodle on a server--your own server or a district server. Then you publicize the
URL of that server so students anywhere can access the moodle site.
If you just want to try out Moodle and learn how it works, go to "Downloads" in the top menu, and
download the one-click version for your personal computer (No one can access it, but you can try it out). The 1.9.9+ version is the best for now. In a few months, you might try the 2.0 version of Moodle. For example, here is one-click
version for a Mac computer.
To add student names and emails, you will have to put them into an Excel spreadsheet and
upload them into the enrollment section of Moodle. This starts getting technical so be sure to give yourself several hours the first time.
Moodle Docs has full explanations of how to do this and how to install Moodle anywhere.
Hope this helps,
Don
