How to Install Audacity

audacity, install, education, moodle

Grading of attendance

How to take attendance in VLS Moodle courses

Moodle Tutorial - Weighted Grades

Tutorial on how to set Weighted Grades in Moodle at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Video Tutorials Creating an Assignment.ogv

How to create an assignment on Moodle

Video Tutorials Quiz.ogv

How to Add a Quiz to Moodle.

How Moodle Can Help Students Study 9/16/09

Moodle - Aktuelle Informationen per RSS-Feed

RSS-Feeds sind zusammengefasste Informationen einer Web-Seite im XML-Format, die im Kursraum in einem Block – laufend aktualisiert – angezeigt werden.

Moodle - Wie funktioniert Moodle?

Dieser Film bietet technische Hintergrundinformationen zur Funktionsweise von Moodle.

LMS 2.0 - Engaging Learners Using More Advanced Techniques and the Odd Mash-up inside Moodle (video) - Jason Hando

A series of screencasts showing people how to bend and stretch Moodle to allow for authentic, web 2.0 style, participatory engagement and learning for their students. These screencasts will be accompanied by support files where appropriate, such as backed-up Moodle courses that can be restored on people’s sites as well as any instructional material such as worksheets in pdf form. I’d also like to provide some way for people to screencast their own work in Moodle and share with the rest of the community - perhaps using screen-o-matic, a free screencasting tool that works from your browser. This will allow other people to share new ways they have used Moodle.

AT&T Classroom Podcast 6 - Geography & Government

Stow Ohio, Geography, History and Government Julie Obraza’s third grade students were moodling in the classroom during their six week study of their community, Stow Ohio. Moodle is an online community where students can exchange ideas by posting information. Mrs. Obraza was the first teacher in attendance at the AT&T classroom to utilize this form of communication for reflection. Students learned to use a compass as well as a GPS instrument to determine direction and location. A ranger from the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Environmental Education Center, Pam Barnes, did a hands-on activity with the children using the GPS system. A daily activity using the Interwrite Board and a projected map of the world, provided students with an opportunity to give and follow directions. The study of Stow government was launched with a field trip to the City Hall. Here Mayor Fritschel addressed the class and students got a glimpse of the council chambers. The Geographic Information System Coordinator, Steve Gibbons, used a variety of Stow maps to show how the population has grown from the early 1950s to the present. Upon returning to the classroom, students were given the choice to run for elected offices. A primary election (along with voting booth) was conducted and the final slate of candidates was posted on a Turning Point slide show which allowed the students to vote anonymously using the personal response system. Timelines using Inspiration software and Palm handhelds were constructed to document all of the fun and educational activities the third graders experienced. Video

Moodle Keynote Presentation

slideshow and audio recording from the keynote presented by Jeff Flynn and Chris Curtis at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School’s Spring Professional Development Day.

Third Session

My third installment of my moodlecast. Moodle has made it possible for me to have a substitute teacher in class and still get high performance from my students!

Fifth Session

A new class begins... Moodle from day one and we all love it. The students have connected with the class at a record setting pace. I think it has to do with hitting digital natives right where they live. These kids can’t believe that they are chatting, blogging, and surfing and I’m calling it class!

Fourth Session

The fourth update on Moodle in my Senior Seminar Class. The first class that I taught all the way through with Moodle is now in the books. I loved it, the students loved it, the administrators love it. I can’t live without it!

Two Weeks Into It

An update after two weeks of Moodle in my Senior Seminar Class. Where would I be without it?!

David Mudrak: What I have learnt by presenting at iMoot2010

1. Show your real face – Stephan Rinke and Michael  Tighe were right in their excellent workshop “In Moodle We Trust“. Your picture is important in an on-line environment. Recognizing the human face is one of the first things we learn as babies and it remains being important through all our life. Showing your real face express your honesty to the others and the fact you do not hide anything. It establishes the first contact with other people and it really helps if you know who is the guy giving the talk.
2. Tell where you are, what time it is and what the weather is – Helen Foster started her excellent keynote presentation with a very kind introduction of herself. If people come to your session at different time zones, from different countries and in different seasons, it is nice they can imagine you in a real-world context. Are you sitting in the office? Or giving a talk from the bed? Is there your family around? Is it snowing there or did you just come from surfing at a sunny beach?
3. Invest time into preparing the slides or demonstration – these kind people come to your session and they are going to spend an hour just listening to you – paying their attention to what you say. Give them clear sign that their presence is important to you and that you were preparing for it. Tim Hunt had a great idea using questions in the new Quiz module as a way to show his slides. It was clear he was carefully thinking about what to say and how to explain it in advance.
4. Bullet lists in presentation slides sucks – presentation is not a book. One picture, even a simple sketch drawn by your hand, may express more than dozens of the words.

Sam Marshall

Sorry, I've been neglecting this blog the last few weeks. Just a couple of interesting things to report (well... not very interesting really... but interesting by the standards of this blog).

First, I am presenting a session at iMoot, the international online Moodle conference this week. (You can still register if you like, it's not very expensive. Tim's got a session too, and of course there are plenty that aren't being given by Open University folk as well!)

This runs on a 24-hour schedule meaning that I have to do the presentation at (I think) 01:30 Thursday morning my time... then it gets repeated at a couple other times where I still have to turn up at the end for questions.

The session I'm doing is basically the complete guide to ForumNG - starting from installation and then covering all the fancy features and improvements. I'm hoping to encourage other people who run Moodle installations to try it, or people who teach to pester their administrators to try it, etc. So it'll be a bit like all the screencasts from this blog, except all jammed together at once, in a more coherent order, and (by the time that session ends) with a less coherent presenter. If that sounds like fun, well, hope to see you there. :)

If you don't fancy that, but you're up for a more traditional conferencey thing, I may possibly have a briefer presentation in the normal UK Moodle moot (this proposal has not been accepted yet so we'll have to wait and see).

Second, I know a lot of people outside the OU wanted the 'subscribe to individual discussion' forum feature. Good news, it turns out that people inside the OU want it too! We're scheduled to do it. I finished a (slightly sketchy) spec today and Ray's just beginning the development work.

Patrick Malley: The Ultimate Moodle Dropdown

For the past few years, I’ve struggled to include a variety of menu bars in my Moodle themes. I’ve tried everything from the simpler CSS-only menus to a slew of fancier menus that require javascript. Some of them have looked really nice. But, none have completely satisfied my need for a light, attractive, and customizable drop-down menu that supports multiple sub-menu levels while still offering basic functionality when javascript is disabled. Until now.

The menu that I’ve found has been under my nose the whole time. It’s the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Menu included in every Moodle download since 2006. I’ve always known the YUI library was there, but embarrassingly hadn’t looked into it’s menu support until just this past week.

Here’s why it’s a superior menu:

1. It’s built on the only javascript library officially supported by Moodle.
2. All of the needed javascript and CSS files are included in the core. The only thing to do is reference them in your theme.
3. Being built on the YUI framework ensures your menu is future-proof. Moodle is committed to sticking with it through 2.0.
4. The YUI library offers great documentation.
5. Since it’s Moodle’s supported javascript library, it works without conflict in all browsers (I’ve personally tested Safari, Firefox, IE7, IE8, and Chrome – same behavior and appearance).
6. It’s completely customizable and offers as many levels of submenus as you’d like to include.

Before you tell me why this is an inferior menu to [insert your favorite menu here], let me stop you and say, “I know.” There are a lot of great menus out there. The problem I’ve found with other menus is their instability in relation to the wide array of code that comes out of and goes into a Moodle installation. I’m just sick of testing menu x on page y of module z.

Download a demo theme

To make this as easy as possible to share, I’ve created a blank theme that includes nothing more than the dropdown menu with basic styles.

Get the Base Menu YUI theme

What I’ve done

If you’re like me, you probably want to know what I did. Here you go:

1. A single line of code was added to the head of header.html to pull in all the javascript and stylesheets from the /moodle/lib/YUI/menu/assets/ directory in the core.

   <head>    <?php echo $meta ?>
       <meta name="keywords" content="moodle, <?php echo $title ?> " />
       <title><?php echo $title ?></title>
       <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo $CFG->themewww .'/'. current_theme() ?>/favicon.ico" />
       <?php include("$CFG->javascript"); ?>
       <?php include("js.php"); ?>
   </head>
   

   Of course, you could just add the javascript and CSS includes in header.html directly, but I find this method to be a bit cleaner.

2. The menu was pulled into the body of header.html. If your theme uses conditional statements to differentiate between the front page and other pages, you’ll have to add the include twice (as shown):

     <?php if ($home) { ?>
       <div id="header-home" class="clearfix">
         <h1 class="headermain"><?php echo $heading ?></h1>
         <div class="headermenu"><?php echo $menu ?></div>
       </div>
   
       <?php include("menu.php"); ?>
   
     <?php } else if ($heading) {  ?>
   
       <div id="header" class="clearfix">
         <h1 class="headermain"><?php echo $heading ?></h1>
         <div class="headermenu"><?php echo $menu ?></div>
       </div>
   
       <?php include("menu.php"); ?>
   
     <?php } ?>
   

   This menu.php file contains the HTML markup for the dropdown menu. It’s a daunting file even if you’re accustomed to looking at such code. But, the logic isn’t too tough to figure out. Dropdown menus are simply unordered lists nested inside list items of parent unordered lists. Spend some time looking at my dummy menu and you’ll figure it out.

3. I added styles_yui_menu.css to the theme folder. This is a modified version of the styles found in moodle/lib/yui/menu/assets/menu.css. If you prefer the styles in that file, by all means use it instead of this one. I chose to create my own menu stylesheet so it’d be easily customized. I’ve commented wherever possible.
4. Based on my Stripdown theme concept, I added a single stylesheet to config.php called styles.css. If you look in that file, you’ll see the only thing in it is the line calling up the menu styles:

   @import "styles_yui_menu.css";

   Of course, there are other ways to include this stylesheet. I chose this one only because I like it. You can add your personal styles right underneath.

5. The YUI stylesheet calls up some images for the menu and submenu icons. I moved those images into /base_menu_yui/images/menu/. There are currently more than than are called; I just pulled all that were in the YUI menu assets folder.

I sure hope I didn’t leave anything out. My feeling is that the file will be more helpful than my description, but this should provide some narrative to my code and some insight into the choices that I’ve made.

Since I’m not a programmer, and my understanding of javascript and PHP is lacking, if this code can be improved in any way, please let me know so I can update it.

Your feedback is always appreciated. Enjoy.

… Continue

Helen Foster: YouTube block update

Helen Foster: More Moodle twitter accounts