One of the problems with teachers uploading PowerPoints to Moodle -or indeed any VLE/LMS – is that not all their students have MS Office at home.  Even if they do, they might have an earlier version and therefore not be able to open their teachers’s 2007  masterpiece. While there are many workarounds – offer Powerpoint Viewer or (better) use OpenOffice, another solution is to convert to Flash. This can be done easily in OpenOffice but if your presentation is – perish the thought!- full of whizzy animations and transitions then they won’t transfer.  Enter iSpring free - a free Powerpoint to Flash converter that converts your slideshows with animations  -with sound -with video -  and even with your exploding text if you really have to… It’s been used and recommended amongst the Moodle community for over a year now. It’s been mentioned in several Moodle books from Packt and by  other Moodle bloggers such as Ian Usher. But the other day a county ICT advisor alerted me to the fact that he’d been refused permission to use iSpring free on his Moodle. The terms and conditions state that iSpring free is for personal use only, such as in blogs and websites. I  – and I daresay many other happy Moodlers -had assumed personal use meant an individual  teacher could put on a iSpring version of their lesson’s Powerpoint for their own individual class within Moodle (or Frog, or Fronter..) But no. When I double-checked the response I got was – quote:

iSpring Free is for personal non-commercial use only. It cannot be used for creating public presentations of any kind, even for educational purposes. I am sorry about that. …We are glad to provide educational establishments representatives with a 25% discount in case of purchasing a single license of iSpring Pro, a great tool for elearning courses authoring. The original price of the product is $249. Considering your academic status, the price will be $186.75.

Sadly, my school is unwilling to pay the  reduced $186.75 and so I am on the lookout for alternatives.   For my part, I shall suggest to the company that their make the terms of usage for the free version much clearer, particularly with the prevalence of VLEs and the need to find a suitable way to make presentations viewable by all users. For your part, Dear Readers – if  you have iSpring free on your class pages – take them off! Or else, of course,  buy the pro version and get a licence. And if you have that sort of money perhaps you might like to buy one for me too…

“Peer Assessment” – buzz phrase in education – is an activity to which Moodle lends itself beautifully. I have used the Moodle workshop module in the past for peer assessment  (see here) It can be set up  in many different ways and at levels from basic to advanced. However,  its complexity dissuades some from trying  it. The “new, improved” Workshop for Moodle 2 which can  be tested here is much more user-friendly and I await its arrival eagerly.

In the meantime, and if you only want a quick, very simple peer assessment task, it is possible to tweak a Moodle forum to do the job. The following screencast shows one way to do this. If you scroll down below the screencast, there are instructions how to set up your forum to achieve this.

The key to making a forum a place for students to peer assess is to enable ratings and then give them the permission to rate each others’ submissions. (What they submit might be text or an attachment such as an image, slideshow, movie/sound file)

1. In the settings for your forum, in “grade”, choose how you want the ratings to work. I chose “average”. All students must grade(rate) each others’ submissions and then each classmate will have an average mark.
2. I kept to the numbers scale for simplicity but you can use customised scales if you wish
3. In course admin>assign roles, click on the “override permissions” tab. (If you are a teacher and you don’t see this tab then ask your Moodle admin to give you the rights to “override permissions”)
4. Click on “student” and scroll down to the forum section
5. To allow them to rate/grade each others’ submissions click the “allow ” button for “rate posts”
6. If you don’t want them to be able to see  who has given which grade to whom , then click the “prevent” buttons for “view any rating” and “view rating”.