At least once a week, on the help forums of www.moodle.org, someone comes along in a real panic. Almost invariably their woes begin with something like I was just editing some roles and then when I tried to log in again I found I’d lost all my admin rights They usually believe they are the first person to whom this has ever happened and are really grateful for help. I understand you can remedy this via the database but the “big hammer” solution I usually suggest is here.
A problem with current versions of Moodle is that it’s very easy to remove yourself from the administrator role by accident – and then you can’t get back in. In Moodle 2.0 there is a special page for managing administrators (Site administration>Permissions>Site administrators) to make you think twice before messing with it. And if you try to remove the primary administrator from there, it won’t let you, however hard you click on the “remove” button:
This will surely cut down on the number of panic posts in future years. Additionally, if you check out Site Administration>Users>Permissions>Assign System roles you’ll see that it is now no longer possible to assign a role throughout the whole of your Moodle to any old teacher or student: you can only do this with Course Creators and (the new role of) Managers. It makes sense for these two to have a global role – but students and teachers should only really be enrolled in the courses where they work – and Moodle 2.0 makes it so. This will hopefully cut out instances where admin accidentally assigned themselves as a global student – or gave all their pupils the global student role and wondered why they could get into every course everwhere without passwords.
And as if that’s not enough, it’s now possible with a Check system permissons page and a Capability report page to know quickly and easily who can do what (and can’t do what) on your Moodle. So hopefully in 2011, Bart will get some different lines to write….
In the Beginning there was only One. Now – there are over 15! It’s a testament to the growing popularity of Moodle as a VLE/LMS that an increasing number of Moodle books are being written and published, primarily by Packt Publishing. The first one, and still the Bible , is Using Moodle by Jason Cole and Helen Foster and is available as a free CC download but also to buy in paperback here. Since then, Packt have commissioned Moodle books not just on general admin and course setup but also on subject-specific topics such as Maths , Design Technology, ESL and English. The Beginners’s series began with a Moodle book – Ian Wild’s Moodle Course Conversion and continued with my own Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds. Just recently Packt have released more technical books to balance out the pedagocial ones. I’ve read one on theming and one on extension (plugin) development for example. There are even a couple of books with chapters that I reckon would apply well to other VLEs too – a Multimedia book and one on teaching young SEN children.
Why am I saying all this? For two reasons. First because if you are interested in any of these books, Packt are offering a deal whereby if you buy a book via moodle.org here you can get a 20% or 25% discount and also support Moodle development since a percentage of your payment goes to Moodle. Second, Packt have alerted me to the fact that if you are thinking of buying in bulk (how about treating each Head of Department in your school to a Moodle book for instance?) there are discounts to be claimed. Readers who purchase 2-4 books from their site (on any subject) will automatically receive an 18% discount, while those who purchase 5-10 books will receive 20% off of the books’ cover prices. If you want more than 10 books, email them from their site to get a personal deal.
I find the whole concept of technical books intriguing: I’ve realised that when I learn a new program I never ever “read the instructions”; I will always play around for ages, making lots of mistakes until I either get it right or give up and in frustration find an online forum to ask the question in. I dismiss my pupils when they ask me how to say such-and-such in French because they “can’t be bothered looking it up in the dictionary” – but on the other hand, when I go ask on a forum I suppose I am doing exactly the same – cutting corners instead of searching through documentation. However, when I have to learn something quickly, something I am not especially interested in or genuinely find difficult then I do appreciate having a real “proper” manual to hand. ( Despite living online I don’t go in for pdfs and can’t see the attraction of a kindle) I like being able to work on my laptop screen while turning the pages of a book next to me. And although it’s not necessarily “my thing” I have come to realise too that a lot of teachers when being trained in Moodle feel more secure with paper handouts – which is partly why I wrote the book.So there is absolutely a place for good old-fashioned “how-to” books and I am happy to continue writing them for Moodle 
Here is a screencast showing a couple of ways of using the new Course Completion feature in Moodle 2.0. If you enable Completion tracking in Site Administration>Advanced features then individual tasks in a course can be marked as complete either manually by the student or automatically based on certain criteria (a grade, a forum post, viewing the resource etc) You can then take this one step further by setting completion tracking criteria for a whole course and choosing the criteria for having a whole course marked as Complete. This again can be done manually by the student (or their teacher) or automatically once students have done specific tasks in the course. You can also include a course prerequisite – whereby a student needs to have officially completed an earlier course before their current course can be checked off as finished.
The great thing about “recipe” books like the Moodle 1.9 English Teacher’s Cookbook is that they spark off ideas in you and motivate you to try them out with your own classes. I found that here from the very first chapter: suggested activities flow fast and freely from one page to the next, enthusing you with the desire to go off and personalise them. The author, Silvina P Hillar is an English teacher with a passion for technology and her technical reviewer, PHM Ben Reynolds is an award-winning fictionist and teacher of Writing. A lot of expertise has gone into tailoring the activities to the English classroom. You can read a breakdown of all the chapters here, but I’ll take them one at a time:
In Chapter 1 we enable our students to make connections, using the matching activities of a Moodle Quiz and Hotpotatoes; wikis, forums and the journal. Interestingly we used MS Word to generate pictures which we pasted into Paint or Inkscape to make an image file – a bit of a Windows bias but I imagine the majority of readers will use MS Office at work if not at home – and in fact, in Chapter 2 we use Open Office in a forum activity so that brings the balance back. Silvina makes frequent use of the journal module – the precursor to the online text assigment (I am not sure of its advantage over the online text assignment) but -as she points out with HotPotatoes – these are disabled by default and need to have their “eye” turned on by the Moodle admin.
Chapter 2 covers matching pictures and text. Again we turn to Word to make a comic strip which is used as a prompt for a quiz, and I was intrigued to find she then used the Exercise activity module for students to match a paragraph of writing with its corresponding picture. I confess I hadn’t used the Exercise module before (as it’s a non-standard module ) so it gave me the chance to explore it. It seems a lot of what it does has been incorporated into the Workshop module (which is greatly enhanced in Moodle 2.0) but is simpler to operate. Later in the chapter, Silvina does use the workshop for a writing activity about Salvador Dali. I think it would have warranted more explanation however; the workshop (its eye closed by default in Moodle 1.9) is a complex beast but well suited to peer assessment – yet I think for this task it is used as a regular assignment but taking advantage of the workshop’s assessment elements. I liked the use of wikis for collaborative writing such as working together on an advertising campaign.
Chapter 3 concentrates on writing imaginatively in the first person, using the Quiz essay question and the journal and then students are encouraged to contribute words to a glossary – another collaborative effort – which are then used by the teacher in a Hot Potatoes crossword. We do encounter the online text assignment later on (why not sooner?) along with the upload a single file and Advanced uploading of files assignment. I believe it is really important to get students sending in their work online so they really feel a part of Moodle, rather than just reading static resources. Silvina does this very well with her emphasis on forums, glossaries, wikis etc but what I think the book really misses is the view from the students’ side: once we have set up each task – we leave it – and move on . It would have been nice to see how it looks to a student and even possibly to see how the online marking works. But this is a cook book- maybe we’re focusing on making the cakes, rather than eating them!
Chapter 4 deals with different types of sentences and Silvina manages to turn what could be a rather dry topic into a fun one by including exercises with embedded video, online games (What2Learn) and other fun sites (Classtools) These are popular, particularly with younger children as I wrote in my own book
Chapter 5 takes us right into Web 2.0 with Twitter and Facebook and you can read it here as a sample. Silvina rightly points out child privacy issues which vary according to your country but which are always there to protect. We can’t actually access either of these sites at my school but the exercises could still easily be set as homeworks. Included here too is a neat related database activity – many people are put off the database module because it appears complicated but it can be used in a range of imaginative ways.
Chapter 6 taught me a new phrase -the cubing technique (look it up!) Use is made here of the resource auto-linking feature (which needs to be enabled by admin) and a fun site if you are graphically minded – floorplanner.com The Exercise module appears in this chapter too -I’d be interested to know who makes regular use of this and what they like about it, not being famililar with it myself.
Chapter 7 -on comparing using Venn diagrams - brought another tool new to me -which I’ll try:Microsoft Visio while Chapter 8 gets our students to “compose new sceneries” with a variety of my favourite Web 2.0 tools including Animoto and (from the makers of Hot Potatoes) Quandary 2 I started using Quandary a few years back (when you had to pay for it!) and really like it -it is easy and can be customised to look attractive. Unless it has changed in the meatime however, it doesn’t connect to Moodle’s gradebook as Hot Potatoes does. Should you want that, an alternative (but trickier) way of doing the fun “Becoming your Idol” task could be the Lesson module.
Chapter 9 covers mind-maps – I have never got my mind around them I am a words person but I realise they’re great preparation and revision techniques while to finish our delicious cookbook, Chapter 10 looks at a Discussion clock -another term new to me! We used Word to make a clock with twelve areas for discussion, uploaded it to the course and created writing activities around it. These included a forum with an embedded mp3 and another collaborative glossary. We learned how to use the track changes feature in Word to correct students’ work but it was a bit confusing, I felt, as there was no context to it – perhaps setting it up as an Advanced Uploading of Files assignment where teachers retrieve, correct and send back students’ writing might have made it clearer?
In conclusion, this is a tasty cookbook – try it for yourself!
Moodle 1.9 For Teaching Special Educational Children is a charming book. Its author, Vanessa S Olsen, is a Speech Therapist and- as I discovered in my googling – comes from a family of Packt authors – her husband, Gaston Hillar, is an ICT consultant and author and her sister-in-law Silvina P Hillar wrote Moodle 1.9 The English Teacher’s Cookbook which I will review next time.
This is a Beginner’s Guide and each chapter presents us with opportunities to use technology and Web 2.0 to engage young children with learning disabilities. We follow a little girl and boy, Alice and Kevin, in the experiences of their daily lives and learn to create relevant learning oppportunities with a great emphasis on the Visual. While you can see the complete chapter breakdown here on the Packt site, examples include using HotPotatoes and J-Click for matching exercises with images and/or words and using Moodle’s own Quiz and assignment types such as the online text assignment , upload a single file assignment and the non-standard Nanogong assignment. In order to generate these activities, the reader is taught to use other programs such as GIMP and Inkscape for image manipulating, Audacity for sound recording, and is even encouraged to delve into the world of webcams all the better to help their young students do likewise. You can read a sample chapter here “Associating images with Words” We’re not restricted to a keyboard and mouse either; we investigate digital pens, game pads, touch screens and more.
The wide variety of -mostly free – software covered in the book – is both its strength and potential drawback: the reader, whom we assume to be an SEN teacher with little experience of Moodle, gets to grip with many programs they might not have otherwise considered or even heard of and is empowered to make their Moodle course all the richer for it. In fact – and this is an important point – much of the book’s content (just like Moodle 1.9 Multimedia ) would apply to other Virtual Learning Environments too – which is great! Indeed, the “adding to Moodle” aspect is often just dealt with summarily near the end of a chapter. We don’t build up an actual course but just upload to a section and test it out for our student. Therefore, if you were expecting to “learn Moodle”, the book will not suffice; but if you were wanting to improve your ICT skills to help your students – then you will be happy. How happy of course depends on your willingness and dedication to learn. Vanessa takes great care in going through the new skills step by step with a friendly style. (At times I feel the English is a bit quirky, presumably because it isn’t her mother tongue, but that in no way detracts from the understanding and is quite endearing) However, I can imagine for example, the Special Needs teachers at my school struggling with the HTML code for coloured writing in a Hotpotatoes exercise at the start of Chapter 1. There is a lot in the book that would be totally unfamiliar to a “regular” teacher on a full timetable - But then – that’s the challenge and that’s where the dedication comes in! Likewise, if you are a tutor of individual children with Special Educational needs, you will need to help them achieve the outcomes required in the exercises – recording and uploading their voice for example, or filming themselves on a webcam and uploading the movie. A learning curve for you and them -but heavens, rather that than the Word Document Scroll of Death
This time last week I was in London, awaiting the start of the 2010 UK Mahara conference, held this year at Westminster Kingsway College and run by ULCC. (You can see here photos on Flickr from Mohamed) I’d previously enjoyed the UK Moodle Moot, where I had presented, and with which I was familiar already, but this was my first time at a Mahara conference – and indeed, it was only the second year there had been a Mahara conference in the UK. I had a lovely time!! The venue was excellent – very modern, everything in a central location – no searching for cloakrooms, toilets or seating and with fewer people than at the Moodle Moot, the atmosphere was a lot more intimate. What struck me, as a high school teacher however, was that when the Grand master of Ceremonies Philip Butler did his usual “Stand up if you are in the …. sector” routine, only three of us stood up from schools: as yet, Mahara is still very much an HE and an FE application; if there are schools using it in a brilliant and innovative way then they are keeping it very quiet (for now…) That worried me at first because I wondered if I would be able to take anything away from the day – I had come looking for inspiration to help move forward at my school where we love Moodle and want to develop its links with Mahara. I didn’t need to worry. After the keynote speech and some very nice banana cake we went into discussion groups, giving everyone a chance to share concerns and successes. Mine was facilitated by Kaye Bachelard whose view is here I was impressed by the Foyer project where Mahara is used with young offenders and very much enjoyed the presentation by Glenys and Richard from TDM, focusing particularly on Mahara with NVQ students. Niraj of Newham College showed us how they were using their Mahara site and it was at this point, towards the end of the afternoon, that I got the inspiration I’d come looking for: all the great examples were of older students; mine are younger – so rather than thinking (with apologies to JFK) what can Mahara do for me? – I should be thinking - what can I do for Mahara? Go back to school, get some children – and their teachers -involved, seek out alternative ways for using it in KS3/4 – and- come back again next year and share! By the time I left for the train I was buzzing with ideas. We’ve broken up for summer now – but -roll on September
Just a bit of fun – I wondered how much of Moodle 2.0 could be covered in two minutes, so I timed it. Of course there’s plenty left out ! I’d been debating going to the Teachmeet Moodle but funding is an issue currently -despite kind offer from @moodledan I think I shall participate virtually instead , so this is dedicated to the event and would have been my “2 minute micro-presentation” had I gone. (Or will be if the money fairy descends in the night!)
(a virtual team point for whoever spots the typo!)
Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology by Paul Taylor and published by Packt as part of their Moodle library is a solid, practical handbook with lots of useful ideas for Design and Technology teachers, primarily in the UK but also with much relevance to DT teachers in other English speaking countries. It’s a subject close to my heart as the Design and Technology department at my school is one of our strongest users of Moodle. Indeed their former Head of Department is now our Assistant Head SSAT ICT Lead Practitioner and my Moodle boss Mark Greenwood.
The book assumes the reader has some experience of Moodle already, although chapter 1 provides a whistlestop tour of the Moodle features covered subsequently. The following chapters then look at Moodle modules from the point of view of DT teaching, in particular examination classes. In Chapter 2 for example we are shown how students may organise their information, research the market for their product using a database and questionnaire. (Some of our keener KS4 students take part anually in the Young Enterprise initiative and a Moodle questionnaire, open to guests, is precisely the way they research which product will sell best for them in the challenge)
Chapter 3 focuses on forums and blogs as a way to encourage reflective practice. Worth noting that in Moodle 2.o it will be possible to add comments on a standard Moodle blog (something that has long been lacking) Paul also mentions two add in modules -the delightfully simple yet effective Lightbox gallery and the currently very pertinent Invidual Learning Plan. Both these can facilitate the tracking of student progress in their project and the setting of targets.
A vital element these days in education is an eportfolio – Chapter 4 covers the possiblities of Exabis, MyStuff and Mahara - the one we are currently experimenting with at Our Lady’s Catholic High School. This chapter provides a valuable insight into the advantages and possible drawbacks (if there are any) of each one, giving the reader a useful starting point when choosing for their establishment.
Of course, along with the research, the target setting, the creation and the reflection -there is still a need for old-fashioned testing of knowledge – and Moodle methods to just that are covered in Chapter 5 where Paul takes the reader through glossaries and quizzes. Chapter 6 taught me a new term: SWOT – ie, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. We learn how to use Moodle for SWOT analysis, using the Questionnaire and Feedback modules. (Another Moodle 2 pointer – eventually, though not just yet – these two really popular modules will be combined to make a bigger better module, hopefully for inclusion into 2.1 and most welcome) This chapter also deals with the DimDim module, a web-conferencing tool that could be used for sharing ideas amongst a group of people in different schools or even countries.
While the previous chapters have covered activities and resources generated by the teacher him/herself, Chapter 7 shows us how to import pre-made resources such as SCORM packages from the Ariadne project and the UK NLN (National Learning Network) – there’s a Moodle add on with the wonderful name of Noodle! But just in case you thought we teachers could get away without making any more materials,we’re also shown how to us the free MyUdutu to create smooth-running multimedia resources – and we have a step-by-step guide to Moodle’s complex but highly satisfying Lesson module. This chapter is provided by the publishers as a free “taster” and you can download it by clicking here.
Fun and creativity over, Chapters 8 and 9 cover the extremely important aspect of assessing work and grading it. Moodle’s assignment types lend themselves perfectly to different projects in different curriculum areas – not just DT – and we have a welcome walkthrough of the gradebook – including how to set custom grades and use Outcomes in our courses.
In conclusion then – a valuable addition to a Moodle-using Design and Technology Department. I’ll let ours know about it – but I am keeping my copy; they’ll have to buy their own
I took my first look at Cohorts this evening. Well -actually - you’ve been able to create cohorts for some time in Moodle 2.0 but you couldn’t do anything with them once you had. Now you can go to a course and add a cohort – go to another course and add it again. I did the briefest of explorations (three minutes) in a screencast below. I’m still not sure of some things though: I made my cohort from users already present: can you upload a cohort directly, say from a csv? I thought I’d be able to add my cohort as a ready made group to my groups in a course but instead they appeared as individuals. Is that coming or will the cohort disband once it’s in the course? Whatever the answers to those, here is what I’ve discovered so far:
Here’s a screencast showing some uses of the new Comments block in Moodle 2.0 and the improvements made to the Blog (which include comments!) It’s now much easier to Have your Say in Moodle, in a lot of different places. If like me you can’t access youtube at your establishment then below the screencast is a list of what it contains:
- a comments block on the main course page so students can give feedback to the tutor
- a comments block on an individual resource or activity
- a comments block on a teacher-only page (the assignment marking screen) so teachers can moderate work together privately
- adding a blog post to a specific course
- commenting on a blog entry
- importing an external blog into your Moodle blog