Down For the Count
For the first time in a couple of years, I got sick. It seems to have been food poisoning, several COVID tests continually came back negative. So Saturday was no podcast. I was pretty much out for the whole day.
Back to Work
Time for schools to open. Time for me to be back to work full time. This was the first summer that I had off in roughly twelve years. (To be clear, I still did lots of work this summer. I still held meetings with my guys. But I didn’t work every day. I mostly had meetings remotely.)
I’m hoping that this year will be much more “normal”. There were so many things that I wanted to do last year, but just couldn’t.
Moodle Times
Lots of Moodle work over the past couple of weeks. This was generated by yearly training requirements. Every year, we need to do compliance training. It’s not the most enthralling experience (either for the teachers that take it or the organization that has to provide it), but it is an important process. There are legal considerations.
I utilized Lesson for the staff members. This allows me to control their path so that they must be successful. If they don’t get a question correct, I can give them information and redirect them to try again. I give them unlimited attempts so, really, they just need to pay a little bit of attention and they will be successful. However, I hit just a bit of a roadblock. Even though I have no penalties set, and the highest attempt, by default, Moodle tells them that their additional attempt may not count. Ouch. Some staff members will read that and freak out. Not what I want. So, a quick trip to Language Strings and I can then edit out that parenthetical language. Now the staff members will not receive the inaccurate language. Yea!
I’m being told that the Lesson module will be deprecated in the future. There is a push for H5P to be utilized instead. Now, I love H5P. But there are issues with H5P sometimes too. For example, I also did the activities in H5P, since I did them last year in H5P, it was a simple Reuse download and upload. H5P is currently duplicating the Header (which is really ugly and confusing for users). There is a CSS addition to remove the extra Heading.
/* Hide the doubling of the description on H5P activities */
div#hvpintro.box.py-3.mod_introbox {
display: none!important;
}
That goes into the Raw Initial SCSS box. This fixes the duplicate header.
However, the Lesson module ends up being much cleaner and better organized. Specifically, in H5P, the student (in this case the staff) has to click on the “Submit Report” button to, well, Submit their answers. Since this looks like a summary sheet, some staff members miss that they need to click that button.
So, I generally try to add in a bit of humor. (I have to be very careful about this though.) Everyone has an indicator of Awesomeness. Each staff member can see their very own Current Level of Awesomeness… via Checklist plugin and the Checklist block. This provides the staff members with a quick thermometer of how much they have completed and how much is left to go.
*Mine is empty as I’m the teacher of the course. I also have the ability, and the button, for the Overview of Students.
Once they have completed the course, every user gets a badge and a certificate. Moodle has two different certificate possibilities (which leads to some confusion). One of them gave me fits trying to develop the certificate. I couldn’t get elements to reliably “stick” where they were put.
The documentation on the other one is less than stellar. Developed for Moodle Workplace, rather than the open-source Moodle version, it is built-in to Workplace. The key is to add an activity “Course Certificate” and the appropriate restrictions. Then, things work wonderfully well.
Presentation
Yea, my presentation proposal was accepted. Now, I have to prepare a presentation. I’ll be presenting on H5P at the ACTEM Conference. I have some ideas on how to structure the presentation, but I need to further develop them. I’m thinking that I’ll be making them play as part of the presentation. That may involve setting up a server. There are some great support resources available, so mostly, I’ll be putting my spin on the use of H5P.
Vactionland
It seems like I’m still on vacation in many ways. Some of this is due to a conscious decision to enjoy things. Some is probably due to moving and not having the same kind of supports and connections around. I don’t really have friends in the area. Many of the places that we are going are places that we are learning about. We lack familiarity of place and people. Thus, things sometimes seem more like vacation than home.,
Book Banning
There are several movements to ban books around the country. Here in Maine, two books seem to be under the microscope. There is a push from some people to ban GenderQueer by Maia Kobabe. This is a graphic novel that is in some high schools. I borrowed it from Hoopla through my local library. It is a quick read. The book addresses growing up, sexuality, and gender identification. This is definitely a book that high schoolers should have access to. Even though it may make some parents feel uncomfortable, it is crucial that our teenagers have access to this information. Our goal should never be to make things like they were for us but to make things better for our kids.
Hypothesis
I’m a big fan of Hypothesis. Essentially, Hypothesis is social bookmarking. Hypothesis allows for annotation on web pages. These annotations can be public or private and include tagging. I’ve used Hypothesis to replace Diigo. I had used Diigo for quite a while, but then reached the limits of the free version. Hypothesis is free and open-source. Theoretically, I could set up a server to run Hypothesis, but that isn’t necessary. The web version of Hypothesis doesn’t have limits.
Hypothesis also allows for the use of groups. I use this group feature pretty extensively. I have a group for Middle School Matters which I use to bookmark things for the Middle School Matters Podcast.
One of the features that I would love, is the ability to see annotations or bookmarks by groups. I would love to see an indicator as to which group a site is bookmarked in.
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