Category: Moodle (Page 4 of 8)

One of the Moodle Mooters (those who attended a Moodle Moot training session) and good friend shared how he is making some accommodations in Moodle. Not only that, but he shared this with some Special Education teachers who were blown away.

He has created a vocabulary quiz using Drag and Drop text. The quiz has the vocabulary words listed with Drag and Drop text options available for the students. There are ten or more words. He showed this during a training. The teachers thought that this was useful. However, he did next, well……

Next he duplicated the quiz . Then he went into Editing the quiz. He renamed the quiz by appending “Beta” to the quiz name. He grouped the responses by pairs (so that the responses and vocabulary words are grouped by color – i.e. there are two blue vocabulary words and two definitions which are blue, two tan vocabulary words and two tan definitions, etc.). (By the way, the Special Education teacher that he will be working with announced that he should “pair” those answers prior to him showing them paired. Looks like a good start to working together).  He gave the students unlimited attempts. He added a restriction to limit which group would see this quiz.

All in all, it took a about one minute to accommodate the quiz. He now has two quizzes in his course. Students will only ever see the quiz that is appropriate for them. On one quiz, the students have one opportunity to take the quiz. They have ten definitions to match up to ten vocabulary words. They can drag one definition as many times as they want. In the second quiz, the students have some guidance to assist with which definitions go with which vocabulary words. Once they move a definition, it moves into that one spot, without being “left behind”. The second quiz can be taken as many times as necessary.

Again, the students will only ever see the quiz that is appropriate for them. (Yes, they will eventually figure out that there are two quizzes – kids talk, but they will only ever see the one that is appropriate for them).

Oh, and both quizzes will be automatically graded AND entered in his official school gradebook without him typing them in.

The Special Education teachers wanted to know how many teachers were using this magic. They want to be able to create accommodated versions of quizzes and assignments this easily.

If you’d like to know exactly how to do this, please let me know.

stokpic / Pixabay

Blended learning is becoming more and more popular. I’m a proponent of using Moodle for blended learning because it is open source, has a long history of development, and is extremely flexible.

One aspect of blended learning is real world assignments. Not everything can, or should be, digital. However, in a blended learning world, tracking those real world assignments should be cohesive with online material.

I’ve written about grading student speeches (a definite real world application) using Moodle and rubrics. That still works. Since I published that four years ago, a quick overview is in order. In Moodle, set up an assignment with nothing selected for Submissions. Select (or create) your rubric. As students give their speech, complete the rubric. Students receive truly timely feedback. The teacher is done with grading by the time the students are sitting in their seats (no more nights of translating notes, transferring grades, etc.)

However, I’d like to take this even further. I’d like to have the students acknowledge that they have received the feedback. Plus, I’d like them to be able to respond. Finally, I’d like to have a “pretty” printable version (sometimes we still need to print things).

The Assignment module hack almost accomplishes those things. The rubric works great. However, students can’t respond, nor can the acknowledge receipt of the feedback. (I’m really considering something like the way a student can acknowledge that they didn’t cheat when turning something in). Printing is UGLY.

Using the Assignment module really is a hack. See the perspective of Assignment is that the students are turning something in. What I’m proposing (requesting?, considering, dreaming of), is something that is from a teacher to student feedback perspective. The student is the really the genesis, the teacher is starting the process. This is more of a coaching perspective. The coach (teacher) gives feedback on the performance of the student. The student takes that feedback, makes some corrections and continues. Ideally, the teacher could provide updated feedback.

*This conversation was begun over in the Moodle Forums. If you are a member, or willing to create a free account, please head over there and add your thoughts.

The posting is duplicated below:

Grading “Real World” assignments

I’m looking for a way to grade real world assignments. Not just grade though, but have a documentable copy of that grading.

For one example, let’s say that the students are presenting on a certain topic. (I do see other uses, such as Project-based learning, creating models, cooking an example dish, building a cardboard boat, etc).

Current situation:

We use the Assignment Module. The student doesn’t have to submit anything. We have a rubric set up that the teacher then uses to grade and provide feedback. Some of the teachers will “forget” to mark the rubric “Released” to student. We then click on the rubric and select “Print”. The rubric and Feedback is printed and then signed by the student.

Ideal situation

The teacher pulls up a Rubric. The teacher has the list of students to pick from. The teacher uses the Rubric to grade appropriately. The teacher also provides feedback. A copy of the results are released to the student. The student acknowledges the receipt of the feedback. (This could be similar to the submission statement feature but at the end acknowledging receipt). There is a report or a print button to allow the teacher to print the rubric, the feedback and the student’s acknowledgement.

I’m sure that you’ve heard of the 15 minutes of fame. Part of my 15 minutes of fame goes to GitHub (is there a thing such as GitHub famous?). I chatted with Mr. Green about the icon for WordSelect. I made a couple of suggestions on a different icon. Even though I did very little, he still nicely placed a “shout out” to me in the GitHub notes.

New [w] icon with a hint of red. Added an svg vector version so no pixelation on zoom. Credit to Troy Patterson for ideas and inspiration on the icon

Marcus Green does some really great work. He has developed the  Gapfill plugin, which I really like, as well as some others. (Gapfill is a very thoughtful implementation of a Cloze activity).

His latest plugin is WordSelect. This is another terrific plugin for Moodle. WordSelect allows you to do exactly what it says, select words. The teacher simply notes the words that will be the correct answer by putting square brackets around the word.

There are several ways to use this new plug in. Teachers could use this for grammar (have students select all of the verbs for example). Teachers could use this to have students identify the correct entries on a table (find all of the mammals listed below). Teachers could also add a number to each sentence and ask students to identify the sentence that is the topic sentence (or which sentence supports a specific idea).

Anyway, Marcus Green is fine human who has done some great work supporting student learning. We need more people like Mr. Green. Now go install the plugin and get to creating.

I was asked by a teacher if Moodle would allow students to grade other students presentations. That is, the teacher has assigned students to give a classroom presentations. This teacher wanted the students in the class to grade the presentations in a simple, easy way.

I’ve previously written up how a teacher can grade oral presentations in Moodle quickly and efficiently. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. This teacher is asking for something similar, but, yet, very different. Instead of just the teacher doing the grading, every student would provide feedback.

I believe that this is good pedagogy. Having students involved in the assessment of their work is important. By assessing the work of their peers, each student also gets a good opportunity to deal with the criteria and learn the expectations.

So, how to do this in Moodle? Well, this seems like a great opportunity for the Workshop Module. The Workshop Module is designed to be student assessment based. In its most popular use case, the Workshop Module is peer editing.

Now, let’s take a look back at what I was asked. Each student will get up in front of the class and present on a topic. The teacher has already developed and shared a rubric with the class. The teacher would like each student to complete a rubric for each presentation.

Although the Workshop Module is not specifically designed for this, it will do a wonderful job. The students will need to “submit” their presentation prior to the starting of the delivery of those presentations. (Workshop module must have all the students at the same point in the process). Thus, I would have the students enter the title of their presentation and a short synopsis (a slightly tricky way to get them to write more and practice writing). Then, the other students will have a rubric and can provide feedback.

First of all, each student will receive feedback from many students. This will give them a good overall picture of how the presentation went. The students will also receive a grade for how closely they graded to the rest of the class. So the students who are listening to the presentation will also receive a grade for how they graded that presentation.

The teacher will get a wealth of data. Knowing how each student graded the presentation (and this is presented in a simple view) can give the teacher a nice broad overview of the class.

The teacher can then grade the same presentation and release this back to the students.

I’m working on a full write up to post over on Master Moodle. If you are interested in how to do this, please let me know.

“I wasn’t always a fan, but I’m a convert now.”

That was a quote from one of our county people about Moodle. See, this person was big on BlackBoard. After all, BlackBoard was offering great prices. The county was comparing BlackBoard to Moodle and BlackBoard was “prettier” at the time. (And I would agree, BlackBoard was a bit prettier then, but I had some other usability issues with it at that time.) So the county pushed local districts to adopt BlackBoard.

Anyway, the county always thought that we were the odd balls. We liked Moodle. We worked to make it more user friendly. (In fact, I was able to do some contract work to make another Moodle more user friendly. Those teachers were blown away by the changes that I thought were pretty simple and obvious.)

See, I’ve always proposed that you are investing in something. You are investing your time, your energy, your efforts, your thoughts, your money and more. The question for me has always been are you investing in yourself or in someone else. Now to be clear, it is necessary to invest in others. There is no way that you can do everything your self. However, for really important things, I generally prefer to invest in us. I consider lesson delivery pretty important. So I invested in us.

A few years later, at least one of our county people agrees. BlackBoard pulled the great funding rates and suddenly districts were faced with significant costs if they wanted to continue using BlackBoard. Most districts couldn’t take on that kind of cost. We stayed the course with Moodle and have continued to develop our skills. Chris Kenniburg has grown from being an excellent Moodle Administrator to developing Moodle plugins. Great things can be done if you are an excellent Moodle Administrator, but even more control can be had by developing your own plugins and themes. (Seriously, check out the Fordson Theme and Easy Enrolment, these focus Moodle on the K-12 environment).

Teachers face a similar situation with the various tech tools out there. Many teachers follow the “fun, shiny” of a wide variety of apps, sites and more. Much time is spent learning how to certain things, training students, etc. This is an investment in someone else. Some teachers will invest in themselves by learning a great tool and becoming an expert at that. Moodle provides such a vast range of tools and learning opportunities. It is open source. And if you fortunate enough to have(or persistent enough to demand) a Moodle Administrator that cares and will put the effort into making Moodle work for your environment, you can count on a fantastic learning environment for your students.

You are always making an investment. Be sure to know who you are investing in and why.

Well, I just upgraded to Moodle 3.3. I’ve played around with it a bit (we have it installed at work, so I get to experience it there). There is always just a bit of trepidation when doing the upgrade. However, I’ve got the process down pretty much now:

• Download the latest version of Moodle.
• Log into CPanel on the web site.
• Change the name of the current installation to something else.
• Upload the .zip file that was downloaded in step 1.
• Extract the .zip file.
• Move the config.php file to the new folder.
• upgrade PHP (it really is supposed to be at the latest version, but I always end up updating PHP).
• Log into the moodle course and complete the upgrade.
• Change all the settings. I’ve also installed the Fordson Theme developed by the wonderful Chris Kenniburg.

Chris has done some great work with developing a them that is user friendly and makes commonly used selections much more “discoverable”. Here is a quick video on the previous version of Fordson. The newer version is even better for users.

This has been one of the smoothest upgrades yet. I’m not sure if that is because I’m becoming more experienced, or if the process is getting better.

However, I’m excited about what the newest version brings. This version brings some user centered features that can help students and teachers. (I think that the Fordson Theme really helps that tremendously. Without the Fordson Theme, some of the settings seemed a bit hidden for me. I’m guessing that that is a because I previously knew where to find everything, but some things seem like there was still a click or two too many. With the Fordson Theme, everything is “right there” for both the student and the teacher.

Anyway, now I need to spend some time adding some pizzazz to the courses – things like Header images (or maybe animated GIF’s), course images and more.