Inserting Images into Moodle

Sometimes you see a cartoon or image on a website and you've just got to share it with your class. You can easily add the image to your course Moodle site.

This video highlights two ways to insert the image. NOTE: neither option includes copy & paste. While the copy & paste function works to insert an online image into a Word Doc or even a PowerPoint (although this is not an ideal practice) copy and pasting into Moodle will NOT work. Most images will bring along pages worth of code. Instead of actually seeing your picture or cartoon on your Moodle page, you'll either see gobbledygook or nothing (but the code will take over your text box and you'll find it's no longer editable).

Printing Webpages (or saving them for later)

Like all good green-blooded citizens, I try to refrain from unnecessary printing; especially printing of webpages. Invariably, the three paragraph article I've intended to print spits out seven pages of additional and unwanted text from my printer.

No more. Joliprint to the rescue. Joliprint will take a web article, remove the unwanted sidebar info (links, advertisements) and save the copy as a PDF. You can then easily print the PDF, or you can save it for electronic reading later. The PDF can be saved directly to your Google Docs, downloaded, emailed, viewed online, or posted to Facebook or Twitter for sharing.

There are two options for using Joliprint: 1) download the add-on application. You'll have a button on your browser toolbar. Click the button to make the PDF. Or 2) just use the webpage interface. Bookmark joliprint.com and anytime you want to preserve or print a webpage, simply copy and paste the URL into the big blank on joliprint.com.

Quick View of Forums in Moodle

This time of the semester always seems to drag a bit: we're still too far out to get excited about the Thanksgiving break, fall break has been forgotten and the work just keeps coming.

If you're finding yourself wondering 'why did I assign so many forum postings? I can't possibly get to them all?' then I have the short cut for you.

You can view ALL forum postings by a student on one page. You can scroll quickly through the postings, make sure your student have hit the mark, and then go on to the next student without clicking in and out of postings at the forum site.

To view all postings by a single student:

1. From within your course page, click "Participants" in the upper left-hand side
2. Choose a student by clicking his/her name from your participant list
3. From the tabs shown above that students' profile info, click "Forum posts" (see image below)
4. You are now looking at all the forums posted by this student. The "See this post in context" link at the bottom of each post writing will take you back to the original forum location.

Happy reading!

File Conversions

Does this scenario sound familiar?

Someone emails you a file; you try to open it, but your computer says "what the heck is this? I don't know what this is! Do you want me to convert it?" and of course, you say yes. Then you get a file that looks like it was keyed by a 2-year old experimenting with keyboard icons.

Never fear, Zamzar is here. Zamzar is a free file conversion website. You can upload a file type (almost any file type) and Zamzar will convert the file to another file type. Convert PDFs to docs; convert those pesky Microsoft Works files (.wps) that one would think should open in Microsoft Word to official Word docs. You're not limited to text-based files; you can also convert image and audio files here.

Check out this short video walk-through:


Note: you must download your file within 24 hours. File size is limited to 100MB.

Moodle Gradebook Settings

Today is D/F day; next week marks our mid-term. What better time than now to look at some simple settings in the Moodle Gradebook?

Today's 2 Minute Tech video will show you how to set your grade book to ONLY calculate items with an existing grade into the grade book total, and how to view the single-user report in the grade book.


Click HERE for a transcript of today's video.

Words

It’s about that time in the semester. You’ve assigned it; they’re fretting over it or ignoring it. The first term paper assignment is on the table (or in the drop-box).

This week’s 2 Minute Tech is about looking at writing, or more specifically, looking at words. You probably have a routine for assessing student writing. Have you thought about looking at a visual representation of writing?

Word clouds: no doubt you’ve seen these colorful visuals scattered on the web, or maybe even in your text book. A word cloud is a visual representation of a body of writing; words are weighted based on frequency in the text.  

This is a word cloud generated from Coe's Mission Statement (found HERE)

Does this visually represent what our mission statement says in words?

Following are three tools for making word clouds:

1. Wordle: word clouds in simple format. Click create, then copy and paste text into the text box. Save to a public gallery or print when complete. No account needed.
2. Tagxedo: self-billed as "Word Clouds with Style". Additional options for stylizing the word cloud and more choices for saving the word cloud (you can save as an image file). No account needed.
3. WordSift: created by Stanford University. Not as "pretty" as Wordle or Tagxedo, but includes more features for analysis. Lists words by how common or rare they are; allows for alphabetical ordering; allows users to click a word and view it in a visual thesaurus; allows words to be grouped by subject areas and color coded. Watch this video lesson for more info. No account needed.

How can you use a word cloud?

Here are a few examples and ideas:

• Read, Write, Web used word clouds to show an analysis and comparison of Obama's Inaugural Speech compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Lincoln's Inaugural Speeches. See it HERE. The New York Times hosts a similar article with ALL inaugural speeches; hold your cursor over a word to get a specific word count. For a slightly different view of presidential speeches via word clouds, look at US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. Use the slider bar to scroll backwards in time to see topics changing through history.
• Copy and paste a discussion forum into a word cloud to coalesce the main ideas 
• Compare/contrast news articles on the same topic from different sources
• "Wordle; or the Gateway Drug to Visual Analysis" this blog post on The Chronicle's ProfHacker blog describes ways students "get" word clouds for visual analysis. 
• Have students generate word clouds of their own papers as additional means of self-analysis
• Frightening or exciting: what would your student evaluation comments look like in a word cloud?

Have you tried a word cloud? What's your idea?

Adding an RSS Feed to your Moodle Course

Most likely, you work hard to connect your course to real world content and current events for your students. You probably keep up with several journals, read daily newspapers or newsfeeds, and perhaps even send links to particularly interesting stories to your students.

Did you know you can do something like this in your Moodle course? After a one-time setup, your Moodle course will be an open-door invitation for your students to explore the same daily news sources you explore.

Here's how:

New Blog Feature: Starting with this week's post, I"ll include a link to the transcript of the video tutorial (when applicable). If it's easier for you to follow WORDS, just open this link to see the transcript. 

Video in Moodle

Video is a powerful tool; you've probably come across at least one video online that you've thought might be interesting to share with your students. You can add an online video to your Moodle course in two ways - linking or embedding. Here's how:
Aside from YouTube, here are a few other sites to check out for video:

• Vimeo: Vimeo started off as a sharing tool for video producers and film directors; it's expanded, but I still find less "Charlie Bit My Finger" type videos and more videos like "Ray, A Life Underwater" on Vimeo.  
• BlipTV: aims to provide video creators with a high-quality service for sharing their web shows.You'll find a lot of 'web series' TV shows here, I especially like the "Truth About Today" series.
• TEDTalks: if you haven't explored TED Talks yet, take a few minutes and check it out. "Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world" and worth watching.

Embedding a Google Calendar into Moodle

Let's call this "goodling" = mixing Google and Moodle!


Situation: You've created a Google calendar for your course. You've added pertinent dates, included campus events you'd like student to attend, etc. Now you'd like it to show up in Moodle. This video will show you how to embed a Google calendar into your Moodle course.

Taking Attendance with Moodle

-Did you know you can easily track your in-class attendance with Moodle? In addition to tracking whether or not a student was in class, the Attendance activity allows you to add a brief note to each entry. You'll be able to quickly tell how many times each student has an excused absence for "food poisoning", "death of cat" or "UFO invasion".

Here's how:



Or, watch with fullscreen options HERE. (The fullscreen button is just to the right of the volume button.)

Full disclosure: this 2 Minute Tech post is actually 3 minutes and 7 seconds. I'm sorry for the extra minute seven.

Today's Recap (Online Tools You Can Use)

Today's workshop session "Online Tools You Can Use" explored several scenarios and the types of free, online tools you might use to remedy those scenarios. For anyone unable to attend, here's the two minute recap:

Scenario #1: Student/colleague/spouse/friend/stranger calls/emails/texts/tweets you because he/she cannot remember or doesn’t understand your thoughtful step by step instructions for [insert computer-related task here].

• Online Tool You Can Use: Screenr.com Free, online screen recording device. Record exactly what’s happening on your screen. If you have a microphone, you can record your voice, too.

Scenario #2: Your class/committee/bookclub/department has a lot to talk about before/after/during your next meeting.  

• Online Tool  You Can Use: Backchannels. Backchannels are interactive websites that allow multiple authors to share text (or links, videos or images). There are LOTS of backchannel sites; the one you use depends upon your needs. 
• Today’s Meet (todaysmeet.com) 
• TypeWithMe (typewith.me)  
• LinoIt (linoit.com) 

Scenario #3: You finally have an awesome picture of yourself to use as your new Google/Moodle/Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter profile pic, except your sister/kid/dog/BFF is also in the picture.  

• Online Tool You Can Use: Online Photo Editors: there are lots of online picture editors these days. My personal favorite is Picnik (picnik.com). It’s simple, does not require an account and integrates with other photo-sharing sites very well. 

For more details on all of these tools, and links to a few more, checkout the workshop handout.

Moodle New Student Guide

Need a quick and simple way to guide your students through Moodle? Use this handy-dandy Moodle Student Guide flowchart:



Click HERE to see the full size flowchart. Feel free to send a link to this flowchart to your students or to post the link on your own Moodle pages.

Making a Moodle Course Unavailable to Students

Each fall, about a week after classes start I have several phone conversations almost exactly like this:

Me: "Hi, this is Lisa"
Student: "Hi, do you do Moodle stuff?"
Me: "Yes, what can I help you with?"
Student: "I'm still seeing, like all the classes I had last year and the year before when I login to Moodle. Can you get me out of those classes?"

This simply means that old courses are still listed as available to students. A simple remedy is to make the course unavailable to students. This doesn't affect your ability to look at the course, it doesn't delete any student contributions/data or grades from the course, it just hides it from student view.

Here's a short video showing the steps to make a Moodle course unavailable:

Welcome!

This is the beginning of 2 Minute Tech @ Coe! Each week I'll post a two minute teaching with technology tip on this blog.  Feel free to leave a comment if you've used the tip, if you have a better idea or if you have a suggestion for another tip.