Do you have more than one course? Do you want to copy activities from one Moodle course to another? Have you wanted to copy something from your colleague’s course? If you answer yes to any of these questions, then the Sharing Cart is the plugin for you. Of course, Moodle has a standard Backup and Restore, but that can take more than twenty clicks and up to 5 minutes to move a single item. The Sharing Cart does it in seconds with 3-4 clicks.

At Sapporo Gakuin University, our teachers share quizzes, videos, surveys, links and handouts between each other every day using Sharing Cart 1.9. We keep a section on our site to keep templates of our best courses. Then any teacher can go there and grab a quiz or assignment that they like. Also each of us has 5-10 classes per week. So just duplicating an activity into another course takes just seconds. It is our number one plugin that teachers love. So needless to say, we would never move to Moodle 2 without it.

Fortunately, just released by Version2 software, Sharing Cart 2.2 will do the same process for you in the latest Moodle release. Our programmer, Tomonori Maruyama, explains that the Sharing Cart is very stable, because it uses the standard backup and restore code from Moodle core. Mr. Maruyama will be demonstrating the Sharing Cart at MoodleMoot Japan in Mie, so be sure to watch for his presentation in Mie in February. You can also get documentation on Moodle Docs.

The Sharing Cart is a block. So it can be installed in less than five minutes. As a site administrator, download the zip file, unzip it, and drag it into the blocks folder. Then go to Site Administrator and click on Notifications. The Sharing Cart will install itself and you are done. Just activate the Sharing Cart by adding it as a block in any course you visit . The Sharing Cart is a persona l bloc k that only copies things for you. The block follows you around your site like a little “pocket” to store things (resources and activities) that might be useful. Of course, it only copies the activity format, never the user names and content.

Contact Don Hinkelman and ask for your free copy of the Sharing Cart (Hinkel at sgu.ac.jp).

For more information or to download the Sharing Cart visit http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=2150.  To read the MAJ Newsletter in it’s entirety visit http://moodlejapan.org/home/ (note that the Japan Moot is coming up this February 22nd and 23rd.  

According to her note to Moodlenews,

I have elaborated a guide about how to set up a staging Moodle, as a replica of the production site, which I have shared with the Moodle UK community. I would like to share the guide with the rest of the community. Coming myself from an original Linux background, I think that the guide could be very useful for those administrators-technicians who have to start using Moodle in a windows server.

Within the PDF Mari Cruz provides the 7 steps in detail of how to copy your production Moodle site for staging and/or testing.

From gathering information to configuring the new installation it’s all detailed.

1. Basic requirements
2. folders structure
3. IIS configuration
4. Changes in php.ini
5. configuration of MySQL
6. Restoring Moodle from backup database
7. configuring Moodle

The guide also links to handy tools/resources to make the process easier.

Download the guide: Setting up a Moodle staging server (general version)

Watch the video here: http://vimeo.com/32160183 or embedded below. The video was created by Willard High School and was recently used in an Opensource.com post authored by Janetta Garton.

Use Labels to Create Menus in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

Not all of the 100+ languages are 100% completed, but you can get a sense of progress by visiting http://download.moodle.org/langpack/2.0/.

Bonne chance, genießen, enjoy!

Sounds a bit like the MediaBird Study Notes module. However, this Portugese-made block is less complex, but simpler to install and to use.

Here are its main features:

• Assign up to THREE priority levels for each note;
• Sort notes by last modification or priority level;
• Easy visualization and edition of notes with popup windows;
• Global configuration for the length of note previews inside the block.

I had always wished that there could be a block that shows the student how many stamps he or she has earned. Why? This is because at the moment, the student has to click on the Stamp Collection module to view the stamps earned. So this evening, I sat down to craft such a block. And I failed miserably because of my lack of experience in PHP coding!

Undeterred, I had a brainwave of how I could achieve the same effect as a real block. Within 4 hours, I crafted something that made use of David’s existing code, HTML, PHP and some tricks. Here’s what it looks like:

So the advantage of this ‘block’ is that the student can see his Stamp collection. Is it growing? Is it stagnant? Oh, and I’m also glad to mention that if the student does a mouseover on any of the stamps (gold stars), the description of the stamp is displayed. See the image below:

So what do you think? Do you like this ‘block’? Are you already using the Stamp Collection module by David Mudrak on your Moodle 1.9.x? Would you like to know how you can set up this pseudo-block on your Moodle 1.9.x site as well? You do? GREAT! Let’s dive in!

Instructions to setup the Stamp Collection Pseudo-block
Read here >>

The course focuses on opportunities to learn about mobile computing in classrooms (with current events curated through Scoop.it), videos and demos of Mobile courses, additional web resources, Free mobile apps, mobile ideas for your courses and more.

The ‘Mobile Ideas for your Course’ section is my favorite.  It pulls articles and ideas from sources helping you to learn how to use Google Goggles in the classroom, Google+ Hangouts, QR Codes, how to create slideshows and much more.

These resources and more are hosted at the Tempus-EFA project Moodle.

What I’d like, is a course format that borrowed a little from the Chrome nav to make it easier for students to move to the next topic once they’ve finished with what is on the page.  I’m not talking tabs, but rather a more Book-like navigation where each Topic is a page and they are arranged linearly (as many courses usually are).

I think it could easily be done using existing screen real estate in a Moodle course.  Here’s a mockup course shown with the grey margins on either side of the topic.  As you can see, the course summary is maintained on all pages and the topics are collapsed in order to display only 1 at a time.

Here’s a mockup with Arrows added:

And clicking on the arrow would return the next Topic area (see below):

Anyone else want something like this?  I realize you can hack this in by using static links to the individual course pages, but I would rather it be created dynamically and easily across a site.  I’d even be willing to donate to the cause/work order for its development (hint hint developers).  It’d also be nice to nix the #s placed to the left of each topic in that grey area.

Moodle 2.2 is one step closer to acceptance by the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) with the release of Moodle 2.2.1+LAE (Liberal Arts Edition) v2.0 beta 1.  While not a stable release this is a milestone for Moodle’s acceptance by the group considering their reservations aired in a Moodle 2 Status Report nearly 1 year ago (Feb 2011).

CLAMP’s beta 1 release is,

the inaugural edition of the LAE for Moodle 2.2. The goal of LAE is to provide a coherent package for modules, patches, and code developed (or improved) by the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project.

This is a beta release, and is recommended for use on development or pilot instances; it is under active development as we assess what issues to resolve and features to include in the LAE.

This package consists of the code that the developers and instructional technologists at CLAMP schools have deemed essential to their operation of Moodle.

Several of CLAMPs featured modules (anonymous forums and quick mail) made the initial beta release while others are being worked on (specifically the LAE Grader report).  Some features like TinyMCE have been removed from CLAMPs distribution and are reflected as core pieces of Moodle code.

For more information about CLAMP or to download a copy of the beta 1 release of LAE visit http://www.clamp-it.org/.