1) Drag and drop ordering (Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0)

Nice variation on the matching answer theme that allows students to drag and drop their answers.

2) Formulas (Moodle 1.9)

One for the maths departments… Create formula based questions with multiple answers, random numbers, etc.

3) Image Edit (Moodle 1.9)

This is an extension to another nice question type that allows students to submit a file as their answer. The image edit answer type links up with pixlr to provide a completely web based method for students to edit an existing image and submit it. Pixlr has an impressive array of tools, you could set some questions requiring fairly complex graphical work using this. It’d be a great way to test students on the skills required for the iMedia digital graphics unit for example.

These are just 3 of the many I could have picked from. Plenty more add-ons for the quiz on moodle.org, more of my posts at on my site, or follow me on twitter.

This week I wanted to highlight the Progress block by Michael de Raadt. A simple install like every other Moodle block, and then just add it to your course.

After adding the block you have to tell it which activities you would like it to track, and then every student gets their own personal progress tracker on your page.

In a simple little block view it tracks the activities I haven’t finished. Hovering over the coloured squares gives me more detail about the activity. And, a feature I particularly like, a link to that activity so I can go and do it.

The red/green are the obvious complete/not complete colours, the blue indicates an activity that I haven’t yet viewed.

Which activities to track gives a teacher much more fine-grained control than I was expecting. In addition to selecting which of your course activities the block follows you can make decisions about what condition defines complete. Is viewing an activity enough? Maybe it isn’t complete until you have marked the activity, or a forum considered complete once a student has contributed.

As a teacher, the block also presents me with an overview of all my students. The screen shot above shows the 2 students on my test course. Obviously this isn’t presenting me with data I couldn’t also get from the markbook, but I really like the clear colour coding for quickly picking up on student progress. This screen is also something I would consider displaying on my whiteboard during class so the group could see how they were getting on.

The Progress Block is a really nice addition to your Moodle setup, go get it now. Available for 1.9 and 2.x.

The bad news is we found on upgrading one of our partner schools to 2.0 that the Lightbox Gallery doesn’t have an updated version to go with it yet.

Cue some searching of the modules and plugins directory and we have found the Image Slideshow activity. As the description on the Moodle site tells you- upload your images, add your titles and captions, the activity then does the building of thumbnails and resizing of images for you.

There is also a neat autoplay slideshow feature- good for those parents evenings where you need to come up with something to put on your classroom projector at the last minute because you forgot to plan something in advance..

And, for those wondering about the lightbox version… You can keep an eye on the migration process in the tracker here.

Lots more Moodle stuff by me here on MoodleNews, and you can find my other ed-tech related ramblings @timdalton or tdalton.co.uk.

Tip 1: Make it bigger

Two tips for the price of one here… You can make the tiny little text box you are editing bigger by dragging out the bottom right corner- good for building those new Pages in Moodle 2.0. And, the button on the far right of the editor bar allows you to take the editor full screen.

(I think…) Both of these also work in Moodle 1.x so this isn’t just a Moodle 2.0 tip…

Tip 2: Copy and paste images

This is a neat one, but not easy to explain… I’ve always found showing staff how to add images to their text areas a little bit tricky. Moodle 2.0 helps a lot here as clicking the image button in the toolbar now allows you to upload an image, not just paste in a URL.

But, you can make the process even easier. If you’ve found an image on the web that you’d like to use (and it has the correct creative commons license obviously…), simply copy and paste it into the edit window, Moodle does the rest.

A quick screen cast of the process if my explanation wasn’t clear is on Youtube here.

Happy Moodle Monday!

Having spent a fair amount of time using GoToMeeting I can say with some authority that BBB more than happily competes in terms of features, and we have had no problems at all with stability or speed of the service.

What I wanted to share this Monday is how good the Moodle module is. With this installed our staff have a simple way to create and schedule their own webinars, requiring no input from the Moodle admins.

As you can see from the screen shot, the set up is the work of seconds. This creates a private BBB room for your students automatically. All students have to do is click the relevant activity link from your Moodle course, the rest is taken care for them.

We’ve found advising students to plug in and test their headphones/mics in advance saves time getting started, and using the ‘hands up’ button to speak is a good rule to control the noise levels in busy sessions.

The ability to upload a presentation to your virtual classroom is a useful feature, as is annotating it as you go. I also really like the option to share all or part of a presenters screen.

Really good stuff. I’m a big fan of Big Blue Button, and the beautifully transparent way it hooks up to Moodle only makes it better. If you’re an IT admin you should definitely look at getting BBB installed. If you’re not and would like to try it there’s a demo on their site, or get in touch and we’ll see if we can help you out.

Got yourself a good set of quiz questions or glossary entries built up on your course? Good… We keep telling you to use more activities with your students…

With those in place you can install the Game module on to your Moodle server and create some new activities using your existing content. Saves you time, gives your students another way to learn your material.

The game module adds a series of simple games to your activity list. You can create the following:

• Hangman
• Crossword
• Cryptex
• Millionaire
• Sudoko
• The Hidden Picture
• Snakes and Ladders
• Book with Questions

Each of these games takes questions from existing quizzes or glossaries on your course, making them 30 second jobs to set up if you already have your activities created. Simple to create, fun to use. You can download the module from here, lots more detail on the documentation page here.

A while ago I wrote about the reports available to admins to see how courses were being used. These reports very much cover staff/student access which is useful, but as a Moodle admin I’m also interested in the disc space these courses are taking up. The amount of disc use is important, particularly if you are paying for your hosting. The following are a few tips to help keep this number low without having any serious impact on your users.

Tip 1) Keep your maximum upload size down

How low do you set this limit? There is a balance between making it too low so staff can’t add the content they need and making it so high content is uploaded without consideration for the best way to add the file. We are running with a 10mb upload limit at the moment, but I’d like it to be lower. If you can help staff streamline the content they are uploading your course size will come down. Help people compress their photos/video, show that there are better ways to share that massive PowerPoint than just simply uploading it.

Tip 2) Reduce the number of backups you keep

Most of us seem to use the automated backup routine to create the zipped backups of the course. But, do you need to keep more than one old backup on your Moodle server? The more of these you have the faster your disc space will disappear. Our method is to run the automated backup nightly, keep the most recent backup as part of the Moodle course but also take a copy of these down to our backup server where we keep a few weeks worth of backups.

Tip 3) Get rid of old courses

If you’re anything like me you don’t delete things. When we finish with a course I often remove the users and then just hide it, leaving it on the site in case we need it again. I had a quick look this morning and removed courses from 3 years ago that hadn’t been touched since. Remember you don’t need to get rid completely, just keep a copy of that zipped backup file somewhere else and you can keep that hoarding instinct happy…

Tip 4) Use external repositories for big files

We haven’t really started to get into this in Moodle 2.0 yet, but there are also things in Moodle 1.x you can do here. We found certain departments adding lots of video to our Moodle a few years ago so we set the school up with a dedicated media server to host the video files, linking them to Moodle. Shifting the video elsewhere saves loads of space. You could even do this with Youtube- an account for the school where the videos aren’t available unless you know the link could act as a private store of films referenced on your Moodle site without any disc space requirement on your own institution.

Tip 5) Check which courses are using the most space

The Course Size Report module for Moodle 1.9 can help you. It adds a new admin report where you can list all courses by size. Identify the biggest ones, go investigate what makes them so large. I spent an hour doing this today, a few Gbs of space saved by making quick changes that this tool to found.

Tip 6) Encourage your staff to use more Moodle activities and less upload a file!

This is something that you’ll read on this site all the time… Uploading a file is fine, but there is so much more you can do with Moodle… Spend some time with the ‘add an activity’ dropdown- you’ll soon find that the Quiz/Lesson/whatever module is not only much more interesting for the students than uploading that 20Mb PowerPoint, it’s also a whole lot smaller…

Do you have any other tips for managing your course sizes? Do add them in the comments.

When editing their profile a user can add tags of their interests. Simply type them in, if it already exists you get added to that tag, if not Moodle creates a new tag for you.

When viewing a user profile you can see what interests they have tagged, and clicking on that tag takes you to the tag page.

The tag page lists all users that have added that particular interest to their profile, creating small communities of users with similar interests. This is neat, but the extended features of the tag page make it a more interesting tool.

As an individual user you can add a description of your tag, and also link it to other related tags. For example, I am part of the theatre technician tag. That is linked over to the drama group. The idea is a user could browse through related tags, join groups they are interested in. Not the most advanced social networking software out there, but I like it as a community feature.

The tag pages also link into the Moodle blog system. If I write a blog post related to something to do with the theatre I can add the theatre technician tag to it and a link will be added to the tag page (providing a user has permission to read my blog post). In this way we start to add related content to the interest groups as well.

Admin Functions

As an administrator you also have permission to modify the layout of the interest page and add some more content. The extra blocks you can add include the standard HTML block, and in our particular installation blocks to display related Flickr and Youtube content too.

You also have the ability to view all tags on the system. You get to the manage tags page by clicking the ‘manage’ button at the top of any tag page, or by going to yourmoodleURL/tag/manage.php

On this page you can see how many users have joined a particular group, and edit/remove tags. As an admin user I occasionally browse through the tag list, tidying things up and removing bits I don’t think are useful. On this page the ‘flag’ option is a useful one. Users have the ability to flag tags they would consider inappropriate, and sorting the whole tag list by this field helps a busy admin find the things they want to remove quickly.

You can also use this page to create ‘official tags’. These appear to users when they are writing blog posts, so creating some official tags might be an easy way for you to encourage students to use a common format for tagging their work rather than always having to think of their own.

Tag Block

While you can view tags by navigating into user profiles, the tag block is a far more visible way to display the most popular interests on the site. Enable this on your homepage so students can easily browse others interests.

In Use

I would be interested to see how others are using the tag functions. At the moment we don’t impose rules on the tags, students can add whatever they are interested in and we moderate what appears there. Obviously there is potential for misuse with this arrangement, but if your AUP is in place it shouldn’t be something to worry about.

I think there is potential for the tags to be used in a more official way though. Use of the official tags admin function, and publicity to show students how and why they should tag their blog entries could very quickly create pages of useful content that isn’t necessarily linked to the curriculum related content of your course pages.

This post originally appeared at tdalton.co.uk, all content refers to Moodle 1.9.9. More Moodle posts on the blog, or find me on Twitter @timdalton

I’ve been thinking about creating a sense of community in our Moodle sites this week, will write a few posts on it. Today I wanted to look at the avatar, and some of the things we could do with it.

Adding your avatar

To add an avatar to your profile simply go to the edit page and upload an image. Our users pick a mixture of photos of themselves, little badges, or other images that they relate to. Really easy thing to do, and the graphics help create a sense of personal identity.

Viewing avatars

The avatars appear all over the place, from the online users block to the posts you make in forums. As a Moodle admin you can also view a collage of all the avatars by visiting this link when logged in to your site:

http://youmoodlesite/userpix/

Ours looks a little bit like this (with some blurring of faces added to help protect privacy on a public blog).

While this is quite nice, we could use these images to create something a bit more exciting for your school. I took screenshots of the collage of avatars and then using Glogster I used them to create this poster.

Loads more you could do with this, but not a bad start…

Customising avatars

I then started to think about how we could customise our avatars, if there were other aspects of the school we could bring in.

Many of our clubs/societies and other groups in the school give the students little pin badges to identify themselves. For example, all of our prefects have badges. I did a quick google search for a suitable badge, then using Pixlr.com as an image editor I added my pin badge to my Moodle avatar.

This is a nice easy way to take something from your school and add some continuity into the virtual. Making/copying little badges and sending them to students to add to their avatars would be a quick project for a quiet afternoon. Or, you could think about the kind of ideas used by sites like foursquare and create games/tasks where students earn badges for their avatars.

Twibbon

Finally… I borrowed the idea of adding badges to your avatar from the fantastic twibbon.com. They have built a nice bit of web software to easily add badges to your Twitter avatar. While playing around with it earlier I created a Moodle Twibbon, if you’d like to add it to your Twitter avatar visit this link.

Hope these ideas inspires somebody, and if you are doing anything else a bit cool with your Moodle avatars do add to the comments so we can share with everyone else!

This post originally appeared on my blog. Visit for other Moodle content as well as other ed-tech related ideas. Or, follow me on twitter.

After something of a delay due to other commitments I’m hoping the Moodle Monday posts will now return to a regular schedule, apologies all…

I’m sure most of you are aware of the groups function in your Moodle courses. They are a nice way to divide your course participants up into more manageable sizes. Not really a concern if you only have a few students and one teacher on a course, but great if you’re dealing with a few hundred with multiple teachers. If you’re not familiar with Moodle groups add a note in the comments and I’ll write something about those in another post.

What I want to achieve here is as follows. I have a course set up with the whole of Year 8 as participants, they mainly take part in activities and view resources together as a year, but we wanted to create a forum on the course that was only visible to one particular class. Maybe you have a course where the majority follow a set curriculum, but you wanted to split off one activity for an advanced group? This might be a good case for what follows.

The separate groups option is in part the way forward, but this still makes the forum link appear on the course for every participant. To hide it from all apart from your one class you need to set up the groupings feature.

The groupings feature was designed to allow you to create groups of groups and assign activities to them. So, if you wanted 2 classes to interact in an activity this would be the way forward. Maybe I wanted two classes to communicate on a forum. The groups feature would only let individuals classes interact, creating a grouping of the two classes would connect them for just this activity.

However, we could also use the groupings function to isolate a particular class, and hide the activity from the rest.

There are 2 jobs involved in setting this up. We need to create our special groupings, and then set up a forum for them.

Creating groupings

In this example, I have a grouping for each class on my course- you may only need it for 1

You need to already have your course groups set up for this stage to work. So, go to your course and select ‘Groups’ from the admin menu on the left. Create your class groups, add members to them.

Once you have this stage sorted we can look at the groupings.

1. On your course select ‘Groups’ from the admin menu
2. On this page click the ‘Groupings’ tab from the top of the page
3. Click ‘create grouping’
4. Give your grouping a name (in my case this is the name of the individual class I want to add to a grouping, but it can be anything)
5. Back on the groupings screen click the ‘show groups’ button on the right of your group name (far side of the table)
6. Add the correct class to your grouping

So, what we have here is a new grouping with just the class we want to see the forum in.

Setting up the forum

In this example the forum will only display for the 8L grouping

We now need to create a new forum activity for this group.

1. Turn editing on for your course, add a new forum to the right topic.
2. Give it a name/etc and set the usual options
3. In the group options select ‘separate groups’ (so other groups can’t see each others postings)
4. In the grouping option select the grouping you just created
5. Tick the box next to ‘available to group members only’
6. Create the forum

This last setting is the important one. It tells Moodle to only make the forum visible to the grouping you selected.

And that’s it. Try a couple of student logins to make sure it works as you would expect, job done. There is no limit to the number of groupings you could create, so you can use this system to create a very flexible collection of activities that are only available to certain groups of students.

Remember- this groupings set up is a more complex way to direct content at one individual set of students on a course. It might not be the best system all the time. Think about the needs of your particular activity- would it be better to start a new course just for these students? Would the usual groups function do the job with less set up? Plenty of options, the trick is picking the best one.

Do you have a better way to do this? Did this method work for you? Do add to the comments if you found it helpful or have a better idea.

This post originally appeared on tdalton.co.uk. My other work there, or find me on twitter @timdalton.