Moodle

Moodle Groupings

As a Moodle user have you ever wondered if it was possible to hide an activity from one group of students and yet allow another group of students to complete the activity? Until now that wasn't possible. With the advent of Moodle 1.9 there is a new feature called "Groupings." Through the use of groupings you can now assign specific activities only to specific students. Now that I have piqued your intest lets talk about how to assign activities to a certain group of students.

Making the nanogong html editor icon work in Moodle 1.93 and later.

I have blogged about Nanogong before. It is a great tool for integrating audio into your Moodle course. Nanogong has a number of components including the Nanogong Activity, a Nanogong filter and the Nanogong editor hack that allows you to access the Nanogong applet from any page that has the html editor. You can read my first post about Nanogong here, it talks more about what Nanogong is etc...

Moodle Server Time Block

Do you ever wonder what the real time is on your Moodle server? Many people have downloaded the Analog Clock block for Moodle thinking that this will show the time on their Moodle server only to find out that it shows the local time on their personal computer.

Moodle Database Module

Back in August I worked with our school district foundation to create on online application for their annual grant program. To make it easy we set the application up in a Moodle site using the database module.  This is working really well because it allows teachers to edit their grant application at will up until the closing date. 

I've got Moodle! Now what? Part 2

OK, slap me around a bit for not following through yesterday.  Things got a bit hectic and too many folks wanted to chat, so here is the follow up to my presentation yesterday.  I showed a variety of different uses of Moodle and the questions were what modules did I use to accomplish those things.  Given those things, here is a list of the modules that are used to allow teachers to do things like podcasts and record audio directly into Moodle.

I've got Moodle! Now what?

This morning at 10:00  I did this presentation at the K12 Open Minds conference in Indianapolis.  I promised those that were in attendaance that I would add my materials as a blog post so this is what I promised.  I felt it was a good session and they even brought in a bunch of extra chairs so people didn't have to sit on the floor. I talked about a windows based multimedia conversion tool called Super. 

Embedding PDF Files in 1.92... Not!

Last week a teacher called me and said she was having a bunch of problems with PDF files on her Moodle site.  She said that when she clicked on a link the embedded window showed up but it was nothing but garbage in the window.  If she went to the files area of her site and clicked on the same file it opened just fine in a popup window.  I thought this was very strange as did the teacher.

Making Moodle Less Moodle Like

Okay, it has been more than a week since my last post so I need to get caught up here.  Things have been a bit hectic so hence the extended absence.  At least it wasn't months like the last time. 

Moodle Nanogong Module

About two months ago I started playing with the Nanogong Module for Moodle.  Nanogong is a part of the Gong Project and is a Java based audio recorder that integrates with Moodle. It worked OK in 1.8 but when I upgraded to 1.9 everything went south.  Over the last few weeks the developers, the "Hong Kong University of Science and Technology", have done a lot of work on the module and just recently made the module Open Source.  I upgraded to version 3.1 last night and things seem to be working quite well now.

Fantastico Install Moodle, Do Not

I spent some time today looking at a Moodle install on a dedicated server being hosted at a large hosting company. The organization had multiple installs of Moodle and were experiencing problems getting any course backups to run. They thought they were having some issues with their database configuration so they had the hosting company bump up the max_allowed_packet size from 1MB to 32 MB. Still no go on the course backups. There were also some errors related to some session stuff so we tried settting the save sessions to the database setting as well.