Tag/Word clouds

Took a break from grading to see if I could figure out how to make tag clouds. These are neat graphical ways to highlight what things are prominent within a set of words - these words could be on a web page, a journal article, or whatever text you want to supply. In my case I wanted to see if this would accurately represent to the students what my course was about.

A quick search pulled up a number of free online tools to do this. I randomly chose http://www.tagxedo.com/.  I literally copied and pasted all of my notes into the entry box, chose a color scheme, and then chose the shape of my cloud (bacterial-shaped of course). Here's what I got for the lecture and the lab. 

Tag/Word cloud for my lab: 

 Tag/Word cloud for my lecture:

Pretty cool and honestly not a bad representation of the lab and lecture parts of the course. Basically it uses an algorithm to weight the font size by the frequency of the word, then fits the words into the shape. 

Actually I could see this being a neat way to show microbial community composition too. Tried it with Ben's fungi data from the Elon Forest. Added a new twist to - instead of capturing an image here is an iFrame of it so that it can be dynamic (see earlier post on Widgets). Scroll over the names to see the magic. Note that the shape is a nice oaklike tree - nice little touch although why can't they supply a fungus icon for us? 

Early view of next Moodle version

Recently I was able to sit in on a Webinar where they talked about the next version of Moodle that is coming our way (I believe in the next month or so). In the rush of finals I unfortunately lost my notes but here are a few notable things I remember

• file management looks like it will be a lot easier AND it will be much more straightforward to organize and share documents across courses and course sections. I see this as being great for some of our multisection courses where we tend to use the same documents - Sr Sem, Bio113, Bio102, etc.  Equally important will be that updating everyone's file on their page will be as simple as replacing the document that is in the main folder. For example, let's take Bio113. All base lab handouts are held in one folder that the lab coordinator maintains. All the sections essentially build aliases (links) to each file. If the coordinator updates the main file, everyone is automatically updated. 

• currently when you set up an assignment you have to wade through a myriad of options, often times only to figure out later it was the wrong option. Now the assignments will all be under one "set up assignment" feature where you can then customize it - I think that will be much easier than the current setup. 

• while it is not new, the personalized learning designer was being pushed as something that doesn't get used enough. I can't claim to have explored this much but I liked the automated messages that you can set up that will get sent to students who meet some condition like having low grades, or who haven't logged in in a while. I can see where this would be a good push for certain students.

link to the 2.0 version manual: http://manuals.moodlerooms.com/display/JOULE2/Teacher+Manual

1st try with clickers

A few weeks ago I got a hold of a set of clickers so I could try them out in my Bio101 course. After a few busy weeks I finally got a chance to use them and here's a very initial reaction

What was the use? 

• I stole a great idea from Sri and was having the students classify music by building a character dataset which we then analyzed for similarity. Had them come up with 10 music "Traits" (examples were acoustic, slow, techno, etc.) then played them clips of 4 songs chosen so that some of them would be likely to be very similar no matter what traits they had chosen. They each scored the traits for each song. Next as a group we built a class character matrix based on the traits they had scored. We used to clickers to have them give their input on what they had scored for that trait, then took the majority. For this part they only input they had was either A-yes, or B-no (although somehow some students still ended up voting C,D, or E....).  Next we tested a hypothesis that they developed - that the Jennifer Lopez and the Rihanna songs were more similar to each other than either were to the Harry Belafonte song. After showing them how to do one of the calculations, I let them calculate one and then enter it anonymously on the clickers. For this the students used the numeric option which allows them to type in a number. I decided not to show them the results on here but addressed that there was a mix of correct and incorrect answers. 

My goals/hopes - that students would be more engaged overall, would have fun doing something pretty complex, and that they would all feel comfortable answering questions.

Ease of learning how to use them - VERY easy to get going with these. The TLT folks kindly loaned me a set of ~30  iClickers. This comes with a base that you plug into your USB port, and some very simple software. Took about 5 min to get it all set up and to try it out in my office

Ease of setting up in class 

• took a few minutes to pass them out, then a few more to help students who had never used them before. Not bad but I hadn't budgeted that in. In classes that use them regularly I hear that they just get the students used to grabbing the clickers when they come in
• very quick to set up base and open up the software

Issues that arose  

• I think I could see my self getting tired of lugging a set of 30 of these around. The specific units for this are pretty big, as is the base unit.  
• Showing the students the results of a survey (which is one of the highlights - they were clearly excited to see if they were right/wrong) has a catch. Personally I write my notes on the whiteboard and in this room the screen comes down right over most of the whiteboard. Furthermore, the room I was in had an automatic lowering screen so you can't just shine the computer onto the whiteboard. So I had to choose - do I want to show them the results or my notes? If you are someone who uses your computer as the main thrust of your lectures (such as powerpoint talks) then this would not be an issue

Did it help accomplish my goals?

• students definately seemed more engaged  
• students were having fun - At the recommendation of one of the TLT postings on this subject I would hide the results of each survey until everyone had voted which added an element of suspence that they seemed to like. Even the fact that a few people kept mistakenly clicking options I wasn't giving them loosened them up a bit. 
• there was a high participation in the answering - usually only one student gets to answer any question that I ask the class, but now almost all of them did. 

Interesting features that I will try to investigate in the near future

• taking attendance - if you have the students always pick up a clicker then you can use it for attendance which I think would be easy and neat. Obviously you would have to assign a specific clicker number to a specific student for the semester and train the students on that. 
• preset questions - if you are organized enough to know all the questions you want to ask them ahead of time then you can have them set up. Doubtful it will work for me but could be useful for others

collaborative slide exercise

In the middle of trying something new right now. Having just covered transcription/translation for my Bio101 class, I wanted to have a presentation about different proteins to highlight the diversity that exists in these molecules. What I decided to do was make a collaborative Google presentation which is Google's version of Powerpoint. I chose a bunch of cool proteins, added the names onto each slide and then "shared" the presentation with the students. They were then told to claim one of the protein slides and to add info and graphics on it.

One of the things I found neat was that there wasn't a single student who wasn't familiar with Google documents. They all knew how to access the documents and how to work with it.

One of the things I found fascinating was logging onto the presentation and seeing as many as 8-9 students working on their slides all at once. I didn't do it but technically I could have instant messaged them through the program at that point too

Technically you can export the Google presentation into Powerpoint, but they also have their own presentation player right in the software - just hit play and it plays on your screen just like Powerpoint. Tomorrow when I go to class that's exactly what I will do - no collating of slides or having people upload - because they all worked on it together at the same time. Very cool...

screenshot showing that 4 people were on editing at the same time

more moodling on a friday afternoon

Am playing around with the "Add a block" function and discovering some things.... A couple of other tricks for the new Moodle system that a few people in the dept have been trying to figure out...

1. sending emails within the class - add the "quickmail" block
2. sending instant messages to individuals within Moodle - add the "message" block
• Linda and I tried this, it seems to be like chatting in Facebook
3. embedding a widget for some functioning - add the "html" block (see previous post for how to get the widget set up in it)
4. help students keep track of what new things have been added onto the site - add the "recent activity" module

Widgets for Moodle

It's often nice to be able to jazz up a Moodle site with little relevant things that make the site feel dynamic. A while back I wrote about this when I was experimenting with the twitter feeds from the professional societies for my Micro course. Thought it was worth revisiting this as a more general topic.

Let's use a recent example. For Senior Seminar, the instructors always make a big deal about the fact that we've synched our watches to the official regional time relative to GMT - it stressed to the students how serious we're going to be about timeliness. As I set up my Moodle site this year I thought it would be cool to get that clock embedded into the Moodle site as opposed to just having a link to it like I had in the past. The key term here is "widget" - it refers to a snippet of HTML code that you can insert into a site that allows something to be displayed. A quick search of "GMT time widget" found a myriad of options out there. 

Here's just one of many such links: http://weatherandtime.net/widgets-gallery.html

On this page I chose one of the forms that I like - the Apple apple sounds good. Now it let me choose the city, then it spits out a little HTML code that looks like this: 

"<script src="http://weatherandtime.net/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript" ></script><div id="div_clock_06" style="text-align:center; margin:auto auto;width:145px; height:185px;"><div style="padding:0px 1px 1px 1px;position:absolute; z-index:100; color:#239C34; text-align:center; width:145px;height:auto;"><a style="color:#239C34; text-decoration:none;font-size:12px;" href="http://weatherandtime.net/en/North-America/United-States/New-York-City-time.html" title="New York City time">New York City time</a></div><span id="swf_clock_06">&nbsp;</span></div><script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript">swfobject.embedSWF("http://weatherandtime.net/clock_06.swf", "swf_clock_06", "145", "185", "10","clock_06.swf", {city: "18103",lang:"en",color:"#239C34"}, {menu:"false",wmode:"transparent",allowScriptAccess:"always"}, {id:"clock_06",name:"clock_06"});</script>"

Now go ahead and copy that (except for the quotes on the end). Now go to your moodle site for your class, and 1) use the "add a block" function, choose "html" then 2) edit the block as follows: - in the "content" section, click on html which brings up a subwindow.Paste the html code into it and voila! you may need to refresh the page before it shows. I've embedded the code below so you can see what it should look like - These widgets exist for a ton of things - so just search for some whenever something pops into your head that you think would be useful for your course site.

New York City time

setting your defaults for Word documents

One of the things that always drives me crazy is having to alter odd formatting settings every time I open up a new document. For example, the default for my Word program is a document that puts spaces after every return. Today I figured out how to change this. Buried in your file structure is a template document. If you open this in Word you can adjust everything to how you like it, save it, and from that point on every new file will start off with that new default formatting. These things might include:

• margins
• fonts
• the way you view the document
• line and paragraph spacing
• others

You can look up "change the default settings for new documents" in the Word help, then choose the "change other default settings in the Normal template" and it will tell you how to find that file.

Alternately, you can probably search your hard drive for "Normal.dotm" to find the file

Moodle: Bulk download of uploaded assignments

This semester I've been more diligent about getting the students to upload their assignments onto Moodle rather than handing me hardcopies or emailing them to  me. What's nice is that - compared to an email - the student can see that their file was posted, and it gets a timestamp too. Today I had a bunch of files to download and here's where the magic came in - clicked on "download files" and it downloaded the whole batch of assignment as a single folder, labeled with the student names too. The part about adding the student names is pure genious. I always request that the students label their files in a specific way to make it easy for me to figure out who's is who's but they always forget - not a problem now!

-AI

TLT Moodle Blog

TLT has a blog that is devoted to Moodle - "Moodle Musings". Be sure to keep an eye out on that blog as well!

Cheri has some neat ideas for collaborative environments and activities in a recent posting. In particular I thought the idea of setting up a forum for anonymous questions was something that would be really useful. I haven't checked out that feature yet but I would assume you'd want to set it up so that you approved the anonymous postings before they actually got posted.

http://blogs.elon.edu/technology/category/teaching-and-learning/moodle-musings/

Moodle: Glossary importing

I've been playing around with the glossary function in Moodle. It seems like each semester there are terms that have students confused that might be resolved by supplying them with a more detailed and context-driven definition than what their textbook offers. The Glossary feature of Moodle would allow me to do that potentially, and this would be a useful resource for them to refer to throughout the semester, not to mention they potentially could export these into a study tool for their mobile devices.

Entering the glossary terms is pretty straightforward, however, it is a little clunky to do it one by one. An alternative is to type out the term and definition into an excel sheet in adjacent columns. These can be imported into Moodle in a slightly tricky way as follows

• visit http://moodleflair.com/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=119 and download the linked html file
• open up the html file into your browser - it should look like a webpage. 
• copy and paste your two columns into the webpage's left column
• click on "convert" and you'll see the info get converted into "xml" (extensible markup language) format. The new material shows up in the right column. 
• cut and paste the converted material into a word document. Here's the tricky part - save as a text file, but give it an ".xml" suffix
• now you can import all the terms directly into the Moodle glossary

An alternative to all of this is that you can have the students help you generate it and grade them on the quality of their entries. 

I'm going to try this with the second section of Bio111 - the material that traditionally is the toughest - and see if it improves student comprehension. 

Moodle: using weighted grade categories

Last semester I was dying to figure out how to get the gradebook to calculate weighted means for Sr Sem. I think I've made some headway on this and I thought it would be nice to have some examples of how the settings should look to make it work

Here's the screenshot of how a basic weighted means should look. For this example I have two categories of grades - quizzes and practicals. Each quiz is worth the same, each practical is worth the same, and they are weighted by their total points. Basically, these are just weighted by their actual point values.

Now a more useful weighting. By making the "weight" numbers equal for both quizzes and practicals, quizzes now become worth as much as practicals. I find it useful to use numbers that represent the percentage. With this settings used below quizzes now get weighted equally to practicals. With mock data where I scored 4/5 on each quiz and 70/100 on each practical, my final grade was reported to be a 75% confirming that this was set up appropriately.

But what about if I want to make things more complicated - what if one of the practicals is weighted four times as heavy as the other, but the weight of the practicals is still equal to that of the quizzes? This is also one of the issues I ran into last semester. To accomplish this I changed the aggregation settings in the lab practical category to "weighted mean of grades" and split up the weight of each practical so that one is weighted at 10 and the other is weighted at 40. With lab quiz grades of 4/5, lab practical 1 score of 100, and lab practical 2 score of 70, my final calculated grade was 87% which is correct by manual calculations.

One key trick to making this all work was to carefully set up the categories and grade items beforehand.