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.