Archive
How teachers can more quickly open/update/save their Moodle files from MS-Office
MS-Education Labs has published a plugin that speeds up editing MS-Office Files in Moodle.
To use the plugin, download (for 32-bit Office) , run, and from (2007) Office Button or (2010/2003) Menu: “File”, use menu item “Open from Moodle” (and later “Save to Moodle”).
You have to (once) let MS-Office (e.g. MS-Word or Excel) know the URL of Moodle (e.g. http://moodle.uncc.edu), 
, then your login credentials: 
.
Note that your categorization of Moodle courses (in the tree menu on the left, all courses are filed away in folders called “Training”) prevents an instant load: 
.
Instead, search for (part of) your course title: 
.
Select the results you want to add and click button: “Add”: 
.
Wait for the courses to be loaded: 
.
You can then use the left course tree to browse for matching MS-office files within each of your loaded courses: 
MS-Office files are likely involved in the majority of Moodle edits, so this promises to be a great timesaver.
For more information, see also the CTL’s step-by-step instruction Using the Office Add-in for Moodle.
Successful test of the new streaming video recording assignment for language proficiency assessment in Moodle.
- Video recordings allow for a more authentic assessment of spoken language proficiency. Today, we could test a new Moodle video assignment type for Almut’s Summer II Elementary German II class: Preparing a natural sounding statement on one’s favorite holiday. This Moodle assignment type is an extension to students of the teacher video upload tool using a service Kaltura – we hinted at that earlier.
- Teachers, when editing their Moodle course, can find this assignment type in the dropdown: Activity as “Video”.
- The assignment options: Note that creating a video assignment is pretty much the same as creating other assignments in Moodle, and so is grading, except instead of reading, you view the submission, right within the web page.
- An example of guiding questions for a recording assignment is here (topic: holiday, language: German):
- Here is how the teacher sees the student submission in the gradebook.
- Caveat: in Safari, we were not able to close the video popup, after viewing it from the class roster, and could only back out of the entire gradebook. Instead, from the roster, first open the page with the individual student submission, and review the video there on that page:
- For the student experience, see here.
- Further reading: The CTL has a number of step-by-step instructions which we recommend for further reading: Student Video Assignment, and specifically for students: Upload a Video for a Video Assignment; for instructors: Grading Video Assignment Submissions.
- The LRC had originally prepared to record the students with our old, handheld mini-DV cameras, import the movie into iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, then find a way to get the files (with easily identifiable submitter names) to the teachers. Hitherto, our best option was compression of the video to to fit into the Moodle 64MB file upload size limit (which, even if you decide to shoot and produce your video elsewhere and bring it as an uploadable file to the assignment , does not apply to the Video assignment either).
- Preliminary testing seems to indicate that video recording of pairs/dialogues is also possible with the LRC’s webcam setup . However, because of the angle restrictions, capturing such sessions will be less natural.
- Overall, the new Moodle video assignment seems a major improvement for all parties – students, teachers and support –, and can help with more authentic assessment of
Free Farsi Proofing Tools available: VafaSpellchecker
Unfortunately, the VafaSpellchecker Proofing Tools are now not available anymore for Office 2010. The links to the Office 2010 on the website have been broken for a long time, the developer seems to have left the university, the project manager has not answered my inquiry. Here is hoping they will be resurrected.
Even though proofing tools are neither designed for non-native language learners nor, traditionally, used in a pedagogically sound way by language learners without proper guidance, they form one of the greatest opportunities to apply advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to second language acquisition (SLA) tasks, given that they are a widely installed and commonly understood artificial intelligence providing automated feedback on natural language issues.
The management and licensing of proofing tools has been much improved since MS-Office 2007 which made it easier (and cheaper) to install modular proofing support for additional languages distributed as Language Packs.
However, in an SLA context, even this may still not be a convincing value proposition, whether for the personal computers of individual student learners, or even – due to apparent the lack of concurrent licensing options within proofing tools – for Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) in an imaged computer lab environment (in our case, we would need to purchase 45 licenses à $25 before tax for a language that may have about half as many learners or less).
All the more welcome are freely downloadable add-ons- – thanks to the MS-Office platform extensibility – the VafaSpellchecker, a Persian Spell&grammar and real-word error checking system by the Natural Language and Text Processing Laboratory in University of Tehran, funded by Iranian Research Institute for ICT, available for both MS-Office 2003 and 2007. A VafaSpellchecker user guide (in Farsi) is also available.
As always with NLP in SLA, caveat emptor, use with a grain of salt, or two.
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Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
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