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Webinar: Respondus 4.0 for Moodle by Vendor

2011/08/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

In case you could not make it to this live online presentation shortly before the term start, I taped this respondus-4-moodle-webinar (plays for sure in Windows Media Player on the Lab PCs) for your review. I also made this transcript which can help you jump to the information that interests you most:

0: 00	question editor
1: 00	signing up for a test bank
4: 00	importing questions from a test bank (example: human biology)
6: 30	editing the quiz based on the test bank
7: 00	adding another question, multiple choice
07: 00	question types in Moodle and Respondus are similar
08: 00	ad advanced formatting, like bold or html or multimedia
09: 00	from a local computer or on the web, like youtube.com
10: 00	equations
12: 00	printing exams
14: 00	publishing exams directly into Moodle
14: 00	enter your Moodle server information (once; or never, if your administrator has prepopulated these fields for you)
16: 00	summary
18: 00	lockdown browser: can’t print, capture screen as image or video, can’t browse web or instant messaging programs
20: 00	integration with Moodle (Moodle block if hosted, module if self-hosted)
21: 00	within Moodle, on the update quiz link, in the section: Respondus lockdown browser
21: 30	students perspective: local client software install
23: 30	example of taking an exam with the lockdown browser
28: 30	what the exam will look like if the students tries to access it with another browser
30: 30	admin perspective: info for the lockdown browser license administrator, including for lab administrators with imaging and answer files
34: 30	summary
36: 30	online documentation
37: 30	pricing
38: 30	q&a: support for Moodle: 2.0,2.1 yes
39: 30	q&a: the admin can in the admin portal prepopulate the server settings for the teachers’ Respondus
40: 30	q&a: question types in Moodle are different from blackboard : these get dropped when you change the personality (blackboard/Moodle) within Respondus, but most basic question types simply carry over back and forth
41: 30	q&a: default font size: menu: file / menu item: preferences/ tab: edit&publish
42: 30	q&a: convert exam view files – go through the publisher of the text bank – or export to word, put the Respondus import markup in, import word into Respondus
44: 30	q&a: lockdown browser system requirements: see online http://www.Respondus.com/lockdown/faq.shtml
44: 30	q&a: timed exams? Yes, but through Moodle, lockdown browser just passes this through
45: 30	q&a: virtual machine: lockdown browser prevents it (no need for vm with windows with new mac version of lockdown browser)
46: 30	q&a: dual screen: lockdown browser prevents it , beyond enforcing full screen
47: 30	q&a: how to push out the lockdown browser to your students during the first quiz? Best set up a test quiz with just this purpose
48: 30	q&a: will the timer from Moodle show in the lockdown browser: yes
49: 30	q&a: about hosting
50: 30	q&a: multiple questions to a single image
51: 30	q&a: publishers

While I like the impetus of Respondus to facilitate formative assessment, its utility seems limited if you do not have pre-authored publisher test bank for your topic. Or rather the functionality of preformatting text in MS-Word and importing it – not demonstrated in this screencast – seems more convenient (and partially could be automated, especially in SLA quizzes by using NLP) than actually authoring quizzes in Respondus – but is also available in Moodle itself.

Or use a simple quiz-generating MS-Word template if you do not need an LMS, but rather feedback so much faster than on the WWW, as implemented in current LMS, that a difference in quantity difference forms a new quality).

And I can also not say that I see much new in Respondus since 2004, except for the Moodle support, which naturally did not exist then. In the area of Web 2.0, one would wish for more than just publisher-driven test banks (where language are largely absent except for the most popular courses).

Categories: assessments, e-learning, learning-materials Tags: moodle, quizzes, respondus

Multi-monitor setups

2011/08/09 plagwitz Leave a comment

Bill Gates has been quoted not too long ago praising his IT staff for equipping him with a “three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop” office computer.

Multi-monitor user interfaces are increasingly deemed useful, if not necessary, to handle the richer data flows created by computers (The following slideshow contains samples of such systems I have collected over recent years, not a few are from Language centers).

multi-screen

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

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Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure Tags: multi-monitor

Calendaring: How to use your Moodle course calendars to keep your students up to date

2011/08/05 plagwitz Leave a comment

UPDATE: this now stopped working here. Clicking on the link from IE9, using “open with”: MS-Outlook 2010 fails with “the requested information store could not be found in the active profile”. I have not found a way to feed the Moodle ical link manually into MS-Outlook 2010 (Shared Calendars / Add Calendar / From Internet) or OWA different problem). Stay tuned…
Easy if you use standard Moodle assignments: “Adding closing dates to course activities — assignments, quizzes etc. will cause them to show up in the calendar block as course events. “
Other assignments you have to add manually, like so:
Resulting in this: or this:
Editing your calendar in other applications and importing, even synching it with Moodle is not currently (2.1) supported.
More on Calendar you can find in the official 1.9 Moodle calendar doc and FAQ.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure Tags: calendaring, moodle

Free screencast recording software from Microsoft

2011/08/02 plagwitz Leave a comment

Teachers ask me about software for making screencasts explaining procedures to their students. I have not googled for free screencast recorders recently, since I have been happy for many years to use (or rather work with extensively, and recommend) Windows Media Encoder 9 on MS-Windows. Allegedly as of end of 2010, this software is not linked on Microsoft’s website anymore (but can still be googled and downloaded). Even though not officially supported on this OS any more, I have also used it successfully on Windows 7 (64-bit) (after Vista (64-bit) and Windows XP)).

The official replacement screencast recorder from Microsoft is Windows Expression Encoder (of which I still use the inexpensive Version 3), which is available here (Version 4 SP1) for free. Media Encoder is almost 10 years old, so Expression Encoder is clearly superior – however, the free version is somewhat crippled, most notably in this context I seem to remember the time limit for screencasts is 10 minutes.

Both Encoders are somewhat technical in nature. In particular, I suspect the reason why considerable experts did not know Media Encoder as a screencast recorder (which is not the same as a documentation and training maker: its post-editing capabilities are limited and not specialized for documentation, unlike e.g. Camtasia), was that its default settings for screencast recordings are low quality.

To “uncork” the real possibilities of this software, your first need to alter the compression settings within the WME configuration file that your screencast is based on (you can do this from within Windows Media Encoder itself). Moreover, for this change to stick, you need to alter an underlying PRX template file also. This file is hidden away in the depths of the Encoder install directories; after installing Windows Media Encoder, search your programs folder for a file named schia.prx, it is an XML file that will open with the Windows Media Encoder utilities.

Categories: e-infrastructure, software Tags: ms-expression-encoder, screeencasts, Windows-media-encoder

QuickNotes: For ELTI 201/202/501 Student Recordings with Sanako Study1200

2011/07/29 plagwitz Leave a comment

This is 20 students class doing a model imitation for English phonetics and grammar – use right half of classroom plus 2 rightmost columns of left half.
Have a couple of spare student computers logged in as labadmn (not as presenter: has no permissions to s-drive to save recordings) for emergencies.
Your students will log in, then take their break. Wait until entire class shows up in the Sanako Classroom layout. Then you can lock their keyboard and mouse – but remember when computers go into locked mode, Sanako cannot control them
See http://plagwitz.org, upper right corner “Quick links” for the path to copy/paste. Or, on the teacher computer in LRC 434, in folder C:\Temp, you can find a shortcut to the Sanako folders
1. “media” with teacher audio (to be prepared with pauses and beeps once it has been recorded and sent; you can easily prepare it yourself: download and view how with Windows Media Player);
2. “student” with student recordings
You can download and view with Windows Media Player the (unedited) screencast of our summative walkthrough here.