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Tag: teaching

How to override quiz settings for a user in Moodle

Bob was absent yesterday and has to make up the test. Jane didn’t do so well and you want to let her have a second attempt. You’re only giving students 10 minutes for the quiz today, but Chris just needs a few extra minutes.

What you need is a user override. Not sure when this was added to Moodle, but I found it while setting up my Moodle 2.7 server for next year; and it looks like something that will get a lot of use.

The basics are that you can give a user, or a group, slightly different restrictions on a Moodle quiz.

Importing into Moodle from Examview – With Images

Edit on 8/7/2014

Well, this script is pretty much worthless now. Not sure when it happened, but Moodle now lets you upload the entire Blackboard zip file, images included, and everything gets imported. No more messing around with the res00000 files.

Going to leave the original post though. Might be handy for someone stuck using an older version of Moodle.

Original Post

I’m a big fan of Moodle, but really don’t like the way you have to add questions to banks. There’s just too much on that page.

So I normally build question banks in Examview and then import to Moodle. Only catch is that importing that way doesn’t allow for images.

So what I’ve done is create a simple Python script that takes the exported file and replaces the image links with a data scheme URI. Wasn’t expecting it to work, but it works without a hitch.

Teaching recursion with Scratch BYOB – take 2

This is a follow up from a post I did about a year and a half ago on using Scratch BYOB to teach recursion. The original way of defining parameters in BYOB were a bit clunky, but it’s gotten much better in recent versions so it seems a good time for an update.

A bit about BYOB
If you haven’t tried Scratch in your intro computer science classes run, don’t walk, and give it a try. It’s early October and our intro students just finished their first pass through a unit on list processing. There’s no way we would be where we are if we had to worry much about syntax, and Scratch takes care of that by letting students drag and drop pieces together rather than worry about classes, methods, braces, and semicolons.

Schools trying out 4-day weeks

With budgets getting tighter and tighter some schools are looking at 4-day weeks instead of 5. The fear, of course, is that students will miss out on the education they’re supposed to be getting if their week is shortened.

Personally I like the idea of a 4-day work week.  It would be great to have Fridays off even if it did mean longer days Monday through Thursday. But professionally I have a few issues with it.

Teaching recursion with Scratch BYOB

One of the biggest limits we came across teaching with Scratch this year is the inability to write methods and use parameters.  Methods, returns, and parameters are probably the only major concept in our intro CompSci class that we can’t teach in Scratch; so we introduced them in Alice this past year.  It worked ok, but we haven’t been able to come up with any really good labs that explain the purpose of parameters well to the students.

This past week I came across an extended version of Scratch called Scratch BYOB, or Build Your Own Block.  And it does exactly what I was looking for.  It gives you the ability to create methods and optionally include parameters.