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Category: 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.

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.