Moodle courses - adding buttons

Spruce up your Moodle course with buttons

I have added some code to Moodle to allow for the easy creation of navigation buttons to Moodle courses and pages. Below is a short PowerPoint guide outlining the process.

Buttons can be created from images too - just insert a link and set the Class to 'button' in exactly the same way as for the text links in the guide.

A button with an image and text is only slightly more tricky, but is best done using the HTML editor - put the image and text inside the a tags, seperated with a br linebreak.

Revision: simple clear mind-mapping with Coggle.it

Mind Maps can be a fantastic tool to revise a topic.

Coggle.it provides a simple platform for creating Mind Maps that can be shared (as below), made collaborative, or exported for printing.

Images can be included by simply dragging and dropping onto the canvas. Linking lines can be coloured a wide variety of colours and nodes can be easily moved to achieve a clear layout. Hyperlinks can be included too (try CTRL-clicking the word "Photosynthesis" in the above example). Full, easy to follow, instructions can be displayed as a side-bar.

Dominoes, triominoes, world loops and more: Formulator Tarsia

A very quick post to let you know about some fantastic free software for Windows computers.

Formulator Tarsia, available free of charge from http://www.mmlsoft.com/index.php/products/tarsia, provides an interface to quickly and easily create a variety of card sort and jigsaw activities and puzzle games. Just type in terms and definitions, or questions and answers and the program will create your puzzle which can be exported to pdf for printing.

Formulator Tarsia allows for easy formatting of mathematical formula or insertion of images.

Revision: Quizlet- flashcards and more

A quick post on one of my favourite eLearning tools for revision: Quizlet.com.

Quizlet is, in essence, a flash card based revision tool; of which there are many. However, what I really like about Quizlet is how you can use your 'deck' in so many different ways to revise. You can also embed the applet into webpages, like below:

Try using the drop-down menu at the bottom right of the embed to switch to the 'Test' and 'Scatter' Study Modes.

As you can see, when embedded Quizlet decks can be used without the need for a login, but with a free account students can search and add other decks to their library, create their own card sets or even set up a Class to share decks and compete with each other to top the leaderboard in the 'Scatter' or 'Space Race' study modes.

There are many sets of terms and defintions already on QUizlet but creating your own is very easy too. Images can also be included if needed.

Embedding the Quizlet applet into a page on Moodle is very simple:

• Open the 'deck' on the Quizlet website
• Click on 'More...' in the tools section of the menu bar and select 'Embed'
• Select and copy the text in the box next to your preferred Study Mode
• Go to your Moodle course and click the 'Add and Activity or Resource' link
• Scroll down to and click 'Web Page'
• Click the small 'HTML' button on the window that opens and paste the copied text here
• Type a title and short description in the relevant areas then save your web page

If necessary I can create a short video showing the whole process - just email me to ask

Names and class lists in Excel

Easily change formatting of names in Excel sheets

Surname, Forename or Forename Surname? ...or even First name and Surname in separate columns?

We all have our preferences but unfortunately so do the different software packages we use.

This post shares some Excel formulas to quickly and easily switch around the formatting of names.

The formulas used are summarised in the image below:

Click to enlarge

The first formulas search for a comma and return the characters on either the left (for surname) or the right (for first name). Just change the cell reference to point to the cell with Surname, Forename.

For surname:     =LEFT(A2,(FIND(",",A2)-1))

For forename:     =RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1-FIND(",",A2)))

The next formula will take a forename and a surname from separate cells and join them to Forename Surname:     =B2&" "&C2

If you want to take forenames and surnames from separate cells and output as Surname, Forename use:     =C2&", "&B2

And finally to convert Forename Surname to Surname, Forename:     =RIGHT(D2,(LEN(D2)-FIND(" ",D2)))&", "&LEFT(D2,(FIND(" ",D2))).

Try this out with this example spreadsheet (be aware this is LIVE and shared publicly!)

Visual Bookmarking and Sharing with Pearltrees

Create and share tiled bookmark collections with Pearltrees.

An excellent way to share links and resources with colleagues and students - collaborative lists can even be set up. One of the best features is the ease of sharing bookmarks using Pearltrees, with options to share to Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Reddit at the click of a button...

...and my absolute favourite, the ability to embed your bookmark tiles into a webpage:

ELearning Tools, by wgsbelearning
This can be done on Moodle too, allowing you to share links in a much more attractive and engaging way!

eSkeletons

eSkeletons: an interactive website where you can explore and compare skeletons of mammals using high quality images of specimens.

Just a quick post that may interest the Biologists today.

eSkeletons also provides a variety of printable teaching resources including puzzles and life-size skeletons (although Lord Sugar wouldn't be impressed!).

GifYoutube: create short looping .gifs from YouTube clips

GifYoutube is very easy to use, just find your clip on YouTube, go to the GifYoutube website and paste the YouTube link into the box on the front page. You can then set the starting point of your gif using a sider or typing in the time in the box, with a handy preview of the video to help you. Use the right-hand slider to set the length of the clip (maximum 15 seconds)

Example

First I select the YouTube clip for my source video:

Skip to gif start point

And here is the end result:

Click to open on GifYoutube site

I'm sure there are many uses people can think of for this, but I wanted to show some short video clips as part of a starter activity: showing the clips through YouTube would have meant timing the starts, restarting the clips manually and possibly even showing each clip one after the other. What I decided to do instead was to create a table to display my four clips, side-by-side and ask students to sketch an energy profile diagram to represent what was happening in each.

Reaction A	Reaction B
Reaction C	Reaction D

Making Posters Interactive with ThingLink

Making posters is a tried-and-trusted activity that students enjoy and is ideal for review of a topic, consolidation of ideas or just allowing a student greater freedom over how they present their work.

Both an advantage and a possible drawback of posters are the fact that limited information can be conveyed - so why not make the poster interactive to allow a topic to be explored in greater detail, or how about adding audio and/or video to your poster! You can achieve this, for FREE, using ThingLink!


With ThingLink you can quickly and easily create accounts for students by copying and pasting in your class list - you can even group them into classes. For each class you can have one or more 'channels' to keep images organised.
As part of the review from a recent test I had students work through their test paper with a RAG self-analysis sheet. Once they had identified an area to target for improvement they were then tasked with creating a poster on that topic, using text books and their own notes to help them. Once completed I photographed each poster and added them to a channel for that group - named 'Poster Photos' - this would allow students to find their own poster quickly and easily.

Once students have located their poster they can 'remix' the image to add it to their account and then add a series of tags to the image. I then had students add their remixed poster to a second channel - 'Interactive Posters'. This effectively allows students to submit their work to me but also keeps all of the completed work in one place. I can then publish the link to this channel on Moodle so all of the interactive posters are available for students for revision.

Finally, the ThingLink interactive images work well on phones and tablets so why not create QR codes for the best posters to stick on to the original paper copy when you put it up in your classroom?