The Youtube Anywhere Plugin - thanks to Justin Hunt, Joseph Thibault and the Community!

This is one cool Moodle plugin for Moodle 2.4 and above



Today's post is on the ultra-cool tinyMCE Youtube Anywhere plugin. It allows you record a webcam video from within the TinyMCE HTML editor, and upload the resulting video direct into YouTube. Many thanks to Justin Hunt, Joseph Thibault, this Moodlenews post that got the ball rolling and the Moodle (and non-Moodle) community of contributors!

I installed in on my Moodle 2.5 site, and I would like to share some screenshots for those of you who wish to do the same. Hopefully I will succeed in whetting your appetite to have this marvelous plugin working on your site as!

Today's post is not a complete step-by-step installation guide. Here are some screenshots of the process involved to setup the plugin on your Moodle 2.4 or 2.5 site.

Main Moodle.org Youtube Anywhere plugin webpage - maintained by Justin Hunt
https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=tinymce_youtube

The installation process consists mainly of these getting the below data (keys, ids and google codes).

YouTube Developers Key
Get a YouTube Developers Key from the instructions found here:
https://code.google.com/apis/youtube/dashboard

Google OAUTH client id and OAUTH secret
Get the Google OAUTH client id and OAUTH secret from the instructions from here:
From http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Google_OAuth_2.0_setup

For more detailed information on how to create the client id and OAUTH secret codes, you can refer to this installation PDF file by Justin.

YouTube Anywhere settings

Possible alert  notification from Google

I received this message because the Moodle plugin was trying to access my Goodle account. Hence I had to allow Google to recognise the server's IP address from which the request came from. I merely clicked on the http://support.google.com/mail?p=client_login link to resolve this.


The Plugin in action

1. Once you have the plugin installed on your Moodle site, click on the YT icon in your tinyMCE editor

2.  A three-tabbed display appears. Click on the "Record a Video" tab.

 3. Click on the "Record from webcam" button.

 4. Click the "Start Recording" button.

 5. Confirm the action - click the "OK" button.

6. Record away!

7. Click the "Insert" button.

8. The link is inserted. Click the Submit button to embed your video into your webpage.

8. Checking out the Playlist tab.

9. Email notification from Youtube/Google

10. Final result on my Moodle site

Very nice. I hope that this series of screenshots will motivate you to
(1) Start using Moodle 2.4 and above
(2) Install YoutTube Anywhere on your own site
(3) Start making videos and embed them directly from within Moodle

Enjoy!

This plugin was a community effort and was funded by contributions. Power to the people! Incentive for the developers!

A list of the contributors:
Tetsuo Kimura
StraighterLine
Waleed Jameel
Richard Oelmann
Classroom Revolution, LLC

Other Contributors
Don Hinkelman
Rex Lorenzo
Jason Palmer
Daran Price
Ben Reynolds
flizotte
bessette
lindstromfredg
Julian Ridden
Roland Sherwood
Philippe Petitqueux
alfieismydog
kdc_teach1

For more information on this Crowdfunded project, click here.

Happy recording!
Frankie Kam
1st June 2013


Postscript (dated 17th October 2013)

If you have enabled Google's 2-step verification for your Gmail account's password, please beware that Moodle will not be able to authenticate your account, and this is what you will see:

A dreaded message appears: "Exception - Authentication with Google failed. Reason: BadAuthentication". Clicking on the "More information about this error" leads nowhere useful.

The solution? My story is this: some months after my original post above, I enabled the 2-step verification of my Google account. Just in case it got hacked. The result? Unbeknownst to me, the Youtube Anywhere plugin could no longer be authenticated!

I was fortunate enough to discover the solution, but only after spending close to three hours(!) re-installing the plugin countless times. Initially I thought that I had broken the Youtube Anywhere code by installing too many other Moodle plugins. Then a breakthrough! In one of my Google web searches, I stumbled upon this StackOverflow post which suggested going here. Thank you Matias Molinas, whoever you are! You saved my bacon.

So I followed the cue and landed here:

The text reads,

"If any of your customers are having trouble with ClientLogin, their account may not be compatible with it for a variety of possible reasons.  For example, accounts that use 2-step verification, SAML, or Open ID are not compatible with ClientLogin. 

Aha! So, Google's 2-step verification has a side-effect!

One workaround is to tell users to generate a single-use password, provided by access codes, which allows them to log in to their account in a web browser and generate a long password that they can type into the password field of any application using ClientLogin...."

What's this "single-use password"? Never mind. No time for that. Let's just get rid of the 2-step verification then, shall we? I want to get the plugin working again on my site. I thought that I should turn off the 2-step verification of my Google account, and I surfed here:

Clicking on the "Using 2-step verification" link, I landed here:

When I clicked the "Turn Off" button, I was greeted by the next screen:

Basically, Google was suggesting that I should attempt to use an "application-specific password" instead of turning off the 2-step verification method. Since I thought that Google's 2-step verification was crucial to ensuring a decent level of security for my Google and Youtube accounts, I went ahead and clicked on the "application-specific password" link. Even though I had no idea what that meant. Fortune favours the brave! After logging into my Google account, this screen appeared:

I clicked the "Generate password" button and Google generated a password for me.

What did I do with the password? Well I went back to the Youtube Anywhere plugin's settings and entered it in the "Youtube master account password" field. Like so:

Finally, I tested the plugin one more time. It worked fine!

At last it worked.

Phew! To think that I spent 3 hours trying to figure out the problem, when all the while, the solution was out there. In the end, nothing is really 'wasted' since after countless installs of the plugin, I am now, unofficially, an 'expert' in the installation process of Youtube Anywhere. Hehe. I hope this helps someone out there ... maybe you!

regards
Frankie Kam

Richard Turere didn't take the problem lion down!

Today's post has got  almost nothing to do with Moodle. But it's got everything to do with innovation.

Source: http://images.ted.com/images/ted/1d369b73bf27ebdb1450605454d66229bda2ab1c_389x292.jpg

Lion kills Masai cow, Masai kills lion. Boy wants to save cows ...  ends up saving cows and lions. Richard, one day when you fly up there in the sky, you'll be able to spot the lions and their offspring that you've saved.



Now why can't Malaysian teenagers, instead of squandering their time on their smartphones, be more like Richard?  He tinkered and applied technology, and has ended up saving his nation's wildlife and lifestock.
What did I learn from this? Necessity is the mother of innovation! Kudos to 13-year old Richard Turere! What a genius.

Source: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/130222151832-richard-turere-lion-lights-3-horizontal-gallery.jpg

Source: http://daposadiku.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/zzzz4.jpg

When faced with a clear and present danger, he didn't take the situation 'lion' down. Pun intended. Just don't have me drawn and quoted.

Frankie Kam

Using OKMindMap for Educational Purposes (Part1)

Dr Ho of Kongju University has produced a series of Youtube videos that show the features of OKMindMap cloud-based service. I wrote a long blog post on his OKMindMap software many months ago. 

I  understand Dr. Ho's diction reasonably well, but I thought that I would invest some hours to transcribe ALL four videos(!) of Dr. Ho. The reason for this is because I would like Dr. Ho's videos to have a greater reach to a global audience of Moodlers and other web users who may have difficulty in understanding the spoken English that has a native South Korean accent. Personally, I enjoyed watching the videos, and I hope you will too.

How to deshake "shaky" videos on your Moodle site with VirtualDub

So you like taking videos with your point-and-shoot camera or with your camcorder to use on your Moodle courses. What do you do about shaky videos that give you that dizzy feeling? Too much panning around, too fast. Jerky motion videos.

Look no further. You need three things. And they are all free.
1. Use Virtualdub 1.9.11 
2. with the deshaker 3.0 filter
    (extract the Deshaker.vdf plugin file and copy it to the plugins folder of Virtualdub)
3. and the K-Lite Codec. After installing the codec pack, your PC should be able to play 99% of all videos on the Net.

To save you the trouble, you can download my zipped version VirtualDub 1.9.11, complete with the deshaker filter inside the plugins folder, here.

How to use Virtualdub and Deshaker filter to smoothen out the jerkiness of your videos

A Youtube video a day makes Jack (or Jill) a Web 2.0 boy (or girl) - how to embed Web 2.0 code inside an ACal Calendar

Ever heard of the ACal Calendar Project? Arthur Wiebe's ACal Calendar is one of those unsung heroes of freeware PHP Calendars.Today's post is something that just hit me as I was about to knock off to bed. So this post is going to be as concise as possible, and yet leave you wanting for more information. So you'll have to figure out the installation steps by yourself for the time being.[Note: I added the installation steps on the next day]

From South Korea with love (for Moodle) - OKMindMap

OKmindmap (OKMM) is a South Korean web-based mindmap service. This service is touted by its developers as the world's first pure Scalar Vector Graphics-based, no-Flash-plugin-required web technology.
 It is Freemind compatible, is Web 2.0 feature-rich and the good news is that it can be integrated with Moodle.

It's developers/researchers are Professor Ho Won (Division of Electrical Electronic, and Information Engineering,Kongu National University, Cheonan, Chungnam), Jinhoon Jang, Kiwon Park and Myungsun Hahm (JinoTech, Dyryongdong, Yusungku, Daejunsi, Republic of Korea).

They have co-written a research paper entitled "Development of Universal Purpose e-Portfolio Mindmap
System on Open Platform". For those of you who are academically inclined, you can download it here. The paper's principal development tool is OKMM. More papers can be found here. Professor Ho's Moodle module page compilations are found here.


I. FEATURES

Here are some of OKMM's impressive features:

• uses pure Javascript technology - no need for Flash 
• cloud technology - can run on most web browsers without any plugin installation. 
• plays YouTube videos within a node itself (note: as of July 2011, only works with Google chrome and Apple Safari web browsers)
• fetch data from Delicious, Twitter, and Face book (Social Networking integration)
• can be used as a ePortfolio
• has been tested with up to 40 concurrent users who collaboratively built a mindmap
• can be Google Search enabled so that the user can do Web searches within the application while building the mindmap(!)
• export to Freemind, HTML, TWiki, PPT, SVG, PNG
• import from Freemind and bookmarks
• conversion from a mindmap to a structure chart (and vice-versa)
• MOODLE PLUGIN (MOD)! More on this later in this post.
• export to HTML code - hence a mindmap can be embeded in a Moodle webpage or label!
• best of all, it is FREE and UNLIMITED as far as I know. In contrast, a Web 2.0 mindmapping service like http://bubbl.us allows a limited number of mindmaps to be created for every free account.

Click here to see more screenshots of what can be done with OKMindmap.


II.  CREATING AN ACCOUNT AT OKmindmap.com

There is a "Sign in" button located in the upper-righthand corner of the homepage. Click on it (see the diagram below).