Now you see it, now you don't - making the SpeakPipe icon selectively appear or disappear on your Moodle 1.9/2.x site.

Mashup: a creative combination or mixing of content from different sources. 

SpeakPipe is a cool Web application that allows the readers of your blog, website, Moodle site to send voice messages instead of text feedback.  If you are new to SpeakPipe, Madras Geek has written an excellent article on it here. Dorian Love also has an excellent post here on SpeakPipe.

I think that I have created a mashup of sorts by combining SpeakPipe embed code with Moodle pages. More so because I now know how to make the SpeakPipe icon appear or disappear based on the type of Moodle resource that is currently accessed by the user, or by the URL of a Moodle webpage.

Thanks to Howard Miller, I was introduced to the powerful yet humble me() function.After several hours of testing and Googling stuff, I finally got it working. Here's the code snippet of my Moodle theme's header.html file:

How to combine a FLV video and a PowerPoint presentation on the same Moodle page

There are several ways how you can combine a PowerPoint with a video on the same Moodle page.

 I don't know about synchronising a PowerPoint with a video, but I can manage a 3-paned window by using 1995-technology HTML frames coupled with Xerte. Here's a demo of a prototype of what I think you are looking for, minus the synchronisation (which I have no idea how to do): http://www.moodurian.com/xerte2/index2.html
a related post is here:
http://moodurian.blogspot.com/2011/07/t-his-mashup-was-originally-posted-by.html

The PowerPoint was transformed into a flash swf file by using ISpring free version.

Marginalia and Nanogong co-existing in your Moodle 1.9 forums - a match made in heaven

In this post, I will explain how YOU can fortify your  Moodle forum by getting  the non-standard mods Marginalia and Nangong to co-exist in harmony. As Hannah Montana would sing, "it's the best of both worlds!". At least on a Moodle 1.9 site.


Nanogong

The Nanogong voice recorder by Dr. David Rossiter and Gibson Lam of Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is an excellent audio recorder for Moodle. As mentioned on the Nanogong website, "it provides a very simple and transparent voice support for Moodle".



Marginalia

Marginalia is, as Geof Glass, the author puts it, "is an open source Javascript web annotation system that allows users of web applications to highlight text and write margin notes."

Red text indicates grammar mistakes by the student. Green indicates the correct sentence or text.

Cool Video Quiz: Mashup of Xerte and Moodle quiz

This mashup was originally posted by Joseph Thibault in moodlenews.com on 22 February 2011. As reported by Joseph, it displays "additional quiz information and content in tandem to a Moodle page".  It uses the Open Source e-Learning tool named Xerte. The mashup allows your students to view a video on the same page as the quiz questions that test their understanding of the subject matter taught in the video.

More links related to this quiz format "novelty":
1. Moodle.org forum discussing the mashup.
2. Youtube video demonstrating the mashup.