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

OKMindMap plugin for Moodle 2.3 and Moodle 2.4.1 (okay, it's for Moodle 2.x!)

Here's a glimpse of the OKMindMap plugin in action on my Moodle 2.4.1 production site. Full blog post is coming soon. Stay tuned to this channel...erm, blog.

All the features highlighted in my blog post on the Moodle 1.9 version are either retained or have been
enhanced.

Dr Ho and associates from South Korea have done the Moodle community a big favour by releasing their Moodle 2.x plugin for OKMindMap. It's an awesome project that over the past one year has seen enhances to its Graphical User Interface and usability.

I'll blog about it in my next post. See you next week by which time I will have gathered sufficient information for my blog post! In the meantime, I've got a day job that needs my attention.

Regards
Frankie Kam

Update on Friday 29/3/2013

Thanks to Dr Ho Won of South Korea for the link to the Moodle 2.3 plugin for OKMindmap which is here: http://www.modulestudy.com/Wonho/Moodle/download/okmindmap_23.zip

OkMindMap's new Ribbon. South Korean Mindmap gets better.

Checkout OKMindMap's new makeover!

Judging from the video by Dr Ho of South Korea, this new version of OkMindMap is a vast improvement over the earlier version which I blogged about here on Moodurian.blogspot.com or here on Moodlenews.com..




Doesn't the Ribbon remind your of Microsoft Office products?

If you watch the Youtube video above, you will see that an iframe node, containing another website, is possible in this version. Amazing!

So, what do you think of the new OkMindMap?

Frankie Kam

Giving the Davo Smith's Realtime quiz a pie chart

I've blogged on Davo Smith's excellent Realtime Quiz for Moodle 1.9 before here. Today's post is about my latest enhancement to that plugin - a pie chart to visually show the breakdown of scores. After all, doesn't every table cry out for a pictoral representation like a graph or a chart?

Back in February 2012, I was tinkering around with a pie chart code I found on the Net. Here's what I came up with for the Realtime Quiz for Moodle 1.9.

Seems that the table data is crying out for a chart of sorts to display visually summary information. The pie chart code is by Rasmus http://www.peters1.dk/webtools/php/lagkage.php?sprog=en
You can download the file piechart.zip. It contains the two files, responses.php and piechart.php, which allows the pie chart to appear. Both files, when extracted, should go inside the /mod/realtimequiz folder.

Have fun with this new makeover for Moodle 1.9,
Frankie Kam



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Export Questions from the Moodle 1.9 Question Bank into Ms Word

Moodle2Word is a great Moodle plugin by Eoin Campbell. With it, you can import Ms Word tables as Moodle quiz questions. You can also export Moodle quizzes from the Question Bank into Ms Word format. Eoin has a fantastic website resource that, thanks to his hard work, gives you tons of tools to do import and export of Moodle <--> Ms Word quiz questions. He's written the plugin for versions 1.9 and 2.x for Moodle. All you need is to login as Guest.

At the end this post, you will be able to export Moodle question bank questions into this Ms Word format:

Like what you see? Read on!

Welcome to dev.moodlebites.com – a single location to demo Moodle 2.x plugins

Moodle is a rich LMS. It is made richer by the wealth of third-party plugins that extend your Moodle site’s functionality. When sourcing for plugins, where does one start?  The most obvious would be to go to Moodle.org’s Plugins Directory.

For those who are still using Moodle 1.9.x, I would like to recommend this French-Canadian site for a comprehensive listing of “Potentially great” Moodle 1.9 plugins.

If you’re using Moodle 2.x, then it might interest you to know that http://dev.moodlebites.com is a Moodle 2.2.3 site setup by Stuart Mealor that allows you to test many Moodle 2 plugins. Expect it to be upgraded to Moodle 2.3 soon.

See the image below? Well, I managed to create my own “Frankie Kam” self-enrolled user account and thus am able to do more than what the Guest account affords me (think forum posts and other activities).

The site allows you to try out many Moodle 2.x plugins, filters and blocks in a safe environment.

The primary purpose of this site is to have a single location that demonstrates many of the things that are possible with non-standard blocks, modules, filters and plugins in Moodle 2.

The site currently has 35 plugins, listed alphabetically. Expect more to be added as Moodle 2.x matures and develops over time.

Read more at Moodlenews.com here.

Cheers,
Frankie Kam

TimeStat: track student presence in your Moodle by the second

Here's something from the archives of MoodleNews.com that I had to post on Moodurian.blogspot.com.

Figure 1: A really cool block.
Be prepared to edit the weblib.php file though.

TimeStats is an indispensible module "...that tallies and reports total seconds and minutes that students have been in a course. It’s great for tracking overall usage and gives a little better information than just click tallies and page views"

Figure 2: See how versatile the TimeStats plugin is?

Joseph explains it very well on MoodleNews. Here's what his post looks like. I'm using Bitty Browser to display the below content. Looks cool right?