An interesting way to navigate Moodle with hotspots

  Nicholas Walker of Collège Montmorency has shared an interesting and instructive post on how to create a Moodle block that contains a image with hotspots that link to various parts of your Moodle course.

For those of you who would like a different approach for your users to navigate through your Moodle activities and resources, why not try it out? You can read about his method at http://adte.ca/2011/09/navigate-moodle.

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]

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?

Internet access to your Moodle site slow? Untangle to the rescue!

So you've tweaked your Moodle site's performance until your eyes are red from too much online reading. Your network has no bottlenecks, at least that's what your network engineers says. Your network's running on a fast broadband line. However, no matter what you do, the line is still running slow and your Moodle site's loading slowly. Your organisation doesn't have or can't afford a good hardware firewall. After a while, your network is falling prey to students' bit-torrenting and unmonitored video streaming. Your network's grinding to a halt. What's next? Well how about using Untangle?

Untangle won't improve the speed of your Moodle site - which is either on your own private server or on a Web Hosting company's server. Untangle will help you to block unnecessary website surfing and unproductive protocols like (IM, Peer-to-Peer or gaming services). So in effect, your Internet access is controlled. So when your users surf to a Moodle site, the experience is smoother and faster. The free-version is not fool proof, meaning that there are ways to circumvent the blocks, but there's always the premium package that comes at a monthly fee.

Untangle is a software appliance that manages every aspect of network control from content security to web caching, remote access to policy enforcement, all from one simple, drag & drop command center.

Figure 1: The Untangle solution - it's free unless you install some of the premium modules