'Motivating' users to change their default Moodle avatar in Moodle 1.9.

Do you use Moodle’s default user icon (avatar), or have you substituted it with an icon of your choice? In this post, I will talk about what I consider, for my site, an ideal default user icon. The purpose of this post is find a way to encourage users or students to quickly change their default Moodle user icon.

In my classes, I insist that my students change their default user icons to images (faces) of themselves.  The reason for this is because, one, I got tired of looking at so many yellow smiley faces. Two, I wanted the Moodle coursepage to be a bit more Web 2.0-like in terms of having actual user faces. So, in every introductory session on Moodle, I inform my students to change their icons. There has never been much great urgency among some students to do so, especially among those who do not have a Facebook account.

However, I believe that with my discovery of a ‘different’ default user icon, I can get more students to make the change, sooner.  Intrigued? Click here to read more!

 'Moodle' cake recipe

Create your own Chatbot - Great for English Classes

HTML5 Speech Recognition API with Google Chrome

Meet Nick Walker

Use with Google Chrome to access the voice-to-text Automated Speech Recognition system (ASR).
Like what you see? Want to know how to setup your own Chatbot with custom speech questions and answers?

Contact Nicholas Walker of Montreal.

Upload files faster and easier in Moodle 1.9 with less mouse clicks. What do you think?

Moodle 1.9.x is like old wine that keeps getting better. There are a 1,001 different ways to innovate and enhance the code. Here's what I managed to do, recently, with the "Link to file or website" resource.

The humble Browse button has sprouted siblings. In this case nine other Browse buttons. Why settle for just one Browse button, when you can have 10 of them! In the screenshot above, you are 11 clicks away from uploading 10 files. Still, you might argue that that's 11 clicks too many still. However, considering that there are no page refreshes between which picking of each file, this feature will be welcomed, I am sure, by teachers and site administrators.

Secondly, here's what I did to enhance the "Advanced loading of files" assignment activity. Now students can upload multiple files within a Moodle assignment. They should now have less reasons why Moodle is so "clunky". The benefit of this? Less mouse clicks, less page refreshes and more student and user satisfaction. After all, time is money.

RSS Plus - a new RSS Kid On The Block for Moodle 2.x

I. What RSS is

Do you use a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) block on your Moodle site?  RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it (from http://www.whatisrss.com/).