Wordle - beautiful words

Another site for making content more interesting, put simply you can paste any text you want to and the Wordle site will generate an image with the words arranged as a word cloud. Words that appear more often are shown in a bigger font. See below for an example of a Wordle made from a short passage from a Midsummers night dream:

You have complete control of fonts, colours and layout directions or you can simply click 'randomize' until you find a combination you like.

It's particularly good for collections of definitions. It isn't a 'magic bullet' but it is a useful addition to a collection of approaches for a teacher trying to make content varied and interesting.

This week I have mostly been working on..

I've been interested in the idea of including parents more in A level delivery for some time. This is largely based on the fact that students are very tight lipped about their studies to their parents. I know we are meant to follow a pedagogical approach to learning but the sad fact is that there are significant numbers of students who fail to see the cause and effect of not working now leading to them failing later. Effective parental involvement can lead to better results.

I want to enlist parents by keeping them closely informed of students progress. I've also noticed that in recent years the number of parents with email addresses is almost reaching 100%. The solution was to develop an email newsletter system that can embed individual data sets in each newsletter in graphical format. What this means in essence is that you can embed results graphs for an individual student.

Students can also see how they are progressing, it provides a good way to give students structured feedback on their progress.

An online editor allows you to insert 'merge' fields. The user can choose from a variety of email newsletter templates. Taking the concept further I have also added functionality to embed RSS feeds, Flickr Feeds and Twitter feeds. This means that current content is very easy to add.

Although still in development it's coming together nicely. Currently it uses CSV files uploaded but later it is my intention to link it in to Google spreadsheets. I was also considering adapting it as a Moodle Mod so that it could take data from the Mark Book.

The really cool thing about the charts I embed are that they are generated dynamically in PHP so you don't need to store hundreds of images on your server.

Presenting Prezi

Every so often you come across a web 2.0 site that is really special, Prezi is one such site. It lets you produce eye catching presentations that are much more interesting to look at than PowerPoint. Presentations are set on a huge canvas that you move around as you add content. You can zoom in as well as zoom out as you move between the elements of the presentation. The effect is difficult to describe but students love it.

Coca Cola Company on Prezi

The interface for creating your Prezi is one of the most intuitive that I've ever come across. It has loads of features (too many to list here). Trust me and take a look, you won't be disappointed. http://www.prezi.com

Email Newsletters Re-purposed

Because of the way Moodle themes work courses can all start to look the same. One way around this is to use email newsletter templates (there are many free available on the internet) as a header for your course. This has been very well received by our students and definitely give a more polished impression of your course.

We use the template to provide useful information about the course such as schemes of work, who the tutors are and crucially because we have very long courses, section links to different topics.

It does require a little work uploading the embedded images and updating the src attributes of the image tags to point to the uploaded images in the files area. Tip: keep all your image files for the template in a subfolder.

You can find a variety of free newsletters here

Xerte Online Toolkit - strange name, great software

Xerte is a free open source product for creating interactive learning materials. There are a couple of variations here. Xerte which is a desktop application and although immensely powerful and flexible it does require a degree of technical expertise to use. Still if you have some experience of simple scripting it shouldn't pose too much of a problem. 

The alternative is the on-line toolkit which can be installed on a web server and provides simple point and click functionality with a wide variety of different interactive pages. I promise that once set up this bit of software is an absolute joy to use.

One of the BIG pluses of this approach is that the learning materials are stored and edited on-line. This means that you don't have the hassle you have having to edit and re-upload powerpoint presentation. The other advantage is that the system has accessibility built in.

You can view an example I have created embedded below (it provides the code to do this!):

You can see a showcase example from Xerte here

Xerte Toolkits home page is here

First Mod to Moodle

I've just finished working on my first mod for Moodle. I've developed a simple slider based on bxSlider and jquery. I've integrated it with a moodle news forum so that as posts are added to the forum the slider will automatically show the new post. Any image attached to the forum post will be used as the image on the left. If no image is attached a default image is used. Content is clipped at a limit specified as a setting. Clicking anywhere on the slider will take the user to the relevant post in the forum.

The new code sits in the forum folder and the slider is displayed through the use of an iFrame. The good thing about this approach is that the iFrame code can be pasted into the HTML view of the content management interface of Moodle. You can see an example below:

This can be placed on the front page or at the top of a course. No changes were made to Moodle system files, although it does require some extra files being copied to the /mod/forum/ folder

I'll have a 'P' please Bob..

Sometime ago I wrote an educational quiz in PowerPoint based on a well known quiz in the 80's (those of us of a certain age will remember it well..). Anyway the other day I rediscovered it...It really was rather good.. You can download a copy here.

What I liked about my solution is that the questions are typed into the Notes section and then the game board was built dynamically from the first letters of the questions. When a 'cell' is cicked the question is displayed, click it again and the cell turns blue, again and it turns yellow. In this way student teams have to attempt to build a solid line of colour from edge to edge. This means that it can be easily adapted for any number of quizzes.

Cool Iris Gallery

Cooliris is a free flash based gallery that can easily be integrated into any website, content management system or virtual learning environment. What's really special about it (apart from the fact it looks and works brilliantly) is that it can be configured to read from a Flickr account. This means that gallery images can be easily managed by the user on Flickr and and new images or changes are immediately shown through the Cool Iris gallery without the need for paying a web developer to update your pages...I clearly haven't thought this through have I...

The Magic 8 Ball Chooses..

I am currently working on a moodle course block that will randomly choose a student to answer a question in class. Why bother? Well the difficulty in class is that you have a tendency to not question students in an evenly distributed way. There is a temptation to ask the student you know will be able to answer. 

The concept for the block is to devise an algorithm that will systematically ensure that all students answer questions but (and here I confess to being particularly pleased with this rather devilish variation) if a student gets a question wrong a weighting is applied to selection so that they will be selected more often to answer questions. Students who answer correctly will be less likely to be selected. The exact weightings will be set  (or indeed turned off) by the course administrator in a block settings page.

To make the concept more interesting to students I have decided to model the selection on a Magic 8 Ball. The user will select a group from a drop down and then click the Magic 8 Ball graphic resulting in it shaking and a student name appearing in the middle. Buttons will also be provided to say whether a student answered correctly or incorrectly. For students who are absent the Magic 8 Ball will simply be clicked again to select a different student.

Open Cart: What a superb bit of free software

Just finished a job for a good friend of mine Simon Thomas over at R2Design which involved customising a free shopping cart system called Open Cart. The system is written in PHP and is based on the MVC design pattern (see my previous post here.)

I am absolutely astonished at the range of features provided by this excellent piece of software and all completely free. Take a look at their home page for more details.

Piece of Cake!

Recently I was introduced to the MVC design pattern. I have been involved in object orientated design for some years and was vaguely aware of design patterns but never really understood how they could be applied. MVC is a fantastic example of just how useful design patterns can be.

MVC stands for Model, View, Controller. Essentially any web based system is arranged so that you have a set of methods and properties for handling data (the model), a set of methods and properties for handling application logic (the controller) and the view is concerned with output to the user.

Web applications using this approach are far more robust and flexible. It makes extending functionality a joy since each part of the application is not tightly bound to the other areas of the application. One such PHP based system is called Cake PHP which provides a ready made MVC web application framework which if used correctly radically improves code productivity, security and reliability.

Another widely used (perticularly on larger scale projects) is the Zend Framework

The learning curve for these development environments can be steep at first but well worth persevering with..

This week I will mostly be working on...

A new theme for the Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle) at Shrewsbury 6th Form College.

Currently the Moodle interface at the college has many drawbacks:

Whilst the layout is full width, it does not make use of screen 'real estate' intelligently. A huge amount of space is given over to daily notices. Although some attempt is made to draw attention to these through the use of colour and animated GIFs (!) the overall effect is a wall of text that most students simply don't read.

It doesn't offer a 'jumping off' point to other areas and the blocks used are not organised or used in a way that considers the end users.

Also the header image is huge and takes a lot of room without really offering any useful functionality. Essentially it is the header from the website and students when asked have never used any of the  links along the top.

My proposed design:

 

The new design is fixed width (optimised for a minimum horizontal resolution of 1024). The announcements have been replaced by a content slider that I propose to hook up to a standard news forum. The message will change every 10 seconds or so and show the last four messages added to the news forum. 

The design does not reflect the final content only the layout. It's likely that emerging requirements will mean the content will change but this can be done through the standard Moodle blocks and content editing.

See the current progress at:

Test Moodle site