Moodle 2.0 - some quick tips

This entry is written especially for instructors at UMD who are interested in moving courses or creating new courses using Moodle 2.0 rather than Moodle 1.9 (which we have used in the past):

• You don't have to create your courses this semester in Moodle 2.0, but will have to move after this semester. I do recommend moving now -- there are features in 2.0 that make it worth while (like the drag and drop that I describe below). 
• If you move to 2.0, courses from 1.9 CAN be copied into your new 2.0 course, but you have to have the Moodle folks do this for you (you don't have the option to import a 1.9 course into 2.0. However, once a course is in 2.0, you then can import a 2.0 course into another 2.0 site). To have your 1.9 site imported, when you request a new Moodle 2.0 site, there is a box for you to paste the URL of the course you want copied, so the Moodle folks know which course you want copied over.
  
• The clipboard feature has now been activated in Moodle 2.0 (just this week!). It is called "Activity Clipboard" (in Moodle 1.9 if was called Clipboard (Experimental).
• Drag and drop feature: this enables you to click on a section or an item and drag and drop it to another place in your site (rather than having to use the old up/down arrow to move something). However, very important: to enable this feature, you MUST enable this in your personal profile settings (rather than in the settings for a particular course). Once you do this, the drag and drop feature will be activated in all of your Moodle 2.0 sites. To do this:

• Under the "Settings" section, go to your profile settings--> choose "edit profile" -->  then under the general section, where is says "AJAX and Javascript" choose "yes: use advanced web features"  (see above screen shot).
• Once the drag and drop feature is activated, instead of seeing the old up and down arrows, you will now see a cross with arrows on each of the points of the cross. If you click on that, you can drag that item (either a whole section in your site, or one of the elements) and drop it wherever you would like to place it within your site.
  
• Profile settings: your profile settings from Moodle 1.9 are not automatically copied over to 2.0, so once you start using Moodle 2.0 you will need to go into your profile settings and set these e.g. uploading your photo. selecting if you want a daily digest of Moodle posts to be emailed to you, setting your campus (I think it defaults to saying you are on the Twin Cities campus, so you need to change this to your home campus if you are not on the Twin Cities campus!), and anything else you want to set.

Parting ways with Jing - switching to Screencast-O-Matic

This week I received a couple of urgent emails from Screencast telling me that my Jing account was about to max out, and that if it did, people would no longer be able to access all the videos I had created on it. So I went to my Jing account and deleted old videos that I no longer needed. However, I then read the small print and realized that Jing has a limit on how many downloads can occur from one's Jing account -- and since my students and others have been watching my Jing "how to" videos more and more, my account was rapidly reaching the limit. Of course this is a clever scheme to get me to pay the $99 per year to enable to increase the storage I have on Screencast and the downloads. But I don't want to go there, as there are many other free options out there...

So, I just tried creating a video using Screencast-O-Matic, uploaded the video to my (free) YouTube account, and bingo -- it is really slick AND works better than Jing (the video I created in my last blog entry here -- on how creating an MP3 for Moodle from a Voice Memo -- I created using Screencast-O-Matic and uploaded to YouTube).

Screencast-O-Matic is really intuitive and easy to use. The first time I used it I had to download a plug in to enable it to work (just follow the prompts to do this), and then it was straightforward. Once I had created the video I had the option of  uploading the video to my Screencast-O-Matic account, uploading to my YouTube Account, or saving the video to my computer. I chose to upload to YouTube (and then I can link to it there or embed it into a page) and I also saved it to my computer.

Try it! I'm eager to hear from others out there about your experiences using Screencast-O-Matic, Jing and other video capture tools like Snagit (interestingly, Snagit is a product of TechSmith, which is the same company that makes Jing).

How to Convert Voice Memo (recorded on iPhone) into MP3 in iTunes and upload to Moodle

This week I had a question from one of my students about how to go about creating a voice recording and putting it into a Moodle course. I have recorded voice memos on my iPhone and before and emailed them to myself, but hadn't tried using these in a Moodle course before. So I decided to try this, and created a video to show how to do this.

I will also describe below the steps that I showed in this video in case you want to have them handy as you try out the process:

1. Using my iPhone VoiceMemo app I recorded myself speaking
2. From within the VoiceMemo app I selected the memo I had recorded, and emailed it to myself.
3. I opened my email, and downloaded the memo into my iTunes account on my computer
4. Next, in iTunes Preferences, I went to the Advanced settings --> clicked on the "Important settings" button and chose to import using MP3 encoder.
5. Still in iTunes I opened the memo (To find it in my iTunes account I went to "Recently added" where it showed up as the latest voice memo that I had downloaded)
6. I selected the memo and then under the "Advanced" file menu I chose "Create MP3 version" --> this saved a version of the voice memo in my iTunes account as an MP3 and added it in my list of Recently Added Voice memos.
7. I then clicked on this version and dragged and dropped it onto my desktop (making it easy to find when I wanted to upload it to Moodle)
8. Next I went to my Moodle course, selected the option to add a resource --> link to a file or website --> and followed the Moodle prompts to upload the MP3 voice memo (that I had dragged onto my desktop)
9. This memo then was uploaded into Moodle and could be played as an audio file directly in Moodle.

How to make a free phone call using Google account

A wonderful feature that comes with Gmail accounts is the ability to make free phone calls (I don't know how this applies outside of the USA, but within the USA you can make free phone calls within the USA). This feature comes with both personal gmail accounts and academic accounts (e.g. University of MN gmail).

I created a short video to show how to make a phone call from my gmail account to show you how to do this:

Using UMConnect (Adobe Connect) from iPad and IPhone

I just came from a meeting where we connected with a colleague in Ireland using Adobe Connect on the iPad, and the quality was excellent! (audio, video and text). Here's a photo I took of the iPad showing what the session looks like on the iPad. This opens up all kinds of possibilities...

Uploading Video to Blog

My students have been working on their blogs, experimenting with different uses for their blogs, and trying to upload different kinds of files. What is interesting is that Blogger enables you to upload video, but not audio files. Here I have uploaded a video that I took at the UMD Take a Stand Rally. I am checking to see if this works. I recorded this video as  Quick Time video using my Canon Power Shot digital camera (just a little point and shoot). It is 18 seconds long, and is 24 MB. 

A mistake people sometimes make when uploading video to blogger is missing the step, once you have uploaded the video, to click on the blue "add selected" button to add the video that you have uploaded to the blog entry, as shown in this screen shot below:

Once you do this, the video is added to the blog. Then the last step is to make sure that you post the blog entry to your blog:)

Update on posting audio file - by using link to Google Doc

I'm still working on ways to upload audio files as part of my blog. As I noted in my previous entry, this worked great using my Posterous blog, but isn't as easy in Blogger, as Blogger doesn't allow you to upload an audio file. To get around this, what I have done is:

1. Upload the audio file into my Google Docs account
2. I made sure to change the share settings for the file in Google Docs so that it is set to be visible to anyone who has the link
3. Then I copied the link from Google Docs
4. Here in my Blogger blog I can share the link. If you click on this link it will take you to my Google Docs

This isn't a great option as in my experience the more steps you require of an end user to be able to access something you share with them online, the less likely they are to follow through and access it. If it works simply, quickly, intuitively with one click, and if it doesn't require actually downloading anything (i.e. users can view online, rather than downloading audio file, pdf or other file), then it increases the likelihood that people will access the file.

I did find some guidelines about audio files in Blogger, and it seems that they are advocating variations of what I describe above. Here are some guidelines about this:

• Posting music/audio 
• A consuming experience. This describes a much more complicated approach where you combine the audio with a stationary screen shot to make a video, and then upload this video into blogger (why Blogger allows you to upload video and not audio beats me!).  While this is a clever idea to use this workaround, it's really a lot more work to do and may put off a lot of folks (like me!) who want a quick and easy way to upload audio files.

My evolving thoughts on this: 

• If I wanted to use my blog to share a lot of audio files, then I might consider using Posterous rather than Blogger as my blog too because if the ease of uploading audio files. 
• Another thing that I also prefer about Posterous is that I can sign into it using more than one email. This is important since I currently have to use my personal gmail account for my Blogger blog rather than my education gmail, and use separate browsers for each, because of the security restrictions on the education account. But, for now, since this tech blog is in Blogger, I'll stay here -- at least for a while!

Posting Audio File to Blog

I've been playing around with audio file sharing via blogs, and found that this is easy to do on a Posterous blog, but not in Blogger. To do this in Posterous what I did was:
1. Use my iPhone Voice Memo app to record a voice recording on my phone
2. From within the app I chose the option to share the recording by emailing it, do I emailed it to my my Posterous blog (as that's an option for how to post in Posterous). I also included the text content of the blog as the email message.

It worked! Check it out:
http://hrallis.posterous.com/testing-to-see-if-i-can-upload-voice-recordin

Synchronous Distance Ed is wonderful when it works, utterly frustrating when it doesn't!

Roller-coaster distance education experiences for me this morning! I was on the receiving end today, in the capacity of a student in two separate experiences, the first amazing, inspiring, and fascinating, and the second filled with potential, but for today, merely frustrating and marginalizing. Both of these were really valuable, because when the technology does work, I learn so much from the content of the lesson and from seeing ways in which technology can really enhance learning. When the technology doesn't work, even though the lesson content is lost, I still learn a great deal about how to trouble shoot and  what doesn't work. But also very importantly, I learn what it is like to be on the receiving end, as a student, experiencing first hand the frustration of being left out and marginalized because I can't get the technology to work. I know that the teachers on the other end are doing everything they can not to have me feel this way -- but this is still part of the reality of online teaching. So let me share more about each experience:

Experience 1 (the amazing, inspiring and fascinating one!)


This morning I joined a live (synchronous) Geography of Bahrain class taught from Bahrain by my brother, Donald Rallis, who is a geography professor at the University of Mary Washington in the U.S. state of Virginia. Donald is currently in Bahrain, en route to Cambodia. He teaches World Regional Geography, and tries when possible to do so from some of the countries about which he is teaching. In addition to posting photographs in Picasa and maintaining a Regional Geography Blog about his travels when possible he conducts real time classes using a free synchronous meeting tool called DimDim (but don't get excited about trying it out -- it is about to cease to exist -- but there are other equivalent tools out there). During these live classes we can hear him and if necessary see a video image of him (but today he didn't use video, possibly because this can compromise audio quality). He teaches using an interactive lecture style where he shows lots of photographs (using PowerPoint uploaded into DimDim), sharing a variety of web pages related to what he is saying, plus uses other media (e.g. video, graphs) as needed. As he does this he asks the class questions, and students respond by typing their answers or asking their own questions in the chat window. I have a screen shot here to show you what this looks like:

What makes these classes perhaps even more interesting and engaging than if they were taught in person, face-to-face is that they are taught on site. There is a certain "wow" factor knowing that Donald really is on location in that country, but more than that, what he does is sometimes is turn his webcam on so that we can see what is going on around him. Using his laptop he will turn the camera so that we watch traffic going by as he describes traffic congestion and how transportation affects the lives of people. I remember watching one class that he was teaching where he had a hotel room overlooking the Straits of Malacca, and as he taught us about the importance of location, we watched ships behind him passing through the straits.Quite remarkable!

Experience 2 (utterly frustrating and marginalizing, yet also valuable):

This semester I am taking a class for university faculty about teaching with technology. The class consists of series of workshops taught from the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. I think that most participants will be from the Twin Cities campus, but others can join from the coordinate campuses (Morris, Crookston, Rochester and Duluth). Today was our first day. The instructors had done a great job ahead of time emailing us about what to expect and about how to connect to class. We were given the URL of how to join the class using UMConnect (the university version of Adobe Connect Pro). We were also asked to install cross-platform software called Movi, and given a very detailed, informative set of PowerPoint slides with directions and screen shots showing us how to download and install the software, and how to get started to join the rest of the class online. From what I can see so far is that Movi is a video-conferencing tool that enables all participants to see and hear each other, and also to be able to share our screens with others. Yesterday when I practiced connecting from my office, it seemed to work fine...

Today I logged in to UMConnect and Movi shortly before class was due to start, 10:00 a.m. U.S. Central time. UMConnect worked great -- I got into the room and said hi, via chat window, to the other participants. Then I opened Movi... and it was downhill from there! What I could see from what others were typing in the chat window was that everyone was having problems getting audio to work in Movi. But I couldn't get it to work at all for more than a short time. I could login and see the video of me, and a couple of times the videos of everyone, with the sound coming through in very short bursts, but never where I could make out anything anyone was saying. Then Movi would crash and I'd have to force quit and restart. In the meantime, others appeared to be moving right along (no pun intended!), and the poor instructors were trying to help me and everyone else using the chat window to trouble shoot. Here's a screen shot showing you what this looked like:

The problem is that Movi uses a lot of bandwidth, and I think the assumption on the part of the presenters was that everyone would be connecting using a high speed connection. I work at home on Thursdays (it is my online teaching day and I get much more accomplished if I teach from home where I am not interrupted). My Internet connection speed is supposed to be high speed, but mostly is not, and it is very unreliable. It works (usually!) for my own teaching using Moodle and UMConnect, but clearly was hopelessly inadequate for the demands of Movi (I tried doing just Movi, rather than both UMConnect and Movi at the same time, but still no go).

So, lessons learned!

• I will have to go to campus on Thursday mornings to connect using high speed connection
• Movi looks like a tool with tremendous potential, but not if I am to use it with students who do not have very high speed connection. Since accessibility is critical issue so as not to marginalize anyone, that means that it isn't an option yet for my own teaching.
• When I use tools that use a higher than normal bandwidth (such as Movi, but also UMConnect), I need to include the technology requirements with the information I send out to student before class so they can look to see if they have what is needed. I also need to find out if they don't, so I can make alternative arrangements so that they can still participate in an equitable way, or else I need to use different technology. [In the case of this faculty workshop here, using Movi is part of what we are learning, so this isn't an option for them. It's different for me when I am teaching students]
• Even though I am relatively technologically competent, I am not immune from feeling like a lost child, ready to scream and cry and rant and rave when this $&(&$##@##)!! [insert your own interpretation of what that means!) technology doesn't work!! It is a horrible feeling, with all sorts of negative thoughts swirling through my mind:  I feel incompetent, like it is just me and everyone else gets it and I don't, why am I doing this anyway, is it worth it, I would rather be outside playing right now, I hate computers, why do I live in the woods rather than in "civilization", etc etc. In other words, I think I am feeling exactly like many of my students who are taking my Distance Education right now have felt at times during my course! And if they are reading this, they are grinning right now and thinking, "Welcome to our world!!" :)

Blogging While In The Woods

So this afternoon my techo journey is taking me out into the woods on a walk with our dogs, my iPhone, and newly downloaded Blogger app. I am typing this with my thumb as I multi-task my way along the trail, taking photos, typing, but mostly soaking in the beauty of this stunning fall day. Ah yes -- this is one of the finer points of distance education -- being able to get outside and still work (at least for a while -- once I hit "publish" I will become one with the woods and abandon technology for a while!).

Let's see if this works!:)