Students have long been taking advantage of the college’s access to Google Drive for completing course work. Assignments completed in Google Drive, however, could not be easily submitted as assignments…until now. Google has introduced a new plug-in for Moodle that streamlines the submission of student assignments completed using Google Drive. The plug-in allows students to turn in Google Drive files through Moodle, and then allows instructors to grade and provide feedback through the Google Drive interface, using the native commenting features of Google Docs.
We held a short hands-on workshop on Google Course Kit last week, but in case you missed it, check out more detailed instructions on adding Course Kit to your Moodle site. If you need further help or have any questions, please contact a member of the Instructional Technology team.
Do you use Moodle? Do your students use (or want to use) Google Drive for coursework?
Google has recently introduced Course Kit, a plugin for Moodle that facilitates assignment submission using Google Drive. Course Kit seamlessly integrates into Moodle allowing students to submit assignments in Drive, and allowing instructors to provide feedback using Google Drive commenting and editing tools, while also integrating with the Moodle Gradebook.
Join us tomorrow, February 20, from 11:30-noon in the Advanced Technology Lab to learn about Course Kit. Register here or feel free to drop in.
After the first full week of classes, let’s look at some of the most frequently asked Moodle questions:
1. Where are my Moodle sites?
This question pops up every year from students and faculty alike. Students frequently look to Moodle to get a jump on their assignments or to get a preview of the syllabus before the class meets. Oftentimes, a student will log in and find that one or more of their courses are not listed and be concerned that something is wrong with their course registration. Most often, though, the course Moodle site just hasn’t been made visible to students yet by the faculty member. Students can contact the IT Service Desk for confirmation as to whether a site should be visible, or look to their instructor for guidance.
When the same question comes from a faculty member, the most common reason for the problem is an outdated browser bookmark. Each academic year, Information Services installs a new, updated version of Moodle, which is located at a slightly different URL. Using http://moodle.conncoll.edu will always get you to the current year, but if you’ve bookmarked Moodle, you may be looking at a previous year.
2. How do I add someone to my course site?
All students will automatically have access to any Moodle site for the courses in which they are registered. However, faculty often need Moodle access for other students who are not registered for the course, either because those students are serving as teaching assistants or tutors, or because the student is taking an Independent Study and is using much of the same material. Anyone with a Connecticut College username can be added to a Moodle site, using the instructions here. Depending on the role selected, users can be given student-level or teacher-level access to any site.
3. How do I email all my students through Moodle?
Moodle has a couple of different ways of sending email messages to students, each with their own advantages. One way is to post a message to the Announcements forum that is located at the top of the page on all Moodle sites. Anything posted to the Announcements forum will be emailed to all the currently-listed participants in a course. One advantage to this method is that all posts remain in the forum for the duration of the course. This allows any students who may add the class later, after a message was posted, to be able to go back and review earlier messages. Any student can look back at the Announcements forum to see any post, even if they have deleted the email from their inbox.
Another method of emailing students is to add the Quickmail block to a course site. Look here for instructions on setting up and using the Quickmail block. The benefit of the Quickmail block is that it allows flexibility in who an email goes to – instructors can select all members of the class, individual students, or groups of students.
Download and save your Moodle Gradebook(s). As a matter of best practice, IS suggests that you save the grades that you’ve entered into Moodle. A course’s Moodle gradebook can be downloaded in Excel format and saved for long-term recordkeeping.
Check out your Moodle courses for next year.Moodle for Academic Year 2018-19 is up and running. Minor changes to the system may happen over the summer, but all currently scheduled courses have been loaded. If you’re teaching a course that doesn’t appear on your course list in Moodle, first confirm that it’s on the course schedule and you are listed as the instructor. If not, contact the Office of the Registrar. If it is on the course schedule, but doesn’t appear for you in Moodle, submit a WebHelpDesk ticket.
Return your library books. Books and other library materials that were checked out this year have a due date of May 18. Return all your loans to either Shain or Greer by that date. Don’t forget any equipment you might have borrowed from Media Services or the Digital Scholarship and Curriculum Center.
Submit your list of course reserves. Please help library staff avoid the crunch at the end of August by submitting your list of Fall course reserves to your library liaison or directly to Bridget Pupillo, Reserve and Circulation Assistant.
In this post I would like to build on Ariella Rotramel’s and Anthony Graesh’s posts on course management systems and describe how I use Google Sites to deliver content and manage students’ assignments.
What is Google Sites?
Google Sites is the website building application in the G Suite productivity suite. The application allows you to easily build a webpage from scratch or customize a template. Although intended for webpages, Google Sites is a versatile and useful tool that can be used for many purposes. Two features make it especially useful in the classroom: collaboration and privacy.
Why do I use Google Sites?
Collaboration and privacy are the main reasons why I chose Google Sites as my course management system for my upper level Italian courses. In these courses I mostly use open-ended written responses to readings and other course material on a weekly basis. I require students to submit their writing assignments as Google Docs and share them with me so we can edit collaboratively. Google Sites allows me to manage all these Google Docs files, which, depending on the size of the class, could be close to 200 per semester, effortlessly and efficiently. Moreover, it allows me to consolidate both students’ assignments and content delivery in the same place. In these courses I tend not to use many of the features available in Moodle, such as gradebook, rubrics, and quizzes, therefore Moodle was never my first choice.
How do I use Google Sites?
For each course, I build a simple webpage using the “Classic Sites”. I use this mode because it is the simpler but more flexible builder and allows me to design my site the way that best suits my purposes. I restrict access to only the students in the class, who also have permission to edit.
This is a snapshot of the course I am teaching this semester where I use Sites.
I use the main page of the website to post the body of the schedule of topics organized by class meetings with links to either PDFs or online resources. I find linking and posting course material much easier and faster in Google Sites than in Moodle. Any changes in schedule or announcements can easily be incorporated in the body of the page. In dedicated areas of the main page, I add other resources that students might need for the course. I then create subpages for each student enrolled in the course. Students have complete control over their subpages and over their own Google Docs files, which they can share either just with me or with anybody else in the site.
On the first day of class I show students how to edit their webpages and divide them into sections, each one devoted to a certain group of assignments. I ask them to adhere to a naming convention (so that I can easily track what was submitted or not submitted.
Students’ subpages look like the one here
Submitting their work on this customized platform is very easy for the students. They work on their Google Docs and, when they are ready to submit, they follow these simple steps:
select Edit mode on subpage
write the title of paper and due date under the appropriate category
highlight title
click on Link icon
add shareable link of the Google Docs file into the Web Address Box
hit Save
What are the advantages of using Google Sites?
For me there are a number of advantages, in courses of this nature, to use Google Sites over either Moodle or My Drive with separate folders and subfolders for each course.
It prevents My Drive to be flooded with files from students.
It prevents My Drive from having too many folders and subfolders.
Content and students’ work is consolidated into a single separate space, that is saved in My Sites (NOT in My Drive).
All the students’ Google Docs files are easily accessible for revisions and neatly organized.
Faculty often create assignments in which students are asked to complete a worksheet or template. When using Google Docs for this, a common practice is to either make multiple copies of the template and share the copies with individual students , or to give students access to the original document so the students can make the copy themselves. The former option is time consuming while the latter option is risky, as students may make inadvertent edits to the original document.
At a recent NERCOMP event, I picked up a great Google Drive tip from a colleague (credit to Carol Damm of Brandeis University). There is a quick and easy way to make copies of a Google Doc (or Sheet or Slide): by changing the word “edit” to the word “copy” at the end of the URL for a Google Doc, the URL becomes a command to create a duplicate of the original Doc. The modified URL can be pasted into an email to students, or posted on the course Moodle page. A student clicking on the link will be prompted to create a copy of the original Google Doc, which will then be stored in the student’s own Google Drive. That resulting file can be edited by the student, and subsequently printed, saved as a PDF, or shared.
Due to demand, we are re-publishing this post from earlier in the year!
Did you miss the weatherproofing workshop last week? We focused on three types of activities you can do with your students if you are unable to attend class. Here are just a few ideas we shared. If you want more information or need step-by-step instructions about anything mentioned, contact Diane Creede or Jessica McCullough!
Record mini-lectures or a full lecture. This can be so easy and done on the fly! Record audio directly on PowerPoint slides, or make mini-lectures and share with students. Students can listen/watch from any location, and you can include some of the more participatory ideas below to hold discussion and check for understanding. Technologies we demonstrated are PowerPoint (Insert Audio feature), QuickTime audio/screen capture, Jing, and whiteboard apps such as Educreations.
Hold discussion, collect responses, and continue group work. Students can participate in discussion and participate in group projects just as they would during class. Use a Moodle Forum to elicit responses to readings or your recorded mini-lectures, or to hold (asynchronous) discussion. Google Docs can be used for group work – ask students to add you as an editor and check in, answer questions, and provide feedback as they progress.
Meet virtually. Have an exam coming up and want to be available to answer questions or hold a review? Hold virtual office hours using a tool such as Zoom. A free license allows for a 40-minute virtual meeting. We have a limited number of Pro licenses that we can distribute for longer meetings. Other options are Google Hangouts or Skype.
*This post was scheduled for later in the day, but we are publishing it now due to the weather!
Did you miss the weatherproofing workshop last week? We focused on three types of activities you can do with your students if you are unable to attend class. Here are just a few ideas we shared. If you want more information or need step-by-step instructions about anything mentioned, contact Diane Creede or Jessica McCullough!
Record mini-lectures or a full lecture. This can be so easy and done on the fly! Record audio directly on PowerPoint slides, or make mini-lectures and share with students. Students can listen/watch from any location, and you can include some of the more participatory ideas below to hold discussion and check for understanding. Technologies we demonstrated are PowerPoint (Insert Audio feature), QuickTime audio/screen capture, Jing, and whiteboard apps such as Educreations.
Hold discussion, collect responses, and continue group work. Students can participate in discussion and participate in group projects just as they would during class. Use a Moodle Forum to elicit responses to readings or your recorded mini-lectures, or to hold (asynchronous) discussion. Google Docs can be used for group work – ask students to add you as an editor and check in, answer questions, and provide feedback as they progress.
Meet virtually. Have an exam coming up and want to be available to answer questions or hold a review? Hold virtual office hours using a tool such as Zoom. A free license allows for a 40-minute virtual meeting. We have a limited number of Pro licenses that we can distribute for longer meetings. Other options are Google Hangouts or Skype.
YouTube is amazing. With nearly 1 billion hours of uploaded video, the site hosts an impressive array of content germane to many topics in my courses. But YouTube is also a rabbit hole of distraction. I’ve gone to YouTube to watch a four-minute video on mitosis and left over an hour later having watched eight videos featuring farm animals attacking humans, nearly 14 minutes of carpool karaoke with Madonna and James Corden, and maybe 12 minutes of Queen at LIVE Aid. Thanks to increasingly savvy logarithms, the opportunities to click on other “suggested” videos are seemingly endless. And then there’s the cesspool of oftentimes caustic user commentary that continues to erode my faith in humanity.
Suffice it to say that sending students (or faculty) to YouTube to watch and think about only one video is like sending my 8-year old to a candy store to do her homework. It’s just not gonna happen. So my challenge has been how to use YouTube content without all of the distractions. My solution, detailed below, is to embed the YouTube video into my Moodle site and to do it such that only the video displays.
Read step-by-step instructions in the document embedded below.
About a year ago, I shifted my course syllabi to Google Docs as a strategy for more nimbly handling the inevitable hiccups and improvisational changes to scheduled meetings during the semester: snow days; opportunistic class visits by colleagues and other scholars; newly published research addressing course topics; etc.. As a result, any updates to syllabi are immediately available to students and other course participants. You can read more about this here.
For similar reasons, I’ve since shifted to using Google Docs for all of my lab and other assignment instructions. Whenever I correct a typo or tweak an assignment parameter, the changes are rendered in real time, and I don’t have to convert the doc into a PDF, upload to Moodle, and delete or replace the old version. Fewer steps, fewer keystrokes, fewer headaches. Huzzah.
I might even consider shifting my courses entirely to Google Drive – for example, check out Ari Rotramel’s approach – but I’m a huge fan of Moodle’s online submission tools, gradebook, and quickmail features; I find all indispensable to my pursuit of less paperwork, less email, and a streamlined workflow during the semester. But Google Drive and Moodle can happily play together. Links to Google Docs, Sheets, and Maps are easily curated on Moodle with other course content and, when properly framed, all of these apps facilitate and enhance student collaborations in ways that are seldom afforded by other software.
Recently, in a moment of glorious nerdiness, I figured out how to take this simpatico relationship one step further, or how to display the contents of a Google Doc in Moodle. My simple goal was to have my Google Doc syllabus display – not as a link but, rather, the actual contents – near the top of a course Moodle page. In effect, the syllabus becomes the digital center of all digital content and workflow while retaining its autonomy as a document that can be shared with colleagues or added to a tenure or promotion file.
The path to embedding the Google Doc into Moodle is not overly complicated, but it does require a dive into various menu commands and a minor tweak to some HTML code provided by Google. For those who take the plunge, here’s a brief video tutorial as well as some step-by-step instructions and notes:
Open up your Google Doc in one tab of your browser and your course Moodle page in another.
Make sure that your Google Doc is shared or, at minimum, viewable by anyone who has the link.
In your Google Doc app, select “File” from the menu bar, and then select “Publish to the web”. (Make sure you’re selecting from the menu in the Google Docs app and not the upper menu bar that belongs to your browser.)
Click on the “Embed” tab in the window that opens and copy the link. If no code is displayed, press the blue “Publish” button. Copy the code, and then close this window with the “X” in the upper right.
In Moodle, turn editing on, and then select “Edit topic” for one of the major topic sections of your Moodle page.
You might name this section “Syllabus”.
In the Summary box below, select the “<>” button which allows you to edit the HTML source code.
Paste the code you copied from Google.
Some tips and code for making more screen real estate, making the document editable in Moodle, and for loading up on bookmarked pages in the embedded Google Doc below.
Students have long been taking advantage of the college’s access to Google Drive for completing course work. Assignments completed in Google Drive, however, could not be easily submitted as assignments…until now. Google has introduced a new plug-in for Moodle that streamlines the submission of student assignments completed using Google Drive. The plug-in allows students to turn in Google Drive files through Moodle, and then allows instructors to grade and provide feedback through the Google Drive interface, using the native commenting features of Google Docs.
Engage 