Faces block

About Faces

Faces is a simple block designed to give educators an overview of the faces and names of students who are currently enrolled in their course. A simple printer-friendly version of the list can be printed for daily class use and in course exam board meetings where it can be difficult to remember all the faces and names!

Development of this block is currently ongoing, so please feel free to make any suggestions.

Where Do The Faces Come From?

As this tool uses student pictures that have been uploaded by each student. It is important that each student has uploaded an up to date picture of themselves to their Moodle user account. If not, all you will see is the default Moodle silhouette of a user!

Adding Faces to Your Course

Moodle Faces is a simple solution that allows you to view all of your students’ faces quickly and easily on a single page.

The only requirement for Moodle faces to work on your course page is that each user on your course has an up to date Moodle profile picture uploaded that will be used by the block.

This next section outlines the steps needed to add this block and start viewing faces!

Step 1

Log into Moodle and head to your course page. On the top right hand corner of your course page click “Turn Editing On”.

Step 2

From the “Add a Block” menu, you will see a list of blocks that can be added to your course page.

Add Block

From this menu select the “Faces” block.

Add Block

Step 3

An instance of the “Faces” block will now be added to your course page and is ready to go!

To get started with the faces block, simply click “Show All Faces” and you will see a list of all the students in your class.

Faces Block GUI

Step 4 - Ordering

When opened you will see a list of the students in your course, however depending on the task at hand you may want to view the list in a different order.

On the top right hand corner a dropdown box allows the order of the faces to be displayed using their first name or last name as the ordering criteria.

To apply the selected filter simply click “Update” to the top right hand corner after you have made your selection.

Step 5 – Filtering by User Groups

Moodle offers educators the option to sort the users that have been added to Moodle based upon defined groups that have been created on the course. E.g. Group 1, Group 2 etc.

These groups can be used within the faces block to filter the faces that appear on the page.

By selecting “Show all Faces”, every student will be shown. Or alternatively depending on the names that you added for additional groups, these group names would show up in the Filter dropdown menu allowing you to select only a specific group of students to view.

Step 6 – Printing

If you would like a hardcopy of the student face list to be printed, without the added headings added by Moodle, the “Print Faces” button can be clicked to generate a trimmed down version of the faces list. This option will consume less ink when printed.

Hiding The Faces Block From Students

If you would like to hide the block from students:

1. Enter into editing mode on your course page

2. On the top right hand corner of the faces block, click the icon that looks like a man

3. The page will say you cannot define roles, but this is ok. On the left hand side you will see the "Administration" block. Inside this click "Permissions"

4. Beside "View" you will see the Roles that currently have Viewing capabilities, remove the students by clicking the X next to the role and ensure it is only set to Teacher, if that is the role you only want to be able to see the block.

Your students should not be able to see the block!

Code Repository

Although the official releases of the code can be found on the moodle.org/plugins. A development version of the code can be found at: https://github.com/Kylegoslin/moodlefaces

Bug Tracker

If you notice a bug, or would like to sugest an improvement, please feel free to visit our bug tracker at: https://github.com/Kylegoslin/moodlefaces/issues