Seattle Academy

Seattle Academy

Seattle Academy is an independent secondary school of approximately 560 students. The upper school has had a laptop program for all students since 1997 and has used Moodle since 2005. Here we document how we have configured and customized Moodle 1.9 to best serve students and faculty in this environment.

Note:  These are draft recommendations by Gary Anderson of Seattle Academy.
They will be reviewed for final consideration and implementation by our technology
staff in consultation with the other teaching faculty.

Server Configuration

Default Settings

These settings apply to Moodle 1.9 Beta4 which is still in development.
In some cases, the default settings may change and so some of these
customizations may not need to be changed and would be for reference only.
As we were early users of 1.9 on a school production server, a number of our
default suggestions have been applied to Moodle base code as as appropriate.

Site Administration Block

Grade category settings

• Hide forced settings - Yes

We like to keep the interface simple for teachers, so those settings that cannot be changed are not visible.

• Aggregation - Simple weighted mean of grades -- not advanced

This is not designated as advanced because teachers will want to set courses to "Weighted mean of grades" if they assign different weight to grading categories like "Daily Work" and "Exams". Simple weighted mean of grades is probably better called "Average of points". It does the common computation of taking the number of points (or marks) earned divided by the number of points possible. This should not be confused with what is called "Mean of grades" which is probably better called "Average of percents". With this computation, grades are normalized to a percentage and then averaged.

• Aggregate only non-empty grades - Yes -- Advanced

If an activity is yet to be marked, it is not factored into the students grade. If the activity shoudl earn no credit, the teacher would give the activity a zero. This would be marked No in the less common case that the teacher wanted activities to be given a score of zero until they are marked.

• Include outcomes in aggregation - No, Force,advanced

Our school does not use outcomes, so we hide these settings under an advanced setting. Since outcomes adds elements to the user interface for teachers and make the gradebook more complicated when used, we force it to hide the feature.

• Aggregate including subcategories - No, advanced

Having this featured turned on causes Mean of grades not compute grades if grading categories are used (unless every activity is manually given a grade).

• Keep the highest - none, advanced

This option is seldom used.

• Drop lowest - none, advanced

While this option is more common, we keep it as advanced to simplify the interface for most users.

Grade item settings

• Grade display type: Real

However, category summaries are normally percentages (including course summaries), so teacher must manually set these up when setting up their gradebooks. Advanced grade item options: We use the defaults excpet for "Grade display type" which is set to not be advanced because teachers must set these for category and course summaries.

Scales

• Remove: Separate and Connected Way of Knowing

This must be here for historical reasons in Moodle's development. We don't know what it is and will not use it. This must be done before the scale is used in a course.

• Added: Not Submitted, Submitted

Seattle Academy faculty are expected to, at a minimum, let people know the status of a student's assignment submissions in Moodle. With this setting, activities can be marked as satisfactorily submitted or not. Potentially, submitted could be treated as 100% for that assignment and not submitted as 0%, so the percent of submitted assignments could be reported.

Grader report

• We use all the defaults except Column average display type is Percentage

Custom patches to the code

To do: Add this section. Seattle Academy has several dozen customizations to the Moodle code for the high school environment, in many cases posting them to Moodle tracker for future versions..

Custom blocks

To do: Add this. We have a half-dozen custom blocks for reporting status on assignments, attendance, and other progress indicators to ease the use of Moodle in a high school environment.