User talk:Chris collman

New Hampshire Moodlers

Way back when, Don S down in Nashua way asked me if I would like to talk about a New Hampshire Moodle user's group. Interesting. That was a small group at that time. Since then the list is really growing.

For example some overall agencies using/promoting/customizing Moodles in NH:

Exeter Professional Development Center is developing the Portfolio module and trains K-12 Moodlers and does Moodle hosting for their stakeholders,
North Country Educational Services (NCES in Gorham) promotes and trains North Country K-12 schools, and
UNH Cooperative Extension is looking at it
Other Professional Development Centers (groups of School Administration Units, funded in part by NH's Dept of Education) may also be promoting Moodle.
The State Higher Ed (USNH) colleges and universities, along with the state community college system (NHCCS, formerly NHCTCS) all use Bb. Some individual teachers may use Moodle.

So I would guess as of October 2007 there are at least 15 to 25 schools and agencies using Moodle in New Hampshire.

To do

Lesson demo

Hi Chris, I would be very grateful for some assistance with the lesson example in the Moodle Features Demo :-) Please email me. --Helen Foster 12:00, 20 February 2007 (CST)

Hi Helen, I will send you email. Actually been playing today at a portfolio demo site and am demoteacher and demostudent in the North Country Course, topic 5. Maybe you have a better place :)

Just an update. I created 4 Lessons for 1.8.0 and have not looked at them in months. In fact, I put them on a Moodle suggested by Helen and on a localhost and now wonder if I can find all the work I did. Note to file: FIND THEM CHRIS. --Chris collman 06:07, 26 October 2007 (CDT)

Import PowerPoints

First, I want to say that I am in awe of programmers and greatly appreciate the efforts in trying to make a handy tool to assist [adjective_variable here] teachers in bringing in their powerpoints into Moodle. Just looking at the 500 lines of code in importppt.php gives me a headache and realize that what I thought should be simple, is not. Doubting readers are invited to create web pages in MS PowerPoint 2000 & 2003 and in Open Office Impress 2.x, then look at each of the files, especially in View Source Code mode. YIKES, the common ground is slim between them!

The initial goal of Import PowerPoint was to bring in text and images from a series of slides to a series of question pages in a lesson, so the teacher could edit or just go with the imported content. It is now a working part of Moodle 1.6 and a bit Horray!

I seem to be leading a one person campaign to come up with an ImportOOI option when a lesson is created. I figured rather than sit around and moan about a feature I wanted, I should be jumping off the cliffs and seeing if the sharks really would bite. Of course I am SERIOUSLY ignorant in the PHP waters and "not sinking" does qualify as "swiming". Sigh, I held my nose and JUMPED!

In my own unique way (and with the help of others) I came up with a very ugly system which brings in an OOI presentation. Essentially it places a screenshot of each presentation slide in page (branch). Importppt breaks out text and image objects. It does not deal with the masterslide. ImportOOI does not contain links or create page titles, because that is way beyond my skills. I also tweaked the image file storage system and got rid of the previous and continue buttons at the bottom of every page (reverted back to default). This forum has a zip file of my effort.

Anyway, my two bannana's worth. --Chris collman 20:23, 8 May 2006 (WST) updated --Chris collman 07:28, 27 June 2006 (WST)--Chris collman 21:20, 17 July 2006 (WST)

Words with two or more meanings

Hi Chris, firstly thanks for your contributions to Moodle Docs :-)

When a word has two or more meanings, we may create a disambiguation page e.g. Database. Please check Category:Disambiguation for a list of all such pages. --Helen Foster 17:53, 8 May 2006 (WST)

Hi Helen, And thank you for your efforts in editing and watching over contributors. Disambigauation is a NEW WORD for me. I will check it out. Given English language, not to mention regional idioms, figured (there is one right there) that great minds had already thought about this. The link appeared to be deleted but I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation . I think See Also is a simple solution. Anyone who is interested in MoodleDocs might find it.

This leads to the question, where do we direct people who want to learn a bit more about MoodleDocs-Templates? Not a big burning issue. More concerned about importppt.php. See top this page. Thanks again. --Chris collman 19:28, 8 May 2006 (WST)

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. Please check the MoodleDocs Style guide for information on Moodle Docs templates. --Helen Foster 20:46, 8 May 2006 (WST)

Major changes to key pages

Hi Chris, please let's not make major changes to key pages without prior discussion, either in the corresponding talk page and/or in the Using Moodle Moodle Documentation forum. Apologies for rolling back your changes to the Teacher documentation until we have reached agreement. --Helen Foster 04:36, 5 September 2006 (CDT)

I apologize. I read this after commenting on teacher documentation page. Did that late at night and definately a major BAD, should know better. I am running out of Moodle edit time and jumped way too quick. Notice on that major page, I will used the page comment to draft. Thank you very much for the completely unnecessary apologies for doing the right thing.

Don't think I am going to be able to cross the pond to my Aunt's memorial service in October in Sussex. However, my daughter going to Italy in the Spring and I may leave NH to visit her and my English cousins. So we might meet face to face and I can buy you a draft or sherry!--Chris collman 07:33, 5 September 2006 (CDT)

Your comments always make me smile - thanks! It would be nice to meet up one day. Good plan to use page comments to draft :-) --Helen Foster 06:09, 6 September 2006 (CDT)

As you know, I like puns and humor. Sometimes I am too quick and have been known to go over the top. Thanks for the words, I will not take it as encouragement but as appreciation of the status quo. --Chris collman 07:28, 6 September 2006 (CDT)

Import Data to Grade Book

I am new to Moodle and I do not know where to ask this. Please excuse if I am at the wrong place (and if possible tell me where I can ask this or find its answer) . I know that I can post off-line assignment and grade it; Can I use this to import the marks that I have already awarded. I have these marks in an excel file. I know I can grade the off-line assignment one student at a time. Can I copy + paste all the data in one step? Will the grade book plus be of some help? Sanjay P. K. 02:19, 11 September 2007 (CDT)

Hi. First excellent question and asking where to go to find the answer can never be asked in a wrong place. I learned something in trying to help you.

I am smiling because last night I was re-editing the MoodleDoc page Answers that I created in May 2006. It is one of the few pages that I allowed my sense of humor to show in my writing in MoodleDocs. One of the more serious sections lists starting points in Moodle to find answers. We do not use assignments or gradebook, so I am as new as you when it comes to those modules. I would encourage you to figure out where in Moodle Documentation might be a good place to place the answer to your question.

If I wanted to learn more about how to do it I would go to:
- Moodle Documentation on Assignment module related pages
- Moodle Documentation on Gradebook related pages
- Moodle Forums : I did a search of the forums, then clicked on the advanced search, put "import grades" in the exact phrase field and selected just the Assignment Forum. Here are my results. There seems to be a thread on "Import grades from Excel" in the assignment forum that took place in 2006 November. I would read and then reply in that thread, by restating the question, your Moodle version and perhaps what you tried.
- Try your own advanced search, perhaps using import grades and search gradebook forum.
- Try not to cross post the same question on two forums, unless a person in forum A suggests you ask the question in forum B. In which case I would say "forum A sent me here".
From the discussion I briefly read, it looks like you should be able to at least create a CVS file and import that into gradebook. I don't see a page Import assignment grades in MoodleDocs, if you wanted to start one with your new found knowledge. MoodleDocs is easier to read than a forum.

That should get you going on several paths to find the answer. Hope that helps. --Chris collman 05:38, 11 September 2007 (CDT)

Thank you very for the reply. I visited the places you suggested and found an enhancement to import data from excel to moodle 1.6 ( my version). I have asked my admin to try it. Sanjay P. K. 22:17, 11 September 2007 (CDT)

Non-integer grades

I was searching for a way to enter non-integer grades. I found this; "It is currently not possible to use non-integer grades. Others had requested the same feature, however the answer was this:Although it would be technically possible to change to accept non-integers, the whole Moodle framework expects integers to be there. We can't tell where down the line this would cause problems, but it is very much setting it up for something bad." If you know of any later developemnts on this, please let me know; otherwise you may ignore this. Sanjay P. K. 22:50, 11 September 2007 (CDT)

Not sure about version features, I did a quick look at Scales and Grades in demo.moodle.org . Sounds like you have a conversion problem Asci to integer. If you have an excel spreadsheet you should be able to create a column with a function to convert a letter to a integer/number grade I probably would use a =vlookup or =hlookup and a table. But a nested =If function would also work (something like "if A, then 100, else if B, then 89, else if C, then 79" and so forth) . Might have to change that column to a value by a special paste and rename it for import purposes. Problem is determining what grade gets which integer in excel and then making sure that integer will average correctly with other scores that are stored as integers but displayed as letters in Moodle. Interesting problem. Hope this helps --Chris collman 06:35, 12 September 2007 (CDT)

Perhaps I was a bit sloppy; what I want to know is how to enter non-integer numbers as grades; e.g: How to award 5.5 ( out of 10) marks to an off-line assignment? Suppose the overall grade a student will get after completing the course is based on the total marks this student will score in 3 assignments (say each of maximum 10 marks) and suppose I do not want to round off each assignment mark to the nearest integer. Sanjay P. K. 23:14, 12 September 2007 (CDT)

NWIKI

I recently posted this. Then I saw a discussion about NWIKI. Have you used this? Does it mean that if NWIKI is installed all the media wiki tags/tools will work in Moodle? I just wanted to make sure NWIKI does what I want and is stable before asking my admin to install it ( for Moodle 1.6). Sanjay P. K. 23:22, 12 September 2007 (CDT)

Sorry P.K., I think I missed your comment. I don't use NWIKI so have no opinion (unusual for me but true). --Chris collman 08:30, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

Tyler add it below

Thanks for your contributions

Chris, thanks, as always, for your documentation contributions :-) Your talk page comments are very helpful. However, please give me chance to reply before making big changes ;-) --Helen Foster 13:07, 20 February 2008 (CST)

Message received. The only big changes I made were with Tracker (mostly formating) and I didn't think it would do any harm to work on Roles Permissions. But I am happy to move the Permission stuff over to the discussion page. The entire Roles section will take a lot of thought before serious edits begin. I have even resorted for the first time to print the pages to get my head around this subject. Opening 5 broswer windows gets confusing :)

Funny you should mention hold your horses a bit. Monday, I had just posted a new page on Wikipedia about a distant relative (one of the Edmund Quincy's), went downstairs to get a snack and when I came back 10 minutes later to start adding details it was GONE! This was the first of 3 or 4 pages I plan on doing for these men. Some quick trigger specialist told me "Had not enough information to make it special, please consider this before you add any page to Wikipedia". Well duh cowboy, some of us are a little bit slower than others. His example about making Edumund unique had me laughing. Figure he some computer gun stock image counter, with a notch for every page he has deleted :)- Best as always --Chris collman 13:40, 20 February 2008 (CST)

What about mod/balding and other capabilities jargon

Hi Helen, I am confuzeled about the mod/xxx link entries. I suspect this is similar to the editingteacher subheading on the Teacher role. I always thought mod/xxx entries were appropriate on a Development: page. Perhaps is this a case of if you don't understand it, you don't belong here or there? I was wondering if we had a standard way of indicating function in simple english next to the mod/name ? Thanks --Chris collman 14:04, 20 February 2008 (CST)

Hi Chris, good question about the mod/xxx pages. Each edit roles page in Moodle (via Administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles) contains a list of links to all Category:Capabilities pages. The documentation pages have not been renamed in this case, as it's easier for non-English speakers to identify the capabilities from mod/xxx. If you have any further questions, please remember that you can always post in the Moodle documentation forum. Most likely you're not the only one with a particular question ;-) --Helen Foster 05:55, 21 February 2008 (CST)

Thanks again for all your comments, they should keep me pointed down the right paths concerning roles and even templates for a while. I did take a break and watched a full eclipse last night. It was one of those cold clear nights in the mountains. Saw the event from our bed looking out the window. Today it is doing an item analysis on an old quiz for a teacher, so we can upload a new version tomorrow for the test on Saturday. --Chris collman 11:16, 21 February 2008 (CST)

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