Moodle: How do I reset my course at the beginning of each year?

It is probably a good idea at the end of each school year to reset your course.  With resetting your course you can delete grades, quiz attempts, forum posts, and pretty much anything else that your students added to your course from the beginning of the year.  Below is a tutorial on how to reset your course so that you get a fresh start in the upcoming school year.

Tutorial

1.  Make sure you are logged in as the course creator for you Moodle class.  It might reset as well if you are the course teacher, but I am not sure.  Once you are logged into the course you should find under you administration options a link that says "Reset."  Click it.

1a.  If you scroll all the way to the bottom of your "Moodle" page you can choose the "Select default" button, which will do most of the check boxes for you.  This is the option that I use when resetting my Moodle courses.    If you want to see what they other options are for then keep reading the tutorial.

2.  You now have a whole slew of options to play with.  You can see under "General" that I can delete calendar events, logs and notes.  Just select the items you want deleted.

3.  Most teachers are going to want to reset at least the grades from the gradebook so make sure you check the "Delete all grades" option.

4.  If you have created groups of students the year before you can get rid of those groups.

5.  The "Roles" section is also one that for sure you want to reset.  Make sure that you unenrol "Students" by selecting them.

6.  If you students turned in or uploaded documents into the Moodle environments, then make sure you select the "Delete all submissions" option under the "Assignments" section.

7.  Delete the chat history if you want.

8.  I never do forums in my class, but if you do, just pick the options that apply to your class.

9.  If you had your students add to the course glossary, then use this section to delete their entries.

10.  The last option is to delete all quiz attempts.  Make sure you choose this option as well.

11.  Just click the "Reset" course once you are finished down at the bottom of the Moodle page.

Google Sites: Adding Page Level Permissions to your Google Site

Sometimes when creating a website in Google sites, you may only want the public to view certain pages and keep some pages private either to yourself or with a group.  For example I created a site that contains two categories of fillable forms.  One category called High School Forms and one category called District forms.  I only want the public to have access to the High School Forms and only teachers to have access to District forms.  Below is a tutorial on how to create sites with page level permissions.

Tutorial

1.  Log into you Google Site.  Click the "Share" button.

2.  Select your "Home Page" that you plan to give permissions to.

3.  Scroll down a little and start entering people that you want to view private sections on your site.

4.  When you start entering people the box will get a little bigger with a few more options.  I change the "Can Edit" option to "Can View."  I usually send them a message letting the user know that I have now given them permission to view that particular page.  Click the "Share & Save" button.

5.  You will notice a grayed out sentence that says, "New pages inherit permissions by default.  If you want to add a user to a specific page you must first add them at the site level.  If you don't see a place to "Invite people" then you are not at the "Site Level."

6.  Now click on the page that you want to make private with those individuals.  In this case I want to make the "District Forms" page private.

7.  If everything went well you should now see your users with a dashed line.  This means that they can't view that page yet.

8.  Click on the dashed line and you will get a couple of options. Allow this user to have permission to edit the page or can they just view the page.

9.  After you have gone down the list of added names make sure your click the "Save changes" button at the bottom.

Make a comment below if you need added help with these instructions on adding page level permissions to your Google Site.

Google Sites: Users can't see parts of your Google Site.

Google sites has page level permissions that you can set up so that some users can see a certain part of a site that the public can't see.  Sometimes however the people you want to see that private page can't seem to find it.  It might be because they are not logged into the site.

An example:  I want the public to view a page with educational forms such as registration.  However there are other forms that I only want my teachers to view.  After setting up page level permissions, some of my staff still couldn't see the page.  That is because they weren't logged into the site.  Below is a real quick way for your users to log into the site so that they can see the correct page.

Tutorial

1.  Make sure you are logged into your Gmail account.

2.  Go to the site.  In my district's case click this link.

3.  You will notice that the page is not showing.  The image below show that a tab is missing.  I should have a page that says "District Forms."  This indicates that your user isn't logged into your site yet.

4.  Just scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click the "Sign in" link.

5.  After clicking the "Sign in" link the page will refresh and if you set up your page level permissions correctly your users will now see the new page.

Smartboard: Create activities using the Instant Checker Tool

If you haven't had a chance to play with Smart Notebook's Instant Checker Tool, then you should give it a try.  With the checker tool you can create some questions as well as possible answers and then when the correct answer is dragged into the instant checker tool, it will get validated.  When the student's choice is incorrect it will be checked off as incorrect.  Play some games and get your students interacting with technology inside your classroom in the upcoming school year.  Below is a tutorial on how to create an activity using the instant checker tool.

Tutorial

1.  After starting your Smart Notebook, click on the "Gallery" tab and then using the search box type in "checker tool" and hit enter.

2.  Click on the "Interactive and Multimedia" tab and then drag the "Checker Tool" onto your page.

3.  Add a question to the page.

4.  Add some choices.  Each choice needs to be a separate text box so that your students can drag them separately.

5.  Once you have your choices up click the "Edit Object" arrows.

6.  Type in the correct answer.  Make sure you spell it and type it in correctly.  Otherwise your correct answer will not come out correctly when your students drag them.

7.  When the incorrect answer is dragged a red "x" will appear.

8.  If your students drag in the right answer a green check mark will appear.  Notice that only part of the answer is showing.  I haven't been able to find out how to make it longer.  I can use the bottom right handle to make the box appear bigger, but the text still did not fit.  This is a glitch I hope an update will fix.  Your students will get the idea and will love the chance to use your Smartboard to demonstrate their knowledge to the class.

Windows 8: How do I find my installed programs in Windows 8?

Many people aren't liking the new Windows 8 because they are having trouble finding their programs without the traditional style start menu.  Here is a very easy way to find your programs, images, music and anything else on your computer.  The new search feature is awesome when you get used to it.

Windows 8 Tutorial:  How do I find my programs, images, music and other things?

1.  First hover your mouse in the top right corner of your monitor, or if you have a touch screen swipe your finder in the middle of the right side of your monitor.

2.  You will now see a new menu appear.  Click on the "Search" option.

3.  Just start typing a part of the program, file, song, or image you are looking for.  You can see that just typing the letter "c" give me 33 apps/programs, 316 settings programs, and 9918 files that all have a "c" in it.  

4.  You will also see that apps will start appearing the moment you type.  The more letters you type in the less options you will see.  One really nice feature is that it lists the apps, images, music, and other things in order of the frequency in which they are used.  Because I used Google Chrome so often you notice that the "c" brings it up first.

5.  If I type the whole word "chrome" just the Google Chrome icon will be in my results.

6.  Lets say I have a picture of a dog that I am looking for.  I go to my search type the word "dog" in and you can see that under the files tab I have 4 documents containing the word "dog", 3 pictures, 12 music files and 1 other.  Just click on the picture column and I will only see the three images with a dog.

This is the easiest search feature a computer has had yet.  Give it a shot and let us know how it went.

Interact with students using your Smartboard with the Extreme Collaboration Add-on.

I came across this really great Smartboard collaboration tool today.  It is call the Extreme Collaboration.  It is an add-on for the Smart Notebook that allows you students to use any device that has a web browser, ipad, ipod touch, tablets, phones and laptops, to connect with your Smartboard presentation.  They can brainstorm together, answer questions, and be better participants in any classroom discussion.  You can set it up to where it is anonymous or with a user name.  I think I am going to prefer the anonymous mode but then again that could be a little dangerous at the high school level.  Below is a tutorial on how to get started with the Extreme Collaboration add-on.

Tutorial

1.  First you need to install the add-on.  Go to http://www.extreme-collaboration.com/download/ and choose your operating system.  This will prompt the download.  Once it is downloaded click the file and install the program.

2.  Now open up your Smartboard Notebook software.  On your side toolbar click the puzzle piece icon which is where you find add-ons for Notebook. 

3.  Click on the "Extreme Collaboration" button.

4.  You will need to create an account.  You can see that logging in is optional, but if you do you can use the whole set of features that this add-on has.  I recommend it.

5.  Enter your email address and then click the "Get account" button.

6.  Now open up your email and find the new email message you should have received.  Click on the verification link.  Now just fill out the registration information. This will then take you to their website where you can create classes and such and actually have your students login with user names and passwords.  I don't know that I would go through all of that because they can just write in their name on the mobile device themselves. 

7.  After you are registered go back to your Notebook software and login.

8. You will now see your Session ID number.  Your students will need this number.  The best way to show it to them is to click the "Insert QR Code" so that it displays both the website, the number and a QR code for those devices that contain QR code readers.

9.  If students have a QR code reader just have them take a snapshot of the code.  If they are using a web browser, have them go to the "add2nb.com" address and then enter the number code that is generated.

10.  On the student side of things it looks like this after they go to the website.  They enter the number and then click the "Connect" button.

11.  Now back to the teacher side of things, just create a new page in your presentation.

12.  Now you just need to try each of these choices of activity you want to do.  Random position places student answers randomly around your page.  List will put their choices in a organized list.  Stack puts their choices on top of each other.  One of the options you can do is to have categories already listed in your notebook software and the your students will select the list to which they want to add.

13.  Now click on the "extended settings" and play with these.  If you allow images, they can use their mobile device camera and upload pictures.  I like the senders name, because it identifies who wrote what.  Allowing them to change their texting color is fun.  Decide how many messages each of your students will be allowed to put onto your brainstorming presentation.

14.   Once you are done with playing with your settings, click the "Start activity" button.

15.  Back to the student side of things.  This is the view from a laptop.  Students will easily be able to add images from their device and change color.  They just click the send button when they are ready to send their idea to the Smartboard.

16.  Once they have sent in as many ideas that you allowed during your settings setup they will be blocked from sending any more.

17.  Back to the Smartboard side of things you can see that I had set this activity up to be in list form.  The student was able to upload an image and change colors to his ideas.  Also because I had set it up to display names, you can see which student said what.

18.  Then I changed my setting to random and it place the next student's information all over the screen.

19.  Once you are done with the activity just click the "Stop" button and students will no longer be able to add information to your presentation.

I think that the Extreme Collaboration software is going to make teaching classes like Science, Social Studies, and Language are more interactive for your students.  Give it a shot in your classroom and come back to this post and let my readers know how it went.