Moodle messaging is a fantastic tool but it is often abused by our students here at college. Students have been reported to spend too much time sending messages in class. Often the male students spend time looking for female students to whom they can send a message to.
When a student receives an unwanted message they can report it by clicking a link.
Although it is possible to remove forum posting rights using roles in Moodle I needed a quick way to ban posting rights for a particular user and forum.
We use Moodle as a student intranet as well as a VLE. On the student intranet we have a student forum where students can discuss almost anything. Occasionally, some students abuse this and post inappropriate messages. We required a way to ban re-offenders from posting to the student intranet forum but retain their posting rights for their course forums.
The Moodle bar provides a quick glance as to how many users are using Moodle at any point in time. In order to extend this functionality we created an Online Users page which does exactly what it says on the tin.
It grabs a list of active users that have been using Moodle in the last 5 minutes. It displays their name and a link to their profile.
When an administrator views this page they see a link to Moodle Detective, a loginas button, an edit profile button, a message history button and an option to send the user a message.
It was brought to my attention that when Moodle filters out a word found in the "bad words" list it in fact leaves the word in the alt text. So moving your mouse over the word "Scunthorpe" produces some quite interesting results!!
The resolve this I edited the file filter/censor/filter.php
And around line 36 replace this code
$words[ ] = new filterobject($badword, ‘<span class="censoredtext" title=".$badword.">’, ‘</span>’,
with this:
As an active XBOX gamer I really like the XBOX Gamercard that allows you to view your score and game progress and compare this with other users.
In fact, I liked the idea so much that I built a Moodle version.
Creating an index on the mdl_log table against info speeds up a standard Moodle installation. Some users have reported huge performance increases, so much so that people have suggested that this be in the standard Moodle build by default.
So far I have noticed some improvements but nothing quite as fantastic as other users are reporting, having said that, maybe you may notice a speed increase to your site, try it leave me a comment here.
This has quickly become of my favourite Moodle books as it offers something completely different. The book focuses on using Moodle as a teaching tool and mixes both the technical know-how and the pedagogical theory to great effect.
This book is ideal for any teacher/tutor who wants to use Moodle interactively. The book teaches the reader how to build an effective online course by promoting the use of the book module, forums, workshops, wikis and other core activities. The use of groups and groupings are not only explained but also put into practice.
At last! I found the time to fix this!
The fact that Moodle does not support full screen FLV playback is something that has troubled me since day one. The button is there and many staff and students complained that when clicked it did nothing. After sifting through the code I managed to gain a much deeper understanding of the player and noticed that the fullscreen attribute is not included in the standard Moodle distribution.
As I’ve said many times before, I love the MyMoodle page and I’m always looking for ways in which to improve it. So my colleague and I, Sukhwant Lota (@sukhwantlota) set about creating Moodle Folders.
We needed something new for the start of the summer term and we needed a custom way to sort long course lists on the MyMoodle page. Being avid fans of Google Mail and Docs we liked the idea of using tags and labels, so in effect this is how Moodle Folders works. The user simply creates a tag/folder which is assigned to a course.
I have created a new skin for the MP3 player in Moodle. It looks much better than the default one. When I get more time I will create some more and make them available for download.