John Tutchings

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users/

I had to edit an avi file over the weekend, a quick search and I came across this bit of software.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/avidemux/
Fairly easy to use and very quick to extract a section of the film, also allows for getting the image of a frame.

To allow for the export of the Moodle grade book so that it can be imported in to Universe, our SIS, the code on the main Moodle Hub server was changed as described in http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=115898

Came across Panopto today, very nice.
Fits in to Moodle and looks very competive with Echo 360 and Wimba Live Classroom.
The main site is http://panopto.com/ and a very good video of its features. This is of course a good example of it working.
It seems to tick most of the features we want, indexing the video, meta tag search and also live casting which is required for the Master Class series.

A couple of virtual walls

One is http://wallwisher.com and the other is http://www.spaaze.com/

this is my test wallwisher http://wallwisher.com/wall/W3a4HEw9HH

A friend of mine who has fading eye sight and enjoys compiling crosswords, including a 3D crossword calendar that he is selling for Children in Need, has challenged me to get a talking crossword puzzle.It started off as a chat where Eric said he had been playing with putting wav files in an Excel spread sheet so that it would play the sound when you entered the cell.  I pointed out that not everyone has Excel and suggested using html (yes, not everyone has the internet, I know) but Eric does have a copy of Jaws screen reader and suggested he had a look at the comments anti-spam feature on this web site.  If you click the image of the anti-spam word it produces a wav file with the word spelt out, try it.

I won’t be giving too much away if I tell you that on the sever there is series of wav files, one for each letter and number that are passed to a function that stitches the files together to make one big file.  This made me think, when you read out what has been entered into a crossword puzzle you tend to say “A, something, something,A”, which would mean making another file called something or blank.The location of a word could possible be done using div and alt tags along with some mouse over events.First steps are

• Work how to stitch wav files together like  Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam
• Look at wav file format
• Test various ways to use html to display a 15×15 crossword 

Eric’s 3D Crossword Puzzle http://www.calendarpuzzles.co.uk/ all profits to Children in Need http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/

When I was studying I sometimes wished………

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3145673/professor_hits_student_in_the_face/

To help tutors manage their students we are using the City/Town field in the users profile for storing the students course code.  This means tutors will be able to view the course code and sort by it when they view the participants list in Moodle.

To alter the text displayed in the profile page it was a case of editing the moodle lang file in lang/en_utf8/moodle.php.

To stop the students from editing it the line $mform->removeElement(’city’); was added to the user/edit_form.php

A set of videos on how to theme Moodle

One

Two 

Three

Four

Just came across this video on how to allow parents in Moodle, while we don’t intend to have parents accessing Moodle we have certain people around the Uni that may take on the role of a parent for certain students. 

Beside parents you can create an inspector role that can go in and view the various courses.