Students are sometimes disappointed when they see nothing has changed on the course page since their last login. (and sometimes they expect teachers to update all of their courses every 24 h)
That's why I was looking for an easy way to add a nice website I happened to stumble upon as a link inside my course. Up to now, this meant logging in, go to the course, create resource and copy-paste the link inside the form.
That's why I was looking for an easy way to add a nice website I happened to stumble upon as a link inside my course. Up to now, this meant logging in, go to the course, create resource and copy-paste the link inside the form.
I looked at Backflip and Furl as alternatives. They give you the possibility to add a smal javascript-bookmark to your webbrowser's shortcutbar or favorites. You can add links to your account with a click of the mouse. This however means maintaining two collections: quizzes, assignments with resources needed for them, and the collection of links inside backflip. Besides: the links I add to Backflip don't show up in the 'Recent activity'-box so my students (instead of clicking on the link to go the backflip-page) would still close their browsers and think of me as their lazy teacher...
It isn't exactly social constructivism (it's still the teacher providing resources for the student to learn with) but I made a new module that can be added to Moodle and that adds FURL or backflip-like features to Moodle.
I've called it bookmarktool, but mainly because furl-it is already copyrighted. Anyone has a better idea? I think it would be better if it was not a separate module but would just be added to the bookmark feature Williams Castillo started. Maybe it can be useful in the meantime
Basically it works like this:
- Add the bookmarktool to your course / section like you would with any other activity...
- Moodle makes a javascript-link that you can drag to your browser's shortcutbar (Have only tried out on IE, should work with Firefox, Mozilla, Opera as well)
- From now on, everytime you stumble upon a nice site you can hit the button and the website's URL and title get added to your course as a resource.
(Afterwards you can do whatever you want with it: change it's description, make it open up in a popup-window, delete it, move it, it's just another resource...) - The javascriptlink remains inside your favorites, so next time you find something you can add it with one click. I Have five buttons (one for each course I teach): I login once and I can add resources to all my sites without having to change courses.
I know this tool can be misused. There is not much educational value in showing a collection of links to your students. It however can make it easier to add some extra resources on topics that could maybe interest some of your students.
I tried to make a flashmovie describing the module. It sometimes is a slow download (800 Kb). You can take a look at the separate screenshots of the movie here. The tool itself can be downloaded here.
This is my second try at writing a PHP-program: you definitely don't want to test this module on your production server!!!
Install instructions are like for any module, and included in readme.txt
