I just can't figure it....

I just can't figure it....

by Deborah Delin -
Number of replies: 16

Hi!  I'm brand new to Moodle - and floundering.

I am writing an English as a foreign language course for young children using Hot Potatoes.  My quizzes are very heavy on audio and images.

Yesterday I looked up all the posts on this forum on attaching audio and images to quizzes.  I have tried following all the instructions by Gordon, Mary and others, but I am still stumped so am evidently being extremely dense and missing something. 

I zip up my HP quiz in a folder together with the requisite image and audio files.  I upload it to Moodle then unzip it.  So far so good. 

In "Adding a New Hot Potatoes Quiz" I select "Choose or upload a file" .  I open my unzipped file and see all the assets displayed with the option to "choose".  When I choose the JMatch file, then in the Weekly Outline area of my course I see the name of the quiz with an internet symbol  but when I select this I get "This Page Cannot be Displayed".  I tried choosing all the individual images and audio files, one by one, but this didn't work either.  I'm going round in circles.  Please help.

Two further questions for when I hopefully get past my problem above.  For my audio player I am using  hbs_mp3_player.swf.  Do I need to select "force media plug ins" or not?

About putting the Hot Pots file and the required audio and image files in the same file.  I have all my Hot Pots exercises in a file on my computer together with a file of all my assets.  To pick out the relevant files for each exercise is extremely time consuming, but I am not sure if it would be a good idea to upload the whole of my assets folder in one load to my server.  And if I did would each exercise be able to "find" the assets relevant to it? 

Hoping one of you angels out there will have the patience to help me out of my fog and thanking you in advance for trying.

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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Hi there. Is it possible you could upload the zipped folder here so it can be checked? Or if it is too large you could maybe email it to me on mary AT moodlefairy.co.uk . Secondly - does your Moodle display regular hotpotatoes files without any audio and video? And do you have any other problems elsewhere on your moodle displaying files?
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Gordon Bateson -
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I agree with Mary. Start simple, and gradually increase the complexity of the situation till you hit a block.
  1. try a simple HotPot, one with no images, sound files or movie clips, and make sure that works
  2. then add a single image to the HotPot and check that works
  3. then use Insert -> Media Object on the Hot Potatoes application (JCloze, JQuiz, etc) to insert a single mp3 file. Use the "Browse" button to locate your p3 file and select "Add Windows Media player" to create the object tags even though you will be using the standard Moodle player. When you add the Hot Potatoes file to Moodle as a HotPot activity, be sure to set "Force media plugins" to yes.
  4. Now replace the object tags in the Hot Potatoes file with those for the player you want to use. Upload hte new file to Moodle and set the "Force media plugins" to "No".
good luck, and please let us know at which step you get stuck
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Deborah Delin -

OK....this is a bit embarrassing!  Thank you so much Gordon and Mary - although you didn't actually pinpoint what I was doing wrong, your quiet confidence that what I was doing should have worked led me to realise I was doing something fundamentally wrong.  Indeed - when dealing with people as technically thick as myself it is very hard for you to pinpoint just how basic that mistake might be.

So - my problem was URL's!  I had thought that having my MPs's and pics in a folder within the same folder as my exercises was OK.  But of course it produced a relative URL which Moodle didn't recognise.  Got rid of that and - it works!!  I have my work cut out now because I have these relative URL's in everything I have done so far - but, looking on the bright side, at least I am only at the beginning and not at the end of writing the course!

There is just one thing that does not work on my exercise.  Moodle evidently doesn't recognise the Unicode I put in for the ticks and crosses on some of the navigation buttons. Please could you suggest an alternative for producing these in Moodle?  As my course is for children learning English as a foreign language who may not even be able to read yet in their own language, I need to use symbols on navigation buttons.

Thanks so much again - now all I've got to do is learn Moodle (and change 1000 URL's!)!

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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

1- Deborah > I had thought that having my MPs's and pics in a folder within the same folder as my exercises was OK. But of course it produced a relative URL which Moodle didn't recognise.

That is not a problem. Relative URLs are perfectly OK with Hot Potatoes and Moodle. What I do (and recommend my students to do when they author their own HP exercices) is either of the 2 following solutions: when you create your HP exercices on your machine, using the HP software,

  • put everything in one folder, your so-called "myHPfolder" folder, (HP original exercises, their HTML output files, any multimedia files (MP3, images)

  • OR inside your so-called "myHPfolder" folder, create the following folders:

    • exercises

    • images

    • audio

    • texts

Then compress (ZIP) your "myHPfolder" folder, upload to your moodle course files, uncompress (unzip) and you're ready to go...

VERY IMPORTANT WARNING. When you name any file you are using in a moodle course (including of course the HP files) never ever use any of the following "forbidden" characters: blank, accents, apostrophes, quotes, etc. This a constant worry for me with my students because they are so used to naming their MS Word documents using any character that they have to be reminded that some software is not as "tolerant"!


Please remember the usual forum netiquette: only ask ONE question per post. I will answer your second question in a separate post.

Joseph

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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Question #2 Moodle evidently doesn't recognise the Unicode I put in for the ticks and crosses on some of the navigation buttons.

It would be easier to answer you if you actually gave us some examples of those Unicode characters that you want to use. When you say "navigation buttons", does that include the Caption for the OK button "OK", the Caption for the Next button "=>", etc?

I don't see why you should not use what you want:

✔ ☐ →

etc.

Joseph

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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Deborah Delin -

Hi Joseph

Thanks so much for the tips on filing and URL's!  And on netiquette!

Re. the unicode, I have used

✔   ✖

being a tick and a cross on the "check answer" button.  These work fine in Hot Potatoes but come out as two rectangles in Moodle. 

Thank you.

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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Deborah,
I don't get it; do you want a tick or a cross (or a tick and cross) character on the "check answer" button?
Joseph
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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Deborah Delin -
I was actually thinking of putting on both a tick and a cross.  The idea being a tick or cross instead of the word "check" to see if they got it right or wrong.  It isn't a very satisfactory idea I know but I can't think of anything better for non readers.  If anyone has a suggestion I would be very grateful.
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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Deborah,
as Joseph says, both the relative urls and the unicode should work fine.

I tried inserting the tick and cross chars into a JQuiz as the feedback for correct and wrong answers respectively and they were displayed OK in my Moodle site, so it is puzzling why that does not seem to happen on your Moodle site.

Please could you upload your quiz and the related files to my server, so that we can see exactly what you are experiencing:
thanks
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Deborah Delin -
Thank you Gordon.  I have uploaded it as Deborahtest.
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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Gordon Bateson -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Thanks Deborah.

The quiz is working now:
The problem was caused by spaces in the file names (Joseph'S hunch was right there!) of the images and mp3 files. To get the quiz working, I made the following changes to the quiz:
  1. removed all spaces within file names, e.g.
    OLD: angry a.mp3
    NEW: angry_a.mp3
  2. removed spaces following the file name, e.g.
    OLD: value="TheSound=angry_a.mp3 "
    NEW: value="TheSound=angry_a.mp3"
Of course, I then needed to rename the files that had names with spaces in them, by replacing the spaces with underscores. Then "hey presto" - it worked!

The unicode ticks and crosses worked fine without any changes from me.

However, the characters at the end of the title (see above) do not look like a language I am familiar with, so there may be still work to do on those chars. That's your call smile

hope that helps!
Gordon
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Deborah Delin -

Ah so it was spaces causing my problems!  Thanks so much for that!

I have discovered that the Unicode problem is a browser thing.  It is fine in Firefox but comes out as rectangles in Internet Explorer.  As most of my students will be using IE I will have to change the Unicode for something else..........

Thank you so much, again, Gordon.

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In reply to Deborah Delin

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Unfortunately, it is a well-known issue with MSIE that it won't display those tick, check, box, etc. entities. With other people on these forums I keep telling people that MSIE is a bad browserevil and that everybody should switch to Firefox.

If you absolutely want to use those graphics in your Check button (and provide for people using the wicked MSIE browserevil), then you'll have to resort to images instead.

Joseph

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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Gordon Bateson -
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Deborah,
please excuse my ignorance for not recognizing the letters in the quiz title as being Hebrew.
Gordon
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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Joseph - some of us in our schools have no option but to use the "wicked" MSIE browser as it is the only one allowed us...
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: I just can't figure it....

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Mary,
I do know of this problem, and my provoking message was to incite those people with the "wicked MSIE predicament" to lobby their school/admin/techies, etc. to install a good browser such as FireFox.
Joseph
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