Moodle in English: Looking for a simple note-taking tool

General add-ons

I'm looking for some creative suggestions for using either a core feature or well-supported add-on as a simple tool for non-editing teachers (not very familiar with Moodle) to use to make themselves private notes during a course. This should ideally be printable or exportable as a document as well.

I have ruled out using a Wiki as not sufficiently user-friendly. I have considered trying to force the Feedback Activity, the Comments Block or the Blog to do at least some of what I want (via settings and permissions - no code changes) and even willing to consider an LTI integrated app if there was one that matched the requirements.

Seems to me that note-taking capability during a course might be widely appreciated.

Any ideas?

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This is interesting idea. Sometime this week or next week, I might experiment with a block plugin that can be used to add dragable & resizeable notes on course page

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Sounds good Mohamed.

To clarify what I am looking for is a way for teachers to write down observations during the course to be used as both feedback to the content provider (site owner/course developer) and for themselves to improve subsequent sessions of the course. We have many schools and many teachers using the same course with separate groups. Each teacher will be instructed to log their individual observations and I hope to find an easy way to do this in the system. They need access to it later on and also the site admin needs to be able to access/export.

A simple block where you could select what type of note you want, enter some free text (with a timestamp?) then output to table/spreadsheet would be ideal. Oh, I wish I was a programmer....

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Hi Heidi,

I would recommend the Database activity for note taking the way you describe. If you have the module installed, you could also use the Dataform activity, which gives some additional capability such as a Nanogong audio recording field..

A database activity can be setup so that only the teacher/admin and the person making the entry can see them using require approval. The capability for exporting is already built in using CSV to MS Excel or OO Calc.

Let me know and I can give you a database preset that I have that is modified from an FAQ preset located here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=87005

Hope this helps,

PS: Probably would have to play with the permissions or groups for the database activity that you set up for this. I normally do not have any non-editing teachers so I just ran an experiment. Students would be able to see anything the teacher or non-editing teacher wrote with the way the permissions are set right now.

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Thanks Al. I've always been a bit afraid of the Database Activity but I do think it is exactly what I need here. If I use separate groups and have each teacher in their own group they should only see their own entries - right? If you could send me or point me to a good preset to start with - that would be great! Thanks Again.

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Daily Notes-preset-20130627_1432.zip

Hi Heidi,

Here is the preset for what I presently use that I modified from a FAQ preset by Steve Y from 2007. The preset I am including was made on a Moodle 2.5 site so if it doesn't work on yours let me know what version of Moodle you are using and I will see if I can generate one from the same version of Moodle.

I am sure you will have to play with groups/groupings to limit visibility like you've mentioned.

Hope it works for you,

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Thanks Al - This great! Preset loaded and all looks good. Still need to test more but I think this exactly what I've been looking for (and not so scary after all).

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As an alternate to developing a new block, you could also consider:

Creating a Page resource or label for them directly in the course. Change permissions to allow them to edit only that one item, and hide it from students.
Letting them use the HTML block to enter their notes. The block could potentially get very long and ugly, so move it to the bottom of all the other blocks.

You could write a SQL report to pull the contents of either option into a report for compilation.

Just a thought.

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Thanks for the good suggestions Kimber. I appreciate your responding. I think I'm going to try the Database Activity for this one first and see if I can manage to work out the visibility.

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