Forum

Hello there. In reverse order..

• you can  use group pictures to highlight who your fire starter team facilitators are. You'd need to add them to a group and give the group an icon which would then be seen on the forum posts (See mine -they are the groups I belong to) See documentation on Groups
• You could expore forum ratings -by default you can rate posts but you might also want to allow your fire starter team (or even students themselves) to rate. See documentation Forum settings and in particular the section on Rating. When you set up ratings you have to set up a scale. If you are on the latest version of Moodle, 2.8 then you can have just one scale "Like" which would cover your first point, although I am not sure if you could use ratings to rate attendance AND have a single, like scale. For the Like scale see documentation Forum FAQ section 2.1

You ask a question about "level of attendance" that always generates some good discussion.

First, the simple thing to do is to use ratings, giving 1 point per post, and using "count of ratings" to contribute towards a students grade.  Right? Simple?

Well, not so.  What will you define as a perfect ("A") score?  10 posts, 100 posts, 1000 posts?  Also, once students catch on to this, they might start making many simple posts.  For example, instead of providing a paragraph of ideas, they might instead provide sentences of ideas.  One ends up with essentially the same problem when teachers try to use "number of words" as a criteria for grading papers... students can easily increase the number of words without any more intellectual content.

So consider what you really want from discussions, and try to configure your forums to encourage what you want.  For example, you can set up a forum using ratings, where you expect a minimum of 5 quality posts, and then rating each post on a 1-4 scale based upon quality.  If a student makes 5 excellent posts, they earn 20 rating points, which can be a perfect 100% (an "A+).  The burden is on the instructor to read every post, and have some form of idea of what a "1" is versus a "2", versus a "3", etc.  If a student makes 5 posts, let's say: 1 excellent, 3 good, and 1 fair, they have earned 15 points, and the student can decide if they want to make more posts in order to reach the 20 maximum points.

Well, this is one idea.  It attempts to encourage "quality" instead of "quantity."  Maybe others will suggest other ideas.