Essay question type preview for students? (ATTO equation preview? Tables preview?))

Essay question type preview for students? (ATTO equation preview? Tables preview?))

by Peter Halverson -
Number of replies: 3

Hi all,          (Moodle 2.7.5+)

I am assigning essay questions to my physics students and they are typing equations into the ATTO editor.

The students need to know what their work will look like to the person grading.  (That would be me, or a T.A.)

Right now this is what the student sees:

Is there a way for the student to preview the appearance of his/her essay before submitting/finishing the quiz?

(I realize that fixing the equation editor would provide a preview of individual equations, but even then the students need to see what the whole essay will look like.)   (The discussion of ATTO's broken equation editor is here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=279931)

Additionally, I sometimes ask my students to construct a table of experimental data.  But the final result look different from the appearance in the editor.  So this is another reason why an overall preview of essay question type responses before submission is needed.

Thank you for your help!

Peter Halverson

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In reply to Peter Halverson

Re: Essay question type preview for students? (ATTO equation preview? Tables preview?))

by Mauno Korpelainen -
TinyMCE has a preview plugin but it can't handle filters and scripts of moodle without tiny hacks. Anyway you can check the idea from tinymce 4 demo http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/basic.php - press View > Preview in editor toolbar.

If core developers want to create such plugin to Atto they can simply create a dialog (modal) window that takes all necessary scripts to header and footer of an empty page and adds the content of editor to this dialog. Or add a button to Atto that switches to a non-editable "preview mode" (other modes normal Edit mode and HTML mode ( < > )

Or a similar button as teachers have when they preview their questions might do the same thing. Personally I would like to have it in editor because it could be used in other activities as well.
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In reply to Peter Halverson

Re: Essay question type preview for students? (ATTO equation preview? Tables preview?))

by AL Rachels -
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Hi Peter,

Head on over to this forum link: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=280386#p1206068

The idea of an Atto preview button has arisen there also this week, and Daniel Thies has already got a working prototype.

AL


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In reply to AL Rachels

Re: Essay question type preview for students? (ATTO equation preview? Tables preview?))

by Peter Halverson -

It works!  The ATTO preview is great!

Thank you, Al, for the tip.  And of course thanks to Daniel Thies for writing the plugin!

For anyone interested, the preview code can be obtained here:

https://github.com/dthies/moodle-atto_preview

I did run into one hiccup.  My server has strict rules regarding the permission settings of php files and directories.  To get it to work I had the change the directories permissions from 664 to 644 and php files from 775 to 755.

My student will really appreciate the convenience.

Peter

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