Hi Edward,
Just to second what Mary Cooch has already said, it is really quite easy for an "ordinary" teacher (I'm another example, but less expert than Mary) to be the admin of their own Moodle. It does take a little time though.
But as you've already seen, there's a whole bunch of people willing to help on the Using Moodle forums.
Cheers,
Glenys
Hi Séverin,
A public thank you for all the work you, Nicolas Martignoni and the few others do on the French docs.
Also for the pleasure of writing to you for once in English.
Amicalement,
Glenys
Hi Vernellia,
What do you mean by, "the where it is set up won't work"? The Question & Answer forum has always worked fine for me.
Could you maybe post a screenshot of what you see as not working?
You maybe need to create a dummy "student" so that you can see what happens from a student's point of view. In "teacher" role it appears quite differetly.
Cheers,
Glenys
Hi Oleg,
The way I deal with your dilemma, if I've understood it correctly, is to use two different Moodle activities: one for learning activities where they can ponder and have have as many tries as they wish, and another for testing whether or not they have a body of knowledge.That is, I use Hot Potatoes for learning activities, and Quiz for testing. Each of these can be used for both learning and testing, but not equally easily.
With Hot Potatoes it's easy to make the scoring invisible until the activity is finished, to give constructive feedback and, if necessary, links to outside resources (that's my way of doing what you suggest: letting students decide whether they need help or not). Presenting Hot Potatoes through QuizPort (Moodle 1.9) also allows the teacher to stipulate pre and post conditions to guide students through exercises in function of their level. (I don't actually use this: I tried and my adult students expressed extreme frustration!)
With Quiz it's easier to make a real test to evaluate a student's level. I use it for placement testing. It's easy to make it clear there's only one correct answer and no second tries. There is also more variety of question types. And you can analyse the results to see if what you think are "difficult" questions really stump more students.
Using the two different activities/modules also makes it clearer to students what the objective is: learning or testing.
Cheers,
Glenys;
PS. Loved your recent "rants" on a completely different subject. It was always perfectly clear to me that they were controlled "actors" rants.
Hi Gordon,
I think it would be such a shame if people didn't find your wonderful work just because it's not in the Plugins directory. We who know come to this forum, but newbies don't.
Cheers,
Glenys