Moodle plugins directory: Amanote - Distance teaching

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Distance Teaching with Moodle and Amanote

Turn PDFs (slides, syllabus, etc.) to interactive content that allows your learners to reach their full potential: note-taking, highlighting, class survey, learning analytics, oral explanations, and much more...

Amanote offers an easy-to-use solution that does not require any software installation or account creation for the teachers and the learners. Amanote “Podcast” allows your teachers to record oral explanations on any PDF course material (slides, syllabus, article, etc.) hosted on your Moodle instance. The students can then listen to the audio recording while taking notes near the corresponding page of the course material. Thus, students have the opportunity to actively follow the course rather than watching passively a video. In addition, the Amanote format consumes up to ten times less bandwidth than a video.

Trusted in academic world

More than 100 000 higher education students chose Amanote to take notes during their lessons.

Eric Willems - Learning Technologist at Univeristy of Namur

« The challenge we set ourselves every day at the University of Namur is to accompany technological innovation in order to anchor it in a pedagogy that is itself innovative and stimulating for learning. In this context, proposing the potential of Amanote to our students seems obvious. »

How it works

For teachers (online course creator and learning analytics)

If they wish, teachers can add oral explanations to their course material and consult the learning analytics. Learners can then listen to oral explanations while taking clean, structured notes, highlighting, researching, and more. That will make your learners more active than when they watch a video.

For learners (note-taking)

Once the plugin installed on your Moodle instance, a button will appear next to each PDF file. This button will allow to open the PDF from Moodle to Amanote. Learners don't have to create an account, everything is linked to Moodle. They can then take clear and structured notes linked with the course materials.

During the note-taking, the learner can:

• Write enriched text next to the each page of the document;
• Add annotations to the document;
• Insert images, formulas, drawings into its notes;
• Highlight text in the document;
• Export its notes along with the document in several formats (PDF, DOCX);
• Mark a page as understood or not understood.
• And much more.

How to install

In order for the module to work properly, please check that the following requirements are met on your Moodle site:

• Amanote filter is enabled (Site administration > Plugins > Filters > Manage filters)
  
• Web services are enabled (Site administration > Advanced feature)
• Moodle mobile web service is enabled (Site administration > Plugins > Web services > External services).
• REST protocol is activated (Site administration > Plugins > Web services > Manage protocols)
• Capability webservice/rest:use is allowed for authenticated users (Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define Roles > Authenticated Users > Manage roles)

When a user opens a file in Amanote for the first time, Amanote asks him/her to access his/her First Name, Last Name and Email.  These data are essential for the proper functioning of Amanote. The access token and its expiration are also passed to the app to authenticate the user and to communicate with the Moodle's web services. This allows the app to act on the user's behalf.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at moodle@amanote.com.