Moodle plugins directory: MooTyper | Moodle.org
MooTyper
BEFORE YOU UPGRADE NOTE! A previous version of MooTyper changed the lesson file layout! Depending on your version, after your upgrade, an admin may need to click on the Edit gear icon and select, Import lesson / KB layout. Depending on the speed of your server, this can take a while.
In the past, if you have created any lesson files of your own, you may need to modify them to be compatible with the new Lesson file format in this MooTyper version. Comparison with a file from this version will show you that each exercise is followed by the exercise name using the same sequence of keystrokes, /**/, as a delimiter.
MooTyper is an Activity module. A course admin, manager, or teacher creates the activity and prepares it for use by selecting the keyboard layout and lessons to use. It can be set up to present a series of exercises from a lesson or to present one selected exercise from a lesson as a typing exam. Once set up, students can then start to type the current exercise. When a student finishes an exercise his achievement is saved into a database, so the teacher can then view grades.
Numerous keyboard layouts are available in MooTyper. If you do not see what you need, ask me, and I will see what I can do about developing it: Arabic, Armenian, Belgium(Dutch), Bulgarian, Croation, Czech, Danish, Dvorak(US), English (UK), English(US), EnglishWKeypad(USV6), Estonian, French, FrenchWKeypad(FRV6), German(Swiss), German, GermanWKeypad(V6), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, numberKeypadOnly, Portuguese(Brazil), Portuguese(Portugal), PortugueseWKeypad(PortugalV6), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, SpanishWKeypad(V6), Swedish, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uyghur, and Vietnamese.
You can visit the website URL listed down below, create an account, and try any of the listed layouts. If there is a layout not listed, that you would be interested in trying, please make a request in the comments below, or at the github Source control URL location.
For this MooTyper release, immediately after you upgrade, you may need to go to one of your MooTyper activities and in it's Administration block, click on, Import lesson / KB layout, so you will get versions of all the new keyboard layouts and lessons. Depending on how you do the upgrade, your old keyboard files may be erased. In that case you will get an error that can be cleared by going to Setup for each MooTyper, and select a keyboard layout to use. Old keyboard versions are not necessarily compatible with the styles.css file included in this version. In some cases, this version includes multiple layouts.
Recent New Features - note that the page was getting so long, I have removed previous version, New Features, lists.
- New Completion settings are available, Exercise, Lesson, Precision, WPM, and MooTyper Grade.
- Can use Whole grade for combined precision and WPM grade.
- Can use Whole grade for just a precision grade.
- Can use Whole grade for just a WPM grade.
- Can use Rating average, count maximum, minimum, or sum for combined precision and WPM grade.
- Can use Rating average, count maximum, minimum, or sum for just a precision grade.
- Can use Rating average, count maximum, minimum, or sum for just WPM grade.
- Added new grade column on both, View all grades, and on the, View own grades, pages.
- When using Ratings, added new, Ratings information, section to the grades tables on both , View all grades, and on the, View own grades, pages.
- Added date/time to the CSVexport file name.
- Added new icon look feature for Moodle 4.0.
- Added basic activity completion for Moodle 3.11 and higher.
- Added capability to delete unused keyboard layouts.
- Added links to, View all course mootypers, on the grade pages, the end of lesson page, and the end of exam page.
- Fixed the bug where the cursor color was not being backed up or duplicated correctly.
- Added plain text to the, Add new exercise to this lesson, button on the exercises page.
- Added capability for an admin to remove database entries and physical files, for keyboard layouts that are not needed.
For any additional information please visit us on GitHub or post in MooTyper's forum topic.
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
Sorry, I do not supply any lesson named "English2.txt" so it must be one that someone in your organization created. What keyboard layout are you using?
I remember once a few years ago, someone had the same problem and it was caused by creating the exercise in MS Word, then doing a copy and paste. MS Word uses the curved version of quotes and apostrophes as they "look" better, but they are actually named something else, which creates the problem you have noticed.
If you edit the exercise, in MooTyper, retype the problem characters and save your changes, that should fix it. You might have to figure out who created the exercise due to permissions, or just have an admin do it. Admins can edit any exercise.
If you are wanting to give students a set of general directions in an audio file for a typing assignment such as an essay, and then have them type whatever they want, you would need to use some other activity, such as assign in text mode, or journal. The audio directions file could be placed/recorded in the description of the activity.
As I mentioned before, for a dictation capability, MooTyper will need to have the text along with an audio file narrating the text. MooTyper will need to be modified so that the complete text starts out as invisible, and then becomes visible one character at a time as the student types. From the student viewpoint, I have this already working. Just need to finish adding code to eins.php and eedit.php that lets the teacher add or edit the audio file. To simplify things, I am going to use the audio recording capability built into the Atto editor, so this new capability may be for only Moodle 3.5 and above. Comments and suggestions from anyone are welcome.
If there are any other users working from home and looking for something to do to keep busy, if you would care to add translations for other MooTyper layouts, please let me know and I will gladly tell you how to do it.
Thanks for yours GREAT plugin.
For anyone who would like to see these enhancements in use, I have a Mootyper 3.9.2 BETA branch that includes these plus a bunch of other stuff, installed at http://m3x.drachels.com/ The best place to see this in action is in the Plugin Development course. You can create your own account, and if you contact me directly, drachels at drachels dot com, I can give you teacher access.
The grade book integration currently just updates a students grade to the last completed exercise grade, so it really is only suitable for a MooTyper exam.
The way I am adding the rating is slightly different from other Moodle plugins where a teacher has to manually enter a rating. In MooTyper when a student finishes an exercise, the precision percentage is automatically entered as a rating based on what the activity is set to use: average, count, maximum, minimum, or sum, of rating.
I'm posting this now because the upcoming MooTyper 3.9.2 version does have both the Moodle Grade and Moodle Ratings working in it, and I know may people will be glad to finally have this capability. I am going to delay its release for a few days, as right now it only works for Moodle 3.9 and Moodle 3.8. That's because the forum code I was copying is using some "new stuff" introduced in Moodle 3.8. Since about 36% of the sites using MooTyper, are on Moodle versions 2.7 thru 3.7, they would not be able to take advantage of having MooTyper automatically place grades in the Moodle grade book.
Currently, this means I will make sure MooTyper works with Moodle 3.5 or higher and PHP 7.1 or higher. Yes, I know that Moodle 3.5 specifies PHP 7.0, but I have adopted some PHP stuff that became available in 7.1.
I also realize there are going to be a few users unwilling to upgrade their sites to Moodle 3.5 and higher, that are going to want to be able to take advantage of MooTyper's new gradebook capabilities that will not be happy with this decision. Simply because researching for this upcoming release I know what needs to be changed, this one time I will try to make available a custom version of MooTyper that will work on Moodle 3.4 and lower and with a lower version of PHP. To get the zip file, you will need to contact me via email message, and I'll see that you get the needed zip file.