Activities: MooTyper
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.
The following keyboard layouts are available in this MooTyper release: Belgium(Dutch), Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dvorak(US), English (UK), English(US), EnglishWKeypad(US), Estonian, French, German(Swiss), German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, numberKeypadOnly, Portuguese(Brazil), Portuguese(Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, 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 Version 3.8.3 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.
- Mistake details are shown to the student in real time in the space between the status bar and the text to type.
- Mistake details are shown in the Mistakes column when a teacher, manager, or admin goes to, View all grades.
- Mistake details are shown in the Mistakes column when a student goes to, View my grades.
- Mistake details are included in the Mistakes column of the CSV file when a teacher, manager, or admin selects, Export to .csv.
- The former link, Export to .csv, is now a button.
- New key top text color setting
- New time limit setting that works with all three modes, Lesson, Exam, and Practice
- New required WPM settingthat works with all three modes, Lesson, Exam, and Practice
- Capability to set time limit, precision, and WPM rate to zero, so you can mix-and-match requirements for all three modes
- Added a Cancel button on the Settings page
- Add information regarding time limit, precision, and WPM to, View all grades, View my grades, and csvexport file.
- Fixed a bug that limited Exams to exercise 1
- Added Lesson ID to the link for adding additional exercises on exercises.php page
- Fixed bug that was showing edit and delete icons when the lesson/exercise was NOT editable by the viewing person
- plus a few others
- Added new events for logging exam_completed, exercise_completed, and lesson_completed.
- Started changing various links into buttons.
- New Cancel buttons when editing or adding a new exercise.
- New Cancel button when creating a new Lesson category.
- Some new log events, plus some with more information.
- The statistics bar is now full width to accommodate longer labels in some foreign language that were causing a line break forming three lines of text, instead of the desired two.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing selecting a mode other than the site default mode.
- Added Lesson/Category name just above the status bar, between the Mode and Exercise X of X.
- Made SQL code change so that keyboard layout lists are in alphabetical order in the three places they can be seen.
For any additional information please visit us on GitHub or post in MooTyper's forum topic.
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
Sites using lower versions of Moodle really should upgrade because if I start having more problems with getting MooTyper to work seamlessly, I will have to drop support for older Moodle versions.
Can you contact me via email, drachels at drachels dot com and provide me with details, pictures, etc., of what you mean by "Time Test"?
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.