Activities: MooTyper
BEFORE YOU UPGRADE! The original MooTyper 3.9.1 version had an error in the version number! It had one too many zeros in it, so it needs to be fixed before you can upgrade from it or to any other upcoming version. If you know how to use phpMyAdmin, search in the mdl_config_plugins table for field plugin, mod_mootyper, and field name, version. Edit the version and change from 20200070800, to 2020070800. As an alternative, download the following file, unzip it into your site mootyper folder, then visit: <site>/mod/mootyper/fixversionnumber.php: http://www.drachels.com/misc/fixversionnumber.zip
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: Arabic, Armenian, Belgium(Dutch), Bulgarian, Croation, Czech, Danish, Dvorak(US), English (UK), English(US), EnglishWKeypad(US), Estonian, French, German(Swiss), German, GermanWKeypad, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, numberKeypadOnly, Portuguese(Brazil), Portuguese(Portugal), PortugueseWKeypad(Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, SpanishWKeypad, Swedish, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, 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 Version 3.9.5 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.
- Added a couple of V5 and V6 keyboard layouts.
- Fixed missing link to suspicion check in atchk.php file, that was making both the attempts and checks table to fill up with orphaned entries.
- MooTyper now will allow you to use the Moodle Grade system. Should only be used for Exam mode.
- MooTyper now will allow you to use the Moodle Rating system. Works best for Practice and Lesson modes.
- Mean, Median, Mode, and Range statistics are listed below the grade tables.
Other recently added features:
- Added new security and log events.
- Tweaked some keyboard layouts to ensure proper rendering.
- Added Groups to the View all grades page.
- Added buttons to make navigating between MooTyper pages easier.
- If student does not make any mistakes, the results will show as 0: No mistakes, instead of Undefined.
- Currently, the Actions menu item, Export/edit exercises, is hidden if you cannot edit the lesson of the current MooTyper activity.
- Currently, the Settings button, is hidden if you cannot edit the lesson of the current MooTyper activity.
- 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
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.
MooTyper is a quite nice Tool. But I'm abit struggeling, because I want to distribute ready made Lessons for german available for all user.
In our Bundesland/Federate Country Rhineland-Palatinate we have a common moodle installation but with different instances. Our admin is not sure how to get the lessons to all of the users and we did not find detailed informations.
As far as I understood the informations at the plugin-page the plugin gets the file for lessons and keyboards by the server or installations-file!?
My ideas is and hence the question, if I can send you the lessons and you can add it to the official collection of lessons?
Best regards, Birgit Lachner
I am always happy to hear from users of MooTyper. Yes, if you send me the file, I will be happy to include the German Lessons in the next MooTyper release. drachels at drachels dot com Next release should be sometime in the next couple of weeks as I am currently testing it with the new Moodle 3.10 code, to make sure everything is going to work okay.
By the way, which keyboard layout are you using? Would you be interested in one that has the number keypad on the right side, like the EnglishWKeypad(USV6)? If you are interested let me know and I will try to get it done in the next day or two.
What version of MooTyper are you using, which PHP version, and what database type? Ned to know so I can try to duplicate.