UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

UP Tech Tips

Up Tech Tips is a series of handy technology related hints, tips and tricks written especially for University of Portland faculty who are engaging with technology in the classroom or in hybrid and online classes. Tips are written and/or curated by Ben Kahn, Academic Technology Specialist and Trainer at the University.

Here is how you can keep up with new UP Tech Tips:

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#UPTechTip: Control When Moodle Assignment Grades Are Released With Workflow

A common question I get from instructors is “How can I make sure that grades for my assignments are not released to students until I’m ready?” Up until recently, there hasn’t been a great way to control this, but a new Moodle feature allows you to do just that – go through grading at your pace, and release grades to the entire class when you’re finished.

Please see this MoodleDocs article for details: MoodleDocs – Assignment Workflow

Notes: To enable this feature in your Moodle assignment:

  • Edit the Assignment settings
  • Under the Grades heading, click “Show More”
  • Enable Grading Workflow

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#UPTechTip: Turn Your Moodle into a You Can Book Me

Do you keep office hours or offer drop-in appointments for your students? Maybe you do advising and want avoid long back and forth email threads trying to find an amenable time for sessions? Do you sometimes have a line out the door, and other times wait around only for no one to show up? Or do you sometimes waste time going back and forth through email trying to find a time that works for everyone? Either way, your own and your student’s time could be used better. Today’s UP Tech Tip post on the Moodle Scheduler is for you!

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#UPTechTip: Set Accepted File Types in Moodle Assignments

The newest Moodle update at UP has a few nifty tricks. One of the best is the ability for instructors to specify what types of students are allowed to turn in to a Moodle assignment. Want to make sure students give you a Word doc so you can use Track Changes? Make it so. Or perhaps you want to use Moodle’s built-in PDF viewer and annotator to grade easily online. Enforce PDF only uploads with an iron fist of justice. Check it out:

Teachers can limit the file types that students are allowed to upload to an assignment submission. This is helpful to ensure that students are turning in a file that is appropriate for the assignment task (for example, if you want students to submit an image file instead of a Photoshop project file) or to accommodate a teacher’s grading workflow (for example, specifying Word documents so that track changes can be used, or PDFs so that submissions can be easily annotated)

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#UPTechTip: Get to Know the New Moodle

Hello, and welcome to the first #UPTechTip Friday of Fall 2018! I hope your new academic year is off to a great start. You’ve probably noticed that Moodle has a fresh new look for Fall. If you haven’t yet, now is a great time to take a few minutes to get acquainted with the new Moodle!

Please use the link below for a quick visual guide that my colleague Stephen Loutzenhiser put together. Some highlights:

  • The new navigation drawer on the left can be hidden or shown via the “hamburger menu” (the three horizontal lines)
  • The navigation menu has quick links that will jump you to each week of your course (no more long scrolling to get to later weeks!)
  • Settings are now found under the “gear” icon – the gear opens links to turn editing on, set-up your gradebook, import content from another course, and more!

Take a look: New Moodle Quick Guide

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#UPTechTip: An Easy Way Resize & Crop Images in Windows 10

If you are on an up to date version of Windows 10, you should have access to the new replacement for the venerable Microsoft Pain app – Paint 3D. The new application can create 3d graphics and is also super useful as a basic image manipulation tool.

Not a Windows person? See my earlier post on using the Preview app on the Mac for similar tasks.

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