UP Tech Tips

Online discussions are a great way to build community, develop writing skills, and foster deeper reflection and engagement with learning. Actually managing forums, however, can be tricky. It’s important that faculty who are seeking to facilitate effective online discussion understand the forum tools at their disposal. With that in mind, this week’s #UPTechTip offers a brief overview of new features available in Moodle forums:

• Automatically lock old/inactive discussions
• Pin threads to the top of the forum
• Make private replies to student posts

Today’s #UPtechTip is a short video tour of the new grading workflow available in Moodle 3.2. If you are looking for an easy way to view student work, add annotations, provide feedback, and enter grades all from one powerful, flexible screen, this one is for you!

Fall is in the air! Err, not really. We’re still experiencing Summer heat in Portland. But, classes have begun at UP; students, learning, and #uptechtips have all returned from Summer vacation!

This tip focuses on the Moodle Announcements forum. This is a simple but effective tool for communicating with students. If you are using Moodle extensively to deliver documents, host discussion, and accept student work, this tool is worth a look! It lets you (and only you) post news updates to your Moodle course. Students can check the page for news, and they will also receive email updates daily of any new posts.

I like the Announcements forum as a communication strategy for the following reasons:

• It provides a redundant source of vital class information for students in case of email issues
• It gives them another reason to log-in and engage with course materials
• It’s much easier to refer back to past announcements here than to dig through email

#UPTechTip: Using Announcement Forum

 

Well, it’s end of the term time. Final grades are about due and the time of reckoning for students who have incomplete work is now.

In this video, I will be showing you how to bulk insert zero grades into empty slots in the Moodle gradebook. In order for Moodle to calculate student grades correctly and fairly, you need to make sure to mark any missing work as a zero. Otherwise, it will not be factored into the student’s final grade calculations.

I realize adding zeros is not of the part of the teaching process that most enjoy, but at least in this video, you’ll be learning a quick and painless way to complete this un-fun task.

Greetings! Today’s tip is in the form of a quick preview of a new email feature coming to UP campus soon. In this short video, learn how using the Focused Inbox and help keep distractions at bay and concentrate on what’s important. Don’t like the Focused Inbox? This video also shows you how to turn this feature on or off.