syamsul's domain

Nice to see an education-specific distribution of Drupal released. DrupalEd EdtechTalk has a thorough Screencast Tour of it here, and one can also create an account at the demonstration site here. From what I’ve seen, this system looks very clean and easy enough for end-users (i.e. busy teachers and students). Not sure about ease of installation or backend management though. I’m also curious to see whether  there’d be any way for students to select custom themes for their own pages…

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Got a little worried when I was asked to put up a polling system in Moodle to allow teachers and students to “vote” for their favourite photo. I knew right away that the correct activity to use would be Choice but… Choice only had blanks for 10 options! There didn’t seem to be an “insert image” function either! But thanks to various posts in the Moodle forums, I managed the following workarounds: 1. Edit /mod/choice/mod.html and change $standardblanks = 10;…

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I’ve been dabbling with wikis for a while and so far I’ve found them to be useful for collaborative writing tasks. For instance, I’ve edited a document with a group of colleagues and I’ve also had students build up a knowledge base on characterisation using Wiki. The ability to share and edit text online, without the need for cumbersome emailing of a document to-and-fro is truly amazing! So, why isn’t everybody using them? Well, for one thing, installing a Wiki…

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After all that planning, my school department’s Drupal-based web portal is finally up! Its present design is based on the SpreadFirefox theme and the only “community” part of it is the forums section. Judging from the content of some of the posts though, it looks like many are quickly reverting to SMS-style “language”. Urgh! Now, the question is: to moderate or not to moderate??

Haven’t posted about blogging for a while, so here’s a huge one. Despite a lot of talk about blogging in the classroom by many edublog-type sites, it is clear that the idea of actually assessing blogwork for assignments is still a new and evolving one. I personally haven’t really tried to go beyond looking at the blogs as a form of portfolio or journal to track the progress of a project. Nonetheless, the web is hardly lacking in excellent student-written…

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