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ISTE and ASCD are merging into a single organization

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
ISTE and ASCD are merging into a single organization
ISTE and ASCD are merging into a single organization

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and ASCD – passionate community of life-changing educators are merging together into a single unit. Both the organizations will unite and become divisions of a new education nonprofit organization. The new combined organization will be dedicated to helping teachers, school leaders, policy makers and industry heads design the future of education.

The merger was finalized on November 14 2022 following a vote by ASCD members and initial approval by both boards of directors. As one collective group, the two organizations will expand their influence to serve all educators throughout their careers and set a course to design the future of education by modernizing instructional practices that close access and equity gaps.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted numerous challenges facing our education system. Now we have an enormous opportunity to evolve that system in ways that will better prepare all students for the future,” said ISTE CEO Richard Culatta. “Bringing together ISTE’s leadership in innovation and technology with ASCD’s expertise in inclusive pedagogy creates an organization uniquely positioned to reimagine learning.” 

ASCD Interim CEO and Executive Director Sandy Husk said the merger will benefit both communities. “Looking ahead, we know the real opportunity to advance learning for all students means evolving and expanding the pedagogical support we provide to educators,” she said. “Working with ISTE, we can meet teachers where they are today and support their efforts to modernize instructional practices that close access and equity gaps.”

The educators will benefit from the merger of ISTE with ASCD as:

  • Uniting technology with pedagogy to design the future of education.
  • Setting the pace for innovation in education.
  • Expanding support for the whole educator with evidenced-based learning.
  • Building a larger community of passionate, life-changing educators.
  • Leading with courage and conviction to reimagine education.

Check out more about the mergers of ISTE with ASCD on the official website here.

MoodleMoot US 2023 – Call for presentations open now

By
Jaswinder Singh
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MoodleMoot US 2023 - Call for presentations open now
MoodleMoot US 2023 - Call for presentations open now

MoodleMoot US 2023 will be a completely online edtech event scheduled to be held on January 30 & 31 2023. The call for presentations for MoodleMoot US 2023 are open now. If you are willing to present in the edtech conference, you can submit your presentation proposal before December 9 2022.

The MoodleMoot’s success depends on the community presentations and contributions by the participants. This year there will be usual presentation types available to submit presentation idea. These are:

  • Long presentation
  • Short presentation
  • Lightning Presentations
  • Poster Presentation
  • Training Workshops

These are in addition to the panels, workshops, and keynotes which get recommended to us by the community.

You can submit your presentation proposal for MoodleMoot US 2023 here.

Early Bird Registrations are open for MoodleMoot US 2023

For all the interested participants the early bird registrations for the this year’s conference are now open. You can register before December 23rd 2022 to get a discounted registration price. There is a group discount, available for groups of 5 or more from the same organization when paid via invoice.

Here are the pricing details:

Registration ticket Early Bird Pricing **
Ends – 23rd December 2022		 Standard **
Ends 20th January 2023		 Late **
Ends 27th January 2023
Full Conference (30th-31st) USD $150** USD $180** USD $210**

To book your seat today, please register here.

For complete details about the MoodleMoot US 2023 check out the official website here.

Join the 2023 TCEA Convention on January 30 – February 2, 2023

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Join the 2023 TCEA Convention on January 30 – February 2, 2023
Join the 2023 TCEA Convention on January 30 – February 2, 2023

TCEA Convention & exposition 2023 – the largest nonprofit ed tech association in the United States will be organized from January 30 to February 2, 2023. The edtech conference is dedicated to advancing teaching and learning through the use of technology. The TCEA Convention & Exposition is running from last 43 years and is one of the  biggest and brightest professional development event of the year.

The TCEA Convention & Exposition 2023 is suitable for educators from all areas. You will find sessions on the following topics:

  • Elementary, secondary, special education, gifted and talented, STEAM, and ESL teachers
  • Instructional coaches, digital learning coaches, curriculum coordinators, and innovative learning specialists
  • Superintendents and district leaders, principals, assistant principals, campus leaders, and librarians and media specialists
  • Chief technology officers, technology directors, IT support specialists, technology integrators, technology coordinators
  • Educators in career and technical education and higher education

Discounted registration prices are available till January 10 2023 with an attractive $50 discount on the tickets pricing. Here are the complete pricing details for TCEA Convention & Exposition 2023:

Badge Type Full Conference Badge One-Day Badge Exhibit Hall Only Badge
Advanced Pricing 11/5 – 1/10

$399

$189

$49
Regular Pricing 1/11 – Close of Show $449 $219
In-person Convention Access
Including: keynotes, Thought Leader sessions, presentations, special events, and more.		 Full Access
Monday – Thursday		 Full Access on the Day of Your Choice
One badge registration is allowed per attendee. Please carefully review the schedule before choosing which day to attend. Please note: We have a limited amount of One-Day badges available per day.		 None
Exhibit Hall Access + Exhibitor Showcase Sessions Full Access
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday		 Limited Exhibit Hall Access
You will get full access to the exhibit hall with a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday badge. If you choose the Monday One-Day Badge, you will not be able to visit the Exhibit Hall.		 Full Access
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

The 2023 TCEA Convention & Exposition is the intersection of passion and possibility, curiosity and discovery, education and technology. And it’s the kind of learning that will change the story of education. There will be more than 700+ sessions with a variety of different interactive formats. You can check out all the sessions and complete schedule here.

Course Merchant joins Moodle as Certified Integration Partner!

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Course Merchant joins Moodle as Certified Integration Partner!
Course Merchant joins Moodle as Certified Integration Partner!

Course Merchant – the online course selling portal is now a Certified Moodle Integration partner. In a recent announcement, Moodle HQ announced the addition of Course Merchant as the Certified Integration partner which will provide a seamless e-commerce experience for your LMS portal.

Course Merchant is a fully featured e-commerce application, or shopping cart, which seamlessly integrates with Moodle, Totara, Brightspace and other popular LMS’s. It has been a go to tool for selling online courses since 2009 for many educators.

Course Merchant provides a Moodle shopping cart linked to both your online store catalogue and your Moodle Learning Management System. Courses in Moodle are mapped to products in the online catalogue, which can be discounted, bundled and sold in an intuitive e-commerce flow.

Richard Standen, CEO of Course Merchant, said, “Used by Moodlers since 2009, Course Merchant has become the go-to tool for LMS-based e-commerce over the last few years. We are now delighted to be able to formalise our relationship with Moodle, allowing us to invest more time and resources to further develop our e-commerce platform to be more aligned with the needs of Moodle e-commerce for many years to come.”

Carles Aguiló-Collado, Technology Partner Manager at Moodle, said, “The addition of Course Merchant to our Certified Integration Partner program was a no-brainer. A solution for e-commerce is one of the top demands of our partners and Course Merchant offers a top notch bespoke solution in terms of customer experience, integration quality and value for money.”

It allows the user to purchase Moodle courses and register them automatically in the courses. They also provide the learner with single sign-on into Moodle, so that the learner arrives at the learning management system in a logged-in state and is ready to start learning.

Source – Moodle HQ Announcement

What is Open Culture and How Does it Work for Teachers and Students? Tips and Tricks

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
What is Open Culture and How Does it Work for Teachers and Students? Tips and Tricks
What is Open Culture and How Does it Work for Teachers and Students? Tips and Tricks

Open Culture is one of the biggest hub of free useful digital resources for education. Started in 2006, Open Culture is on a mission to centralize the best educational content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Since its inception, it has grown massively with lots of useful educational resources. In this post, we will cover how you can use the Open Culture for education?

What is Open Culture?

Open Culture essentially is a list of all educational content available across the internet. As the name suggests Open Culture boasts of resources spanning a wide range of culture and potential subjects for which it can be used. The resources includes audio books, Free Online courses, eBooks, textbooks, videos, language lessons and a vide variety of other resources.

Even after more than 16 years, the site has maintained its original aesthetics without much change.  Unfortunately it makes the navigation a bit difficult to move around and find your educational resource. However, you can signup for the optional email newsletter which collates the new content. The whole site is available for free of cost supported by the advertisement. So if you have an ad blocker running you may be met with a pop-up that asks you politely to consider turning it off so the site can make money to pay its staff and running costs.

How much does Open Culture cost?

Open Culture is available for everyone without any cost – for free. You don’t need to signup for any paid subscription and share your personal details. The site does have advertising to support the service and you will be watching a popup notification to disable your ad blocker.

How does Open Culture work?

You can start using Open Culture Immediately. There is no need to signup or share any personal details. On arriving at the site, just find out the content for your interest and use it.  Once you land on the Open Culture website homepage, you will see a list of potentially useful educational resources along with sub-headings to narrow down your search criteria.

Once you shortlist the resource of your interest, you can simply click on it. You will be navigated away from the Open Culture website to where the resource is hosted.  So, practically there isn’t anything actually on the website itself, just links to other places that offer the content.

Best Open Culture features?

With so many wonderful open educational resources available for use, Open Culture provides you with the following features:

  • A vast array of resources for K-12 education and more.
  • Large collection of audio and ebooks.
  • Vast collection of online courses
  • Free Language lessons for language teaching
  • Good collection of educational podcasts

As an educator you can use Open Culture to let your students complete the research on a specific topic and submit the findings.

What are the other free Open Educational Resources website where you can get plenty of resources. Please share with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Admins – Adaptable theme new version released with new features and updated fixes

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Moodle Admins - Adaptable theme new version released with new features and updated fixes
Moodle Admins - Adaptable theme new version released with new features and updated fixes

Adaptable Theme – which is one of the most downloaded and popular free Moodle theme, has been updated to a new version. The Adaptable theme which is maintained by Gareth J Barnard is a highly customisable responsive two column theme designed for use across a vide variety of Moodle installations.

The Adaptable theme is one of the most actively maintained and used Moodle themes. It is currently in use by more than 19,500+ websites. The theme is recently updated for Moodle 3.9 and Moodle 3.10 supported versions. Gareth J Barnard announced the release of latest version on Moodle forums. The new versions came with a lot of new features and improvements.

Here is a brief list of fixes in the new version:

  1. Re-fix ‘Title moved to top by search’, ref: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=425729#p1718073.
  2. Fix ‘block configuration actions menu does not contrast enough’, ref: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=427627.
  3. Fix ‘My Courses dropdown not showing all enrolled courses’ – #258.
  4. Fix “My courses dropdown can show hidden courses when user does not have capability when ‘mysitessortoverride’ setting is not set to ‘Use list from my overview'”, related to #258.
  5. Fix ‘One Topic font color change not getting applied’ – #264.
  6. Add ‘OneTopic active tab colour’ – #269.
  7. Fixed semantic versioning 2.0.0 (https://semver.org/) for the release value, whereby the ‘major’ number is the Moodle core branch number.  The ‘version’ property still needs to follow the Moodle way in order for the plugin to operate within the core API.

You can download the latest version of Adaptable theme from Moodle Plugins directory here. If you are new to Moodle, you can follow this guide to learn how to install a Moodle Plugin.

What are the other popular Moodle themes which you are using on your Moodle environment? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Educators – Use the Recycle Bin feature to retrieve accidently deleted course elements

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Moodle Educators - Use the Recycle Bin feature to retrieve accidently deleted course elements
Moodle Educators - Use the Recycle Bin feature to retrieve accidently deleted course elements

Moodle LMS being one of the most popular open source Learning Management System is packed with features. There are many features which are not actively used among the Moodle users. One such feature is the ability to restore course elements which are accidently deleted by teachers. The feature known as ‘Recycle Bin’ was funded by Moodle Users Association in Moodle core.

Recycle Bin allows not only to restore the deleted course items, it also allows you to restore accidently deleted courses. If deleted items are not needed, they are automatically permanently deleted after a specific days interval. In this post, we will show you how you can use the Recycle Bin feature in Moodle.

Moodle’s Recycle Bin

Before you can use it, The recycle bin feature has to be enabled by the Site Administrator. As a Moodle Administrator, you can navigate to Site administration / Plugins / Admin tools to enable the Recycle Bin feature. You can also set how long an item or a course will remain available until it is permanently deleted.

Caution – Automated backup settings in Site administration / Courses / Backups / Automated backup setup are also used for the recycle bin. To include the User Data in the Recycle Bin, you need to make sure to enable ‘backup_auto_users’ and ‘restore_general_users’ settings.

How to restore an activity from Recycle Bin

Before deleting any activity, Moodle make sure to show a warning screen. Once a teacher deletes the course items by mistake, she can restore the same through the Recycle Bin.

The link to Recycle Bin will appear under Course Navigation > More. (The period for appearing depend on your Moodle Cron schedule. It can vary from a few minutes to few hours also depending on your Administrator).

Once you see the recycle link, you can click the Restore link against the course item to restore it back into the course.

Similarly you can restore the deleted course through the course categories actions menu. Here is a useful video showing how you can use the Recycle Bin feature in Moodle:

 

What are the other handy tips which you would like to share with other Moodle users around the world. Please share with us in the comments section below.

Join MoodleMoot US 2023 online on January 30-31 2023

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Join MoodleMoot US 2023 online on January 30-31 2023
Join MoodleMoot US 2023 online on January 30-31 2023

MoodleMoot US 2023 is a two day completely online edtech event which will be taking place on January 30-31. The MoodleMoot US 2023 is organized by the Moodle community and supported by Moodle US. The event features experienced speakers, practice share sessions from Schools, Colleges, Universities, companies and Government organizations and dedicated sessions and workshops.

The 2 day Edtech conference will bring together diverse and talented Moodle users, educators, workplace trainers, administrators, developers, and leading ed-tech minds from across North America to collaborate and share ideas for using the Moodle LMS.

The sessions includes Long Presentation upto 25 minutes long, Lighting Talks – just 5 minutes long, Workshops – 30 minutes long on key topics and Posters. The early bird registration will starts from November 14, 2022. The call for presentations is now open and the deadline for the submission of proposals is December 9, 2022.

You can choose your presentation across the following different tracks:

  1. Further / Higher Education
  2. Reflective Practice
  3. Workplace of Corporate Learning
  4. Professional Development
  5. Moodle Development

The tickets for the MoodleMoot US 2023 will be available at the following prices:

For more details about MoodleMoot US 2023 please visit the official website here – https://moodlemoot.us

Moodle Admin Alert! Moodle 4.0.5 and other minor versions released

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Moodle Admin Alert! Moodle 4.0.5 and other minor versions released
Moodle Admin Alert! Moodle 4.0.5 and other minor versions released

Moodle LMS has released the minor point versions for all the supported versions. The new minor version release includes big fixes and security issues addressed. The versions released today includes Moodle 4.0.5, 3.11.11 and 3.9.18.

The next major Moodle version i.e. Moodle 4.1 is scheduled to be released on November 28. The list of general fixes and improvements includes:

  • MDL-68437 – Whole forum grading shows suspended students
  • MDL-73624 – Chrome cannot download files when the filename in Content-Disposition contains a comma (e.g. quiz report download)
  • MDL-74762 – Statistics in the Moodle 4.0 question bank use many DB queries causing performance problems
  • MDL-74941 – Cannot edit 3.11 Calculated Multichoice questions in Moodle 4.0
  • MDL-27570 – Quiz time limit changes are not reflected in active quiz attempts without page refresh
  • MDL-66955 – Slow search in ‘Search people and messages’
  • MDL-68943 – Converted PDF file does not update when submission file is overwritten
  • MDL-75173 – Course is marked as completed when conditions are not met for passing grade
  • MDL-61880 – Oauth2 field mappings are reset and endpoints lost when identity issuer settings saved
  • MDL-75065 – Database error when creating simple calculated question
  • MDL-71531 – Moodle file cache – excessive locking around cache reads
  • MDL-76011 – “Download all/selected submissions” imposes download date on the zipped files instead of retaining submission dates
  • MDL-75010 – Viewing images in email should not update last access
  • MDL-74201 – Content bank files used by reference not restored on other site
  • MDL-75766 – Adding indexes in h5p database table (backport of MDL-71129)
  • MDL-74965 – BigBlueButton students access error
  • MDL-75784 – Expand all/Collapse all button is not working when we have two more button in a page
  • MDL-76169 – Various behat fixes for Question
  • MDL-74468 – BigBlueButton Custom Completion Fixes
  • MDL-59458 – Sorting database module entries by certain fields shows no results
  • MDL-72490 – Restrict date/time: Show error if users picks incompatible date restrictions
  • MDL-75985 – Standardise HTML output when comparing editor values
  • MDL-76020 – Some items missing from footer in Classic theme
  • MDL-76113 – Legacy grade sync always fails for LTI 2.0 consumers
  • MDL-76170 – LTI legacy grade sync fails if member sync occurs before first user launch
  • MDL-76041 – Exception when on the Recording Only page in BigBlueButton
  • MDL-74315 – Filters dropdown with large amount of elements is not displayed correctly in report builder
  • MDL-75519 – Default configuration of “Users” report source should sort by fullname
  • MDL-76108 – Exception thrown when restoring 1.9 backup into current moodle
  • MDL-75192 – “Current week” condition in report builder always considers Monday as start of week
  • MDL-75848 – “Cannot read properties of null” error when using Atto editor
  • MDL-75558 – BigBlueButton displays alert banner when Forced Group Mode “No groups” enabled
  • MDL-75642 – Error deleting multiple (random) questions from quiz
  • MDL-75727 – Problem with regrade for quizzes where “each attempt builds on the last”
  • MDL-75889 – allowedemaildomains should be case insensitive

There are other security fixes and accessibility improvements which are listed in the release notes here.

You can download the latest Moodle versions from the official downloads page here or through the GitHub repository here.

In case you need help in choosing which is the best Moodle version for you, you can check out this guide.

Moodle Educators – Use the Sections Course format to merge Topics & Social Course format

By
Jaswinder Singh
-
Moodle Educators - Use the Sections Course format to merge Topics & Social Course format
Moodle Educators - Use the Sections Course format to merge Topics & Social Course format

Moodle is most customizable open source Learning Management System in the world. By using wide variety of Moodle Plugins you can extend the Moodle features beyond the Moodle core. There are more than 2000 plugins contributed in the Moodle Plugins directory. Recently, a new course format type Plugin – Sections Course format is added which allows you to combine the benefits of Topics course format with Social course format.

The Sections Course format type Moodle plugin is developed by Catalyst IT for the University of Canterbury. It is based around the Core Topics course format but including the benefits of the Social course format. According to the plugin description, it allows the following features:

  • Hide section 0 when viewing another section
  • Add a news forum/social forum display under section 0 when viewing the course “home”
  • Allow the user to swap between showing one topic per page and all topics on the same page.

You can download the Sections course format from the Moodle plugins directory here. You can follow this guide to understand how to install a Moodle plugin. Once installed, there are no major configurable parameters for this plugin and you can start using it immediately after installation.

Moodle Educators - Use the Sections Course format to merge Topics & Social Course format
Sections Course format settings

Under the Course Format area, you can choose the Sections format. You can also configure to Hide Section 0, Show news under Section 0 and Allow users to choose their course layout as shown in the image above. Once you are done you will be able to see a General section with an Announcement forum below followed by the Course Topics.

I was pretty impressed with the Sections course format plugins and the advantages it offer over the default Topics format. You should also give it a try if you are a Moodle enthusiast.

What are the other Moodle course formats you are using on your Moodle environment? Please share with us in the comments section below.

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