Learning the World

Audio recording tools for Moodle are something that’s come up several times on campus. English and foreign languages faculty would love to be able to use such a tool with students; in English they’d use it to work on student’s inflections and readings of poetry, while foreign languages would use it as part of spoken language critques.

I experimented with using NanoGong to do this, but unfortunately it was just too unstable; the Java applet running it refused to save files on two of the three computers I tried it on … including computers on which it had worked.

COVCELLL has created the audio recording assignment that works with Moodle 1.9. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, and would love to hear from anyone who has.

A demonstration of the very nifty Drupal Admin Module. I’ve been experimenting with using this module; it seems like a good way to expose the guts of Drupal, which can confuse even veteran users.

I’m experimenting with installing NanoGong on one of our test servers running 1.9.2. It’s a browser-based auto recording/playback tool for Moodle (and other apps) that our English and Foreign Languages faculty are interested in. So far I’ve got the NanoGong assignment working, but in-forum recording isn’t working.

NanoGong crashed under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) under Safari 3 and Firefox 3, but recorded/played back using the same browsers on Mac OS X 10.5. Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 3 worked fine on Windows XP.

I’ll be continuing to experiment to see if I can get forum recordings working properly.

There’s an iTunes U authentication block available for Moodle 1.9 now. I haven’t had a chance to do more than kick the tires on it, but it seems like it’ll handle basic authentication to a protected iTunes U site using admin, faculty or student credentials. It allows you to create a block with a link to an iTunes U course. It doesn’t generate a list of the resources available in that course (which would be fantastic) but it looks like it might do what I need it to do in the short term. I’ll try it out more next week and report back.