Happy New Year!
Happy New Year Instructors! Check out this month’s Moodle News, which includes information about our Winter 2020 Faculty Workshops, Spring 2020 Faculty Workshop announcement, Request your Moodle and Echo360 course in SPIRE for Winter and Spring 2020, Moodle tip of the month: Drop the Lowest in the Attendance Activity, and Moodle help and resources.
Winter 2020 Faculty Workshops
Take a moment during this Winter break to join us in our Winter 2020 Faculty workshops series. Our workshops will be covering teaching with technology ranging from Getting Started in Moodle, Getting started on how to use blogs for your teaching and learning, Introduction to Trello, Quizzing in Moodle, Using Feminist Approaches in Moodle, and more. Check out our Innovation Events page to see more Workshops and register.
Can’t decide which workshops to take? Have questions? Contact the Instructional Media Lab for help in deciding which workshops are right for you. Call us at 413-545-2823 or email instruct@umass.edu
Spring 2020 Faculty Workshops Announcement
In addition to our Winter Workshops, we will be offering over 20 workshops during the Spring 2020 semester. Register early to guarantee your spot!
Where we will be covering topics on how to learn educational technology tools and Create engaging content, such as Getting Started in Moodle, Getting Started in Echo360, Teaching with Zoom, Quizzing in Moodle, A gentle Introduction to G-Suite (apps at UMass), Camtasia for Mac, Build interactive content with H5P on Moodle, Engaging your students with echo360, and more.
Where we will be covering topics on how to try new teaching technology, exploring accessible technology and managing your projects, such as Team Formation and Peer Assessment with CATME: A Faculty Panel, Explore the Future of Classroom Technologies, Creating Accessible Podcast, Introduction to Screen Readers, Group work with G-Suite (apps at UMass), and more.
Check out our Innovation Events page to see more Workshops and register. Can’t decide which workshops to take? Have questions? Contact the Instructional Media Lab for help in deciding which workshops are right for you. Call us at 413-545-2823 or email instruct@umass.edu
Request Your Winter/Spring 2020 Moodle Course in SPIRE
Request your Winter and Spring 2020 Moodle courses. Remember that every semester you will have to request a new Moodle course through SPIRE.
Requests your Echo360 Course in SPIRE
Request your Echo360 course in SPIRE for your Winter and Spring 2020 semester. While making your request you can specify that you’d like to:
- Automatically record in-person class meetings in Classrooms Equipped with Lecture Capture.
- Re-use recordings from a previous semester.
- Create screencasts and record custom lessons for students to watch outside of class with Echo360 Universal Capture.
For step by step instructions, see Request Lecture Capture. Once your Echo360 courses are ready, it’s easy to give students access to Echo360 recordings through Moodle.
Moodle tip of the month: Drop the Lowest in the Attendance Activity
Moodle allows you to track attendance for the entire class or specific events with the Attendance Activity. But, did you know that you can also set it up to drop a specific number of the lowest-graded sessions to be excluded from the overall attendance grade for each student? Check out our documentation on how to Record Attendance in Moodle. If you already know how to set up an Attendance activity jump to Part Two: Change Status Sets (Part 4).
What’s new in Moodle: Turnitin Unavailable, Saturday, January 4.
Due to scheduled maintenance by Turnitin, Turnitin services will be unavailable on Saturday, January 4th, EST 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM. During this maintenance window, users will not be able to submit or grade. Please, plan accordingly.
You can check the status of this maintenance on the Turnitin’s status page.
Moodle Help and Resources for Instructors
To learn more about Moodle or to get help, you can:
- Review our Moodle Support Articles.
- Contact the Instructional Media Lab (instruct@umass.edu | 413-545-2823) with a question, or to set up a time for a one-on-one consultation.