TED team blog for SEMS/SoI at City University London
Tips
Negative Marking in Moodle 1.9 Quizzes: Our Workaround
Nov 12th
In the School of Informatics there is a common requirement for quizzes to use negative marks, so a student will lose marks if they select the wrong answer. Unfortunately the version of Moodle that we currently use at City, 1.9, doesn’t make it easy to do this, so a workaround was needed.After a little bit of head-scratching I came up with a method suitable for the majority of cases we have encountered and I am going to show you how it works here.
This student receives a mark of -6 for their quiz because they answered some questions incorrectly.
The actual quiz is next to it.
Educational software recommender tool ‘launched’ today
Nov 6th
Today saw the unveiling of an online tool to help teachers and learning technologists to identify software to support particular pedagogic approaches, or to highlight the pedagogic uses of specific software. It currently has only 40 or so entries, but we will be working on it to add more and to include other features, such as case studies and help guides. There are several ways to filter the list of applications according to specific requirements, and we will be adding new categories as time goes on. We also have plans to create similar pages for hardware and Moodle functionality in the near future.
The tool was developed by me and two other City colleagues, James Toner (City Law School) and Farzana Latif (School of Health Sciences). You can find it at http://www.cityunihealth.co.uk/appsSimile/web2tools.html. We hope that this will become a resource that people can use to get ideas and share feedback about how specific software can help support pedgogic activities, we would be very interested in any comments, feedback or tool suggestions you may have.
Exploiting Google Scholar to Raise Profile and Keep Up-to-date
Oct 10th
Google Scholar is a service that I really like and find extremely useful, and for the last 12 months or so there has been a little used feature that allows anyone publishing research to get much more from it – Author Profiles.
SEMS Technology Tasters
May 2nd
The TED team ran well-attended sessions in April for the four main disciplines in SEMS: Civil Engineering; Electrical, Electronic & Information Engineering; Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering; and Mathematics. The sessions were structured around the presentation of 5 technologies in the 4 broad categories of Feedback, Research, Assessment and Resources, with one that spans all of these. Each was followed by a period to talk about the technology presented and these were lively and produced some very interesting discussion.
The specific technologies were:
