File Conversion Site - even Publisher files!

Found this at another friend's blog.... as the school "geek", I'm often ask to convert files that students bring in from home. This is sometimes a different version, sometimes a different program... so, it's nice to find things like this.

From http://wolfravenous.blogspot.com/2009/03/converting-publisher-files.html

I found a link that I think can be of some help to lots of people out there so I am going to post it here. It allows you to use a web page to convert files to other formats for free. So you could convert a Publisher file to a Word file or even into the open source ODT file format to be used with Open Office. Here is the link:

Zamzar File Conversion Page

Looks like http://zamzar.com will be added to my list of favorites. This site can convert all of the major file document types as well as images, videos, music, and even archives (zip, tgz, etc). Pretty cool find!!

Moodle Books

I saw an interesting article today at Moodle.org. - http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=121208

If you're looking for a book about Moodle, please visit our Moodle Books database, which contains a variety of books and manuals, for both teachers and administrators, written by members of the Moodle community.

Recently added titles include the Moodle 1.9 Course Creator Reference Manual by Ray Lawrence and Moodle for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds by Mary Cooch. Both Ray and Mary are Particularly helpful Moodlers in our Using Moodle course.

Please note that when you buy a book from the Moodle Books database, you're helping support Moodle development, as a percentage of all sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

Looks like a good resource for Moodle books and I like the fact that you're donating to the Moodle trust.

Happy Moodlin'!

Moodle Admin: Site Files - The sharing solution

Teaching with Moodle can be done with many of the same techniques and tricks used in traditional face-to-face instruction. Moodle can be used to improve upon face-to-face instruction, sometimes with unexpected results. In this case, Moodle was used to share common course documents across a large number of courses.

One way to accomplish this sharing of files is by using Moodle Site files. This is another one of those areas that most Moodle admins don't even know exist, but, using this feature can save in server space, and increase collaboration.  I often use Site files to create a common document, place that document in Site files, then create a link to that file in a course. Then, I backup and restore that "base" course multiple times so that all courses are using the same file. This will allow me to make changes in that one file and apply those changes to all courses simultaneously.

Note: Site files is an administrator only option. If you want to use this as a non-admin user, you'll need to be really, really, nice to your Moodle administrator. :-)

To access your Site files, you can  go to Front Page> Site files in the Site Administration menu, or go to http://yourdomain.edu/moodle/files/index.php?id=1. This should bring you to a screen similar to the one below (I'm using the Wood Custom Corners theme).

Remember that you can upload several files at one time by uploading a zip archive of your files and then use the Unzip function to decompress the archive once you've uploaded them.

If you run into upload limits while trying to upload your zip file(s), then try FTP'ing your files up to your moodledata folder. All site files are located in the folder: /moodledata/1/.

Site files can be used to share a variety of items across all of your moodle site or across the world. Note: files placed here can be accessed by anyone.

Finally, if you really can't use Site files for your shared resources, then, consider using an outside file sharing service. I like Dropbox (Please use my referral to obtain an extra 256 MB of storage space) to share large files for my moodle sites. It provides 2.5 GB of storage for FREE. Another alternative is ADrive. ADrive allows for 50 GB of storage, but, the links expire after 30 days, so, it is not quite as practical for sharing files in moodle.