Thursday: Moodle

I remembered what I wanted to say a few weeks ago.  It's about Moodle.  That's the classroom management system we use.  It got upgraded over the summer.

There were some annoying things about it previously.  At the beginning of the school year, there were several very annoying things about it.  It seems as though one or two have been fixed, except for the main one.

There is too much clicking.

Say you're grading a homework assignment.  You put in a grade.  You then have two options.  You can click the "go to next student" to which it gives you a warning that you didn't save the grade and that it will do it for you and after you click ok it tells you the grade was saved.  (3 clicks)  Your other option is to click the save grade button, click ok when it tells you the grade is saved, and then click to go to the next student. (3 clicks)

Three clicks per student!  It used to be one.  "Save and continue to next student."  I definitely don't need a click that tells me it was saved.  Not only do I just assume that it happened, I can see that the score I put in goes from 1 to 1.00.

There are still a few other annoying things, but I can work around them.  (Such as not being able to grade in the order work was turned in.  I have found several plagiarism cases because they turned their work in at the same time.)

To be fair though, the highlight-what-day-we're-on is much more visible.  Actually, the preview works pretty well too and saves me one click on some assignments.