 Good morning, Moodlers. Welcome to the My Learning Space webinar Moodle and the Cloud. This webinar will aim to demonstrate the use of the Moodle repository plugins to share media and content. I'm Shlona Nutsch-Klein Services Manager for My Learning Space and the moderator of this session. The webinar itself will be presented by our resident Moodle expert, Chad Uten. Before we get started, I'd like to point out that this session will be recorded. Additionally, if you have any questions through the presentation, please type them into the chat window and we will attempt to include them in the session. Ideally, please save your questions for the end of the webinar where we will endeavour to get through them. Now all that said, please sit back and I will hand you over to Chad. Thanks Shlona and G'day Moodlers. Welcome to Moodle and the Cloud. More precisely, we're here to learn about the repository plugins for Moodle version 2. Quick heads up in terms of where we're heading for the next half hour or so. There's a lot of buzz and hype around this thing called the Cloud. What is it and what might it mean for us as online educators? We'll explore those two questions. That conversation leads naturally into a new function in Moodle 2.0 known as the Moodle repository. It's an interface that makes it easy to share content and media from third party sites and services. So we'll aim to demonstrate how that can be done and naturally take some questions along the way. Okay, perhaps we'll start with a quick poll of our audience. Which sites and services have you used this month? Google Docs, Gmail, YouTube and Flickr. You can make multiple selections as we push that poll to you now. We'll leave it open for 15 or 20 seconds. Thank you as those results are coming in. Close to quiz the poll rather in a moment and the results. Okay, interestingly the majority of us over 75% are using Google Docs and Gmail. About half of us YouTube this month and Flickr about a quarter of the participants. Well, it's fair to say that all of these services are in fact cloud based. They're popularizing and in essence cloud based services such as these are all about data and applications stored on the internet, not locally on your computer or local area network. So there's no shouldn't the cloud. So it's a concept of computing delivered as a service. So it is really software as a service and it also involves resources and information provided to users and their devices via the internet. So I mean historically speaking in computer network diagrams as a matter of fact the cloud is often used to depict the internet. So the cloud is the perfect metaphor effect for the internet. It's no surprise it would be called that. So it is all about software as a service, not as a product. And it's a real distributed computing model. The notion that resources and information data may in fact be shared across a multiplicity of servers or computers that doesn't reside on one physical dedicated piece of hardware. And that's unimportant. We just need to know that our data or applications or information is available when we're connected to the internet regardless of where we are. So if I had to draw you a pretty picture of cloud computing, it would likely look something like this. The cloud contains applications, information and services. You can see some examples of them there. In fact documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, calendaring and contact applications, multimedia and web-based gaming. Now these applications and information and services they build upon technologies and infrastructures for the internet and users send and receive information to and from the cloud through various computing devices. So they could be desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. Where the conversation gets interesting is the Myrtle repository. In a nutshell, the repository is Myrtle's way of connecting to these cloud-based services as the interface whereby its users, so that's us as educators and learners, we can go beyond basic file uploads into an online Myrtle course. We can also share content and media from a variety of third-party sites. What is important however before we can do that in Myrtle 2 is that the LMS administrator has enabled and configured the repository plugins. So when the time comes and we're in a course looking to add content or media, we use this new feature referred to as the File Picker. It's the new metaphor in fact for sharing content via Myrtle and we'll see that in a short while. We'll be able to insert images, media, or attach files. So as far as some of these repository plugins are concerned for Myrtle, here's a snapshot. It's by no means an exhaustive list of the plugins, but these are some of the more noteworthy. One of the latter slides in the presentation here will reference each of these services and you're free to explore them at your leisure. I'll briefly just make mention of each of them to give you the heads up. Our Fresco is an open-source content management system. Amazon, BoxNet, and Dropbox, they are cloud-based file storage solutions. Flickr and Picasso are photo-sharing sites. Google Docs is a collaborative web-based solution for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and web forms. Wikimedia is a Creative Commons multimedia repository. It's a sister project of Wikipedia. And YouTube is a cloud-based video sharing site. So as far as this diagram is concerned, we've got Myrtle, I guess, at the center of all of this and connected to it toward the bottom there. We've got the new file system architecture and Myrtle users. They could be administrators, teachers, and learners. So those elements, in essence, interact. And it is all about importing or pulling content from these third-party sites up in the cloud to an online Myrtle course. It's worth mentioning, however, this process does work in reverse via the Portfolios plugin. But that's perhaps a conversation for another day. Okay, time for a demo. So I've logged into a plain vanilla local instance of Myrtle 2.1. On the front page is an administrator. As far as configuring and enabling these repository plugins is concerned, your LMS administrator needs to go to the settings block, sort admin, plugins, repositories, manage repositories. We get presented with a variety of repositories, most of which are disabled and not visible by default. The top four, server files, recent files, uploader file, and private files ought to be enabled and visible. The others need to be enabled and configured. I've done that already just to save a little bit of time today with some of these other repository plugins. But to give you an example of how it may in fact work, there's one of these disabled. It will typically involve the administrator enabling it and making it visible, and then saving the subsequent page. In this case, with the Amazon S3 repository plugin, you're actually required to visit the SAD third party site and get a public and a private key. That'll take about 60 seconds. You're not donating an organ. It's quick and easy. You grab those keys, you would copy and then paste them into the fields here, save, and then that plugin should be available to users in their courses. I guess it's worth mentioning as well with these repository plugins. They are generally, if they're saved and configured, they will generally be site-wide or global. So that'll be a single instance. You can also have for some of them at least course-wide and or private instances of these repository plugins. Again, when they're enabled and visible, the administrator can make that decision then and there. Okay, let's go into a course and see if you're these in action. So this is a brand new course. We can see we've got one loading object given to us by default. It's a news forum. It's where we make general news and announcements. So let's go in there and have a new topic. So I'm giving our discussion topic, its mandatory subject and message. Down the bottom here, we can attach a file to this forum post. So people will read this. It being news and announcements, they certainly loaners won't be able to respond, but we can certainly attach files if appropriate. So we click add and we get this dialogue popping up. This is the file picker and we can see on the left side here, we've got a variety of options from server files, recent files that a lot of it as a user have been working with in middle. I could upload a file or I could call on a private file that I'd uploaded earlier and it was for my eyes only and I've decided to make it public or visible to other middle users. I've got a file system, which again, if this file path is mapped correctly, be it a network or a server drive, we could FTP documents and media to a said directory and learners could, and teachers for that matter, access the files there, they could pick the files and add them to places such as discussion forums. We talked about some of these other cloud-based services. We'll run with Google Docs on this occasion. It would require that I would have a Google Docs account and it would typically ask me to log in. I've been there a little while back, so I'm logged in already and I would select the file. It could be a document, a presentation or perhaps a piece of media. I'm going to import or copy this into the middle course. So it's got a name, an author and I choose the license, but it's all rights reserved, public domain or creative comments. Select the file and post to forum. So other course participants will be able to read this message, general news and announcements and access the file attached to it. So whether it's a case of opening it, saving it, printing it, etc. So that's our first look at the repository's plugin and the file picker. Let's turn editing on, because there are in fact a couple other ways we can go about adding media and content to our middle courses. All right, editing on, add a resource, let's choose page. Now if you're using Moodle 1.9 earlier, you would be familiar with two options in this menu along the lines of text page or a web page. A page removes any ambiguity, so we select it. We'll give this resource a name and a description. In the next field is where we put our page content. One of the new features of Moodle 2 is this HTML editor. It's a new HTML editor and it's supported by a larger range of web browsers, which is good. This little icon here, the tree, allows to insert an image. So we click that and if we knew the web address, we could simply enter the image URL and its description. Or else we click the button here that reads find or upload an image. So we get our file picker again and the options we see. So again depending which of these repository plugins have been enabled and configured and are appropriate for when we're looking to insert an image. And that's not all of them. Google Docs, for example, is not on this list at the moment, nor is YouTube. So let's go flicker public. That would be the one to use most certainly if you didn't have a flicker account and or you weren't intending to necessarily import or pull a file from your own account, but one from the public stream. So we've chosen flicker public and we would run a keyword search or a tag search and see what results we get. You can see it was a pretty general query and I've got a hell of a lot of results. So I would need to be more specific than that if I'm going to find exactly what I'm looking for. In the case I'll select this and let's just presume I either own the file or I've been given the express permission of the author to make use of this file under a given license. That's the key essence here. So I select that file and we get a preview of it and we could go into the appearance tab if we wanted to adjust its alignment, dimensions and spacing, simply insert the image into the page. So save and display. So you get an idea here in terms of how this might work with a moodle page resource. We have a variety of stylized text, hypertext and we can embed media images in particular like this quite quickly. And these resources are dating timestamp which is quite useful as well. We'll return to the course page. Editing is still on. Let's add an activity this time and we're going to add a glossary. So we'll just enter the mandatory name and description. Glossary is a typically used as a course base dictionary or a compilation of key concepts or language that learners need to be familiar with. So we'll set that up. We now need to add an entry. Let's say the concept will be repositories and we can define that as a moodle. It's a moodle to plug in, share content and media from third-party sites. So we've got some text there as part of the explanation definition of this concept in the seed glossary. With reference to the HTML editor, this little filmstrip icon allows us to insert or embed media from cloud-based services. So we click it. The dialog is slightly different here. We find or upload a sound, video or applet. So this isn't naturally we're not looking to upload or insert an image or a document. So we get our file picker. Again, the options here in the file picker pane will vary depending which repository plugins have been enabled, configured, and are appropriate for inserting moodle media. So we see Wikimedia, for example, and YouTube because we can grab video from over those sites. So let's say YouTube. We search videos, again keyword search. So we get some results here. There's not a lot of results. In fact, our search was quite specific. We select the appropriate video. Again, you get the option here to rename the file, the author, and choose the license. So select that file. You get a preview. Let's insert it into the definition area there. So if we save changes, we'll get to see how this looks. So it's served up quite nicely on a moodle page, hasn't it, in a skin or a media player. So we can view the video here. It contains audio as well. Or alternatively, we could go full screen. Or watch the video on YouTube in the available resolutions. The thing I like about embedding media from third-party sites such as YouTube and Flickr in your moodle pages is I guess you're better able to moderate the content. The moment you send your learners to these third-party sites and services to view the videos and the images there, for example, you tend to be at the mercy of people you don't know and at times the crude comments that they might leave. So bear that in mind. We're referencing that content and just embedding it in a player within your moodle course. Now, if you've tried to do what I've just demonstrated there with your video, YouTube, for example, and it's not displaying as it ought to, you might want to check a couple of things. I'll give you a quick heads up. Through the eyes of the administrator, you'd want to go to the settings block, side administrator, plugins, filters, managed filters. Filters control the way that moodle pages are displayed. None of these are enabled by default, incidentally. One that we are interested in enabling is the multimedia plugins, this filter in particular. So we've set it as active it's on. Over in the settings, there's various multimedia plugins for this particular filter. So we've enabled virtually all of those. YouTube, Vimeo, Vimeo is another video sharing site. MP3, Flash Video, HTML5, Audio and Video. There's a few legacy players as well. Just bear in mind, not all of those multimedia plugins are enabled by default. So it may not be enough to simply enable the multimedia filter. You'll have to come in here and check a few boxes is what I'm saying. We've left .swf files as disabled. What does happen from time to time is the possibility of someone with malintent malicious code via said files into your moodle. So it's not advised or recommended from a security point of view. It's you enable SWF. If your Flash videos aren't playing, you may in fact want to enable that filter and see if it makes a difference. If it doesn't, the other thing you can check via your site admin, security, site policies will be the allowing of embed and object tags and enabling trusted content. Other than that, if these videos don't display on a moodle page, the issue is either server related or it could be at the end user side and their environmental settings, their browser, the version of browser and settings and the plugins they do or don't have. So that's about as much as I wanted to show with respect to repositories. I might just go back to the course and I'll take any questions that might come to hand. I could say a few things there that have been mentioned in the chat window. One of which is with respect to version control. So what happens there when we insert a document from Google Docs or Flickr for example, in essence what we're doing is creating a second copy of those files. So we're pulling it, we're importing it from the cloud service into your moodle course. So what that means is if the document up in Google Docs is updated, those changes aren't reflected as far as I understand in the moodle file. That's a separate copy. It might be a future feature or a feature request that you might want to put in. But I don't think it's a single version. So you've got versioning control considerations there. Another question along the lines of do learners need login accounts to these cloud services to make use of the repositories plugin? The answer there varies. It does really depend. If it's simply us as teachers or admins sharing documents and media with them via moodle, absolutely not. The learners don't need logins to any of these sites or services. We're simply sharing a copy of these said files with them in the moodle environment. If, however, you want to empower your learners and have them sharing and getting social and collaborating and contributing, I've encouraged that. I think that's part of the philosophy of plugins. They really do need login accounts to Google Docs and Flickr and so forth. So they can log into their account, grab their files and make a moodle copy of them. Okay, I think that is just about it. There's no other questions coming through there. There's the resources from today's presentation. Feel free to explore those at your leisure. And I'll hand back to Shalona so she can wrap things up. Thanks, Chad. Thanks for another great session. Thank you, Moodlings, for participating in today's webinar presented by My Learning Space. We trust this session has been of benefit to you. If you'd like to learn more about Moodle 2.0 and its functionalities or any of our expert services, please feel free to contact us. If you have any further questions, please ask them now. To everyone, we look forward to seeing you again in our future webinars. And happy moodling.