DCL Updates

Monday's PD with goals and scales and the DCL was productive, no doubt. We got most teams in the district moved out of phase one and into phase two at least. Days like Monday also give me a lot of information about what is working for people and what makes them want to go Office Space on something because it doesn't work or is too hard/many steps.  I've been aware for some time of something in the DCL that qualifies as the printer in the image above. 

One word: Tables.

Tables are as needed in our daily work in schools as copy+paste. Without tables, we are essentially flashing back to the error era of typewriters where we would spend 2 hours trying to spacebar and return our way into lining things up so they look halfway decent. Case in point, the DCL's phase two focuses mainly on developing and putting learning goals & scales in the template into the DCL. That entire task is predicated on being able to use a table. 

So you would probably think that since Moodle was built for education, it would be great at tables. You would be wrong. 

Tables in Moodle are frustrating and harder than they should be. This is largely due to the nature of the differences between how a desktop application like Word handles this task vs how an Internet-based app can handle it. Classic square-peg, round hole. 

So one is left with two options: Spend the equivalent of two lifetimes setting up a scale by hand in a Moodle table or set it up in Word/GoogleDocs and copy/paste. 

I wonder which most folks will choose? 

The unfortunate thing about copy/paste is that it works until it doesn't. Copying and pasting a goals/scales combo worked until we started adding multiple tables in a unit. This was found by one of our CLs who was adding scales. Once she got scale #3 pasted in, the text editor (the box we type into in the DCL) locked up entirely and she couldn't do anything. Troubleshooting led to copy/paste, in that you get a lot of hidden formatting that comes with and when converted to Internet-readable code during paste, you end up with a mess that Moodle can't read and thus locks up. 

Solutions

So today I went back and reworked some things in an effort to make it easier and just work. Here's a rundown:

1. Added Autosave. Moodle (including the DCL) will autosave what you're typing as a "draft" every 30 seconds. Like GoogleDocs but just not as fast.

2. Reworked the toolbar getting rid of the extra click to expand the bar and tools we don't use. It's much shorter now.

3. Added back tools lost when we upgraded like the "Oops" back button

and the "Go to a full screen so you can actually see what you're doing" button


4. Added a replacement to tables called "grid" which is easier to use. It really should be called "columns" which explains how it would be used.


5. Made "Remove Formatting" more prominent. This is your number one button when cleaning up the aftermath of a copy/paste fiasco.


6. Fixed the copy/paste code problem with "paste special" 


Now when you copy/paste something from GoogleDocs or Word it will give you a preview before you paste it in.  You can then tell if it will be a disaster or not.

If you tell it where you're copying from, Moodle will strip out the garbage in the background making it so you can actually edit the table later without problems.

Take-aways 

1. There is an on-going effort to simplify and make things 'just work'. It is important to realize that adapting on the fly is the name of the game. I will try to find a solution or build a solution to your DCL or Moodle Classroom problem, but first I need to clearly understand it which comes from specific feedback. A CL gave me this table problem and it clearly was getting in the way moving forward in phase 2. 

2. Try out copying and pasting your goals/scale tables now. Hopefully it will work a lot better and not give you a post-paste mess. If we're still having a lot of troubles getting the goals & scales template in there, we'll need try other fixes.