New updates and tools in Virtual Classrooms
Moodle, the University’s Virtual Classrooms platform, offers Externadista professors and students a better user experience through new applications, added to those already available.
Virtual Classrooms are renewed! They have become a key platform for students and teachers in this age of remote classes. There, different dynamics and activities, such as exams, forums, and homework, are carried out virtually. Hence, the Digital Educational Innovation Office has fostered some updates to improve its use.
A tool to take attendance
In the Virtual Classrooms, professors will be able to verify that students are present in remote classes held on platforms such as Zoom. Through this new tool, added with a classroom activity, they will also be able to assign attendance status, such as “absent,” “excused,” or “late,” and download a report. View more information here.
Student Badges
From Virtual Classrooms, professors will be able to recognize their students’ learning processes progress by awarding digital badges. These are 100% customizable – the teacher will be able to assign an image to identify them, write a description of the achievement, goal, or skill achieved by the student and even link the institution’s name recognizing the badge if officially certified. View more information here.
Rich text editor
It is an assistant to personalize texts written in Virtual Classrooms. With this editor, teachers and students can add bullets, hyperlinks, HTML codes, and multimedia content such as audio files, videos, and images. They can emphasize texts by using bold, italics, and different sizes. With this new tool, Virtual Classroom users will be able to communicate more efficiently and expressively. Learn more here.
Curriculum Builder
The Library and the Digital Educational Innovation Office promote this tool allowing teachers to make better use of all the collections of electronic books, audiovisual materials, journals, magazines, newspapers, databases, and other digital resources offered on the Library website.
Professors can link the resource they want to the Virtual Classrooms they have in Moodle. This will allow them to create electronic bibliographies for their students, substantially improving their access to the digital resources available in the Library while protecting copyright.
You may also contact the Library helplines for more information: (57 1) 341 9900, ext. 3351 /library@uexternado.edu.co
Safe Exam Browser
This tool allows the creation of a safe environment for students to take their exams. It is a personalized Internet browser allowing teachers to ensure that students, while answering an exam, quiz, or partial in the Virtual Classroom, do not visit other pages, do not take screenshots, do not print questionnaires, do not use the calculator, or send messages through their emails, among other actions.
The tool can be configured according to the teacher’s preferences. For example, students can be blocked from opening Google to perform an extensive search on Wikipedia pages. They can still be authorized to open Excel to perform calculations or enter the Spanish Royal Academia page to find a term’s definition. If you wish to learn more about what this tool can do, click here.