Tek4L

Spent most of last week playing around with Moodle’s WYSIWYG editor. We are about to launch a trial of Moodle and I really wasn’t happy with some of the limitations/problems with the existing HTMLarea editor.

There are moves afoot to replace the editor in version 2.0, but we can’t wait for this. Some work had been done by others on integrating tinymce3 and I was able to take this and build on it. I have managed to do a temporary integration by turning off the default editor and pasting the tinymce javascript into a theme header.html file.

Getting it running was the easy bit. I then had to integrate the Moodle image and link file browser, but thanks to reasonable documention for tinymce it wasn’t too much of a problem.

The integration was mostly achieved without having to touch core Moodle or tinymce code, so it won’t be affected by upgrades to either package. The only thing I had to hack in Moodle was the javascript form validation script as the form textarea content in tinymce was not visible to the validation script  without tinyMCE.triggerSave(); being run. This is a bit of a pain, but at least it is just one line of code in one file that will need to be re-applied after Moodle upgrades.

It mostly seems to be working now,  but I need to do some more extensive testing to make sure!

Details about the integration and download of the required files can be found at
http://www.host4learning.com/moodlemce/

Well my sons had a great time last year getting stuck into Scratch, so I thought it might be worth moving them up another level to a more fully blown game development environment

http://www.microsoft.com/express/gamedevelopment/

Our first problem was our graphics card was not up to scratch, so having replaced that just before xmas we are now all set to get started in the new year.

We are going to use the c# version rather than c++. It is a major learning curve compared to Scratch, so it will be interesting to see how they get on. I will keep you posted.