Moodle Gradebook: If you're already using Moodle for your courses, adding the power of the in-built gradebook can make teaching life a lot easier. This book tells you all about it – from basic concepts to clever customization.

Unlike most of the Moodle books, this is a shorter more focused book with 128 pages, however this is quite sufficient to target the different aspects of the gradebook. The book is targeted at course instructors rather than admins.The introduction is a great primer about the gradebook, providing a strong overview of what the key features are and how it can be used. It is short and to the point and leaves the reader ready to target the areas which are of most interest to them.The following chapters explain the different types of grades, including numeric grades, letter grades, custom scales and outcomes. They then go through the steps of how to use the different grading methods with activities and assignments. I really liked the explanation of Rubrics and how they work with Moodle 2.The chapter on calculations is great (and the largest chapter in the book). It provides a nice progression of explanations and contextualisation even when handling some of the tougher aspects of the gradebook. I love that there are four examples and not just instructions.One chapter which is a MUST read for everyone is the chapter which covers excluding assessments from the final course grade. Great explanation.The chapter on the reporting side of the gradebook is really clear and provides good explanations on all the options available.Rebecca does a wonderful job explaining the activity tracking and course completion in the final chapter.The book provides a concise overview of the surface of the gradebook and of the depth of configurations available and how and why you would want to do so.If you are serious about utilising the gradebook then this is a book to keep on your desk

Moodle teachers and administrators have needed a good book on the Moodle Gradebook for a long time. Finally, Rebecca Barrington fulfilled this need with Moodle Gradebook, from Packt Publishing.As an author, I know that it can be tempting to inflate a book's page count with unneeded text. Thicker books sell for higher prices, which means more money for the author. That's why I appreciate an author who writes a book that presents the information that I need, and then gets out of the way so I can get on with my work. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is a classic example of this kind of user-friendly writing. Rebecca Barrington's Moodle Gradebook is another.Barrington begins with a tour of the gradebook, including a list of the Moodle activities that can be graded. Many Moodle teachers don't know that forum posts and glossary entries can be graded. Barrington also tells the reader early in the book that you can create custom scales for the gradebook, while avoiding the temptation to go into detail about those custom scales. After Barrington explains the standard numberic and letter scales, she gives us details about custom scales.Barrington also covers using outcomes, which might be the Gradebook's most underused feature. If you're a corporate user of Moodle, you will be especially interested in using outcomes. That's because and outcome can be measured by several different graded activities. For example, suppose resolving customer complaints is an important skill in your company. Your company might have a speicfic course on that skill, "How to Handle Customer Complaints." Also, that skill might be a part of several courses, such as a topic in "Dealing with Angry Customers" and also a topic in "Routing Calls to the Proper Department." You could create an outcoome for Resolving Customer Complaints, and apply that to graded activities in all three courses. Then, you can track your students' progress for that skill as they progress through your catalog of courses.Rubrics are also covered. A rubric is an element of a grade. It enables you to separate a grade into individual criteria, and assign a specific number of points to each criteria. Barrington uses the example of a writing assingment, where the word count, number of quotes, and number of elements covered are all critera that are graded.Barrington covers several kinds of grading reports from both the teacher's and student's point of view. Knowing what the students will see when they look at their invidividual gradebook is very useful for the teacher.If you want to get more insight into your students' progress, the Moodle Gradebook can be a valuable tool. Barrington's book does a good job of explaining and demonstrating how to make full use of the gradebook. I encourage you to read the detailed table of contents on Packt's website.

If you have used Moodle before, but would like more detailed help using the gradebook, this book is great. This books starts with an introduction to the gradebook, but quickly covers more advanced topics, such as using your own scale for grades, using letter or words instead of simply percentages, and many other advanced grading methods.Even though the book doesn't cover every possible function in the gradebook, it provides a comprehensive walk through on doing most anything you would want to do.If you have used Moodle, and want to become well versed with using the gradebook, this book would be a great reference.

Como toda la serie de estos editores, el libro es excelente, pues presenta un desarrollo de modelos muy didáctico y fácil.

I'd long thought there was a need for a manual on using Moodle's Gradebook. While some people find its latest incarnation unneccessarily complicated, others love its huge range of features and with the advent of Conditional Activities in 2.0 and rubrics in 2.2, it will open up more possibilities to more Moodlers. So I have been looking forward to the publication of Packtpub's Moodle Gradebook by South Devon College's Rebecca Barrington whom I met at the Irish/UK Moodle Moot in Dublin last week. While I can use the gradebook to an acceptable degree, I am one of those numerophobes for whom any mention of terms such as "aggregation" "normalisation" or even "forumalae" have me quivering - so I hoped this book would quell my fears and explain grading essentials in clear terms. I was not disappointed.Chapter 1 gives us a basic introduction to the gradebook, how to access it, which activities work with it and how to organise grades and then Chapter 2 explains in more detail customising grades for our purposes within a course. What is useful is that the author is aware teachers reading the book probably won't have admin control, so where features need to be enabled -such as Outcomes - she points the reader in the direction of the admin settings so they can pass on the information. We learn how to tweak the gradebook's default letter grades for instance to suit Pass/Merit/Distinction requirements, and there is a useful section on the aforementioned Outcomes, something I feel has a lot of potential, but which I have rarely seen well used.In Chapter 3 we learn how to allocate Scales and Outcomes to graded activities such as assignments. We learn the difference between Simple Direct grading and Rubrics, a new feature for Moodle 2.2 (It's worth pointing out here that although the book is written for Moodle 2.2, a lot of it applies to earlier versions of Moodle 2 and 1.9 as well) The section on Advanced grading is clearly set out and helpful to those for whom this added functionality is a real boon - and that's a lot of us! Finally we look at adding grades directly to the Gradebook rather than via an assignment. This is also helpful, as I've realised when doing intermediate or advanced training that users are not always aware they are able to do this.Having set up assignments, we are then shown how to grade them in Chapter 4 with a clear explanation of the different display options to make the Gradebook easier to manage. Until now I was quite comfortable with what was going on: it was Chapter 5, Using Calculations that for me made the book worth the money (I bought my own copy so I am an unbiased reviewer!) I feel now much more confident about the processes of aggregation and normalisation and especially appreciated having several examples to follow.Chapter 6 explains how to organise grades into categories, something else that it's important to show new users from the start so they don't end up with long cluttered lists of grades, and also so they can have different aggregation types within one course. I was pleased as well to read about how to exclude assessments from the final grade as this is another query that is often raised on the help forums of Moodle.orgGroups and reports are dealt with in Chapter 7. Filtering by groups is another Must, especially if you have a course with several classes and shared by several teachers. I appreciated also having the different reports explained. Reports are one of Moodle's strong points and judicious use of the information they provide can assist in monitoring and improving the progress of our students. Another plus is that the Gradebook data can be exported and then played around with in, for instance, Excel. I always make a point of mentioning this to newbie Moodlers as well as it can be reassuring to realise that your grades aren't stuck on the internet - they can be downloaded, manipulated more and even printed off. You can also import grades.Finally, Chapter 8 outlines how to set a pass grade (very useful!) and then goes through the new Moodle 2 features of Activity and Completion tracking and Course Completion, including helpful screenshots of the teacher view and student view.The book is available in Moodle's Books Database and if you buy it from there, a percentage of the sales go to the Moodle Trust, so you will be supporting Moodle. Becky's final words at the end of the book are: I really hope that you have found this book useful Yes thankyou Becky - I did - and so will those who buy it!