Microsoft Education Labs has a free Office Addon for Moodle. This addon allows teachers or the owner of a Moodle course to upload documents to their course and access Moodle documents from within Office. Once the addon is installed to Office two items are added to the file menu: Open from Moodle, and Save to Moodle.

 The user configures the address of their Moodle server and logs in with their Moodle login. After this the user can access Moodle files from Office. 

 The addon works with Office 2003 and 2007 and Moodle 1.8.x and 1.9.x. The My Courses should be installed for the addon to work. No additional Moodle modules are required for the addon to work.

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(photo by jimmyroq)

For the past couple of weeks, I've used some of my time to write code that adds support for Federated Login for Google Account Users to an Elgg instance. This particular project's requirements don't end with just an implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO) but it also needs to have access to some of the user's Google Apps Data.  Because of this, I decided to use Google's OpenID+OAuth Hybrid protocol, which is a good fit for the requirements.

The first thing I did was to register the domain of the application I'm writing with Google.  You can read instructions on how to do this here.  After I've validated the domain, I now need to write the interface to Google's OpenID+OAuth Hybrid protocol.  The goal is to have SSO working with the capability to automatically create users on the Elgg side and map them to the proper Google account and to be able to request access to Google services.

I searched the plugins page for Elgg if anyone already wrote such a module and I got two results that piqued my interest.  These are Kevin Jardine's OpenID client plugin and Justin Richer's OAuth plugin.

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The Certificates module for Moodle will allow granting certificates based on completion of a Moodle activity.It allows uploading graphics and setting the style of the generatied certificate. Once a user has met the minimum criteria they can download a PDF and print their certificate.

There are several options for setting criteria for granting a certificate. These include overall course grade, time spent in the course, and ability to require one or more activities be completed, optionally with a minimum grade for the activities. Any of these requirements can be combined to determine when a student receives a certificate.

 Images can be uploaded to style the borders and include a watermark if desired. A signature image can be included, and of course, a logo can be uploaded.

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