When Forums Need More Than One Grade

Problem:
We have two separate grades for one total assignment. The assignment: Post a Report and then Post a Peer Review of Another Student's Report. Report gets a grade of 12 points, a Peer Review gets a grade of 4 points.

Solution:
I read a post in the Moodle Forums that says to create a hidden forum for the second grade. I thought this meant I would have to log into each student's profile and post as them so that we could assign a grade to each posting. Not true! Here is how to make this work:

1. Have your forum the way you want it (for us, each student post a single discussion topic and the peer reviews are posted as replies) - out of 12 points
2. Create a hidden forum for the second grade you want to set it up for (I called them Lesson X Peer Review Grade) - out of 4 points
***make sure that your instructors have the permissions to manually input grades into the grader report
3. Have your instructors manually input the grades for the hidden forum - it still shows up for the student under their grade sheet
**hint: make sure they turn editing on (the button in the upper right corner)

ex.:
Student.......Lesson X Forum....Lesson X Peer Review Grade...Lesson X+1 Forum...Lesson X+1 Peer Review
Jane Doe.....12..........................4.............................................12..............................4

Excel Tip of the Day

Excel can be difficult and confusion when you know you want to do something and you just need to figure out how to do it.

I was tasked to create a spreadsheet for time management between our multiple grants. As such, there would be multiple sets of data to go through. Now, if we typed a task under Grant 1 we wanted it to auto tabulate 12 minutes. If nothing was entered, then 0 minutes.

I found several functions that were close but not quite. What I wanted was an IF function that was basically: if I type text in, then 12, if not, then 0. After a couple of hours of searching I finally was able to create my own.

=IF(ISTEXT(cell number you want to "test"), 12, 0)

This reads: if there is text in "test" cell, then auto fill 12, if not, 0.

I hope this helps someone!