Author: Michael G

ARKOS 2 -DEMO- (2023) // Walkthrough (No Commentary)

Posted on by Michael G
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HenryMacArthur3
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/HenryMacArthur
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/henrymacarthur83/

Genre: 1st Person, Shooter, Action
Developer: RetroSouls
Release: xx.10.2023

Description:
Arkos 2 is a first-person fantasy shooter with destructible voxel environment. You play the old wizard Arkos, who has to save the land of the twilight.

Source:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2308660/ARKOS_2/

Voc Builder for Students by Using Prefixes, Roots and Suffixes. Part 6: auto.

Posted on by Michael G
This video is designed to help build general and scientific vocabulary for State and standardized exams by using word-part (prefix, root, suffix) explanation and examples.

This video is part of a series. In this video, we introduce this word parts: auto.

You can download the free student engagement worksheet / quiz that we made for this video at the following link: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Vocabulary-Builder-Part-6-Video-sheet-Google-Forms-Canvas-more-V1-11602613

For educators:
– For background on why students may benefit from completing the video worksheets at home the evening before you teach the class, please see this 3-minute video: https://youtu.be/_zZuryl1k-c
– Our worksheets are available in electronic format for free (e.g., Blackboard, Canvas, Easel, Google Forms, MS Forms, Moodle). For more info, please see https://youtu.be/ZdSb95QyByI
– We have manually edited the closed captions, so those in English are correct. Although we cannot guarantee all automated translations will be accurate, we have been very impressed by those generated by YouTube® in parts of languages that we can understand. If a speaker of your chosen language can ensure the translations are acceptable, then you may wish to turn these on for students whose first language is not English.

Other free resources we’ve made:
– For links to many free educational resources, please visit our website (no 3rd party advertising, no subscriptions, no paywalls): https://TestPrepLLC.org/

– For our free apps for Apple’s Mac and iPad (collects no data, no advertising, no subscriptions, no paywalls, no in-app purchases), please visit our page on the Apple App Store. These apps include Common Core and State based practice tests in math, and State science exams based on NGSS and State curriculums (all with detailed, colorful explanations): https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/test-prep-llc/id1727786893

Best wishes,
The staff at Test Prep LLC
https://TestPrepLLC.org

#NGSS

Introducing Moodle Workplace 4.4: Unlocking self-directed learning

Posted on by Michael G
by Emilio Lozano.  

Dear community members,

We are glad to announce the latest release of Moodle Workplace 4.4! 🥳

I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank the entire Moodle team for their tremendous hard work in making the release of Moodle Workplace 4.4 an absolute success, as well as for delivering an exceptional Moodle LMS 4.4 release last month. 👩🏻‍💻🧑🏼‍💻👨🏽‍💻

The latest release of Moodle Workplace 4.4, which includes the Learning Catalogue, aims to empower employees with self-directed learning tools. This underscores its tailored approach to organisational growth and professional development objectives. It provides strong support for Learning and Development (L&D) managers, facilitating the creation of customised development plans for every team member.

Moodle Workplace 4.4 offers features designed to enhance how organisations manage their training programs. The update includes options for more advanced customisation of training pathways, a streamlined process for certification management, and increased administrative control over training courses. With these improvements, organisations are better equipped to facilitate effective learning initiatives, foster innovation, and align their learning strategies closely with their overarching goals.

Let’s take a closer look at all the features and what they have to offer:

Discovering a range of courses with the Learning Catalogue

The Learning Catalogue, also known as ‘Catalogue’, is a new feature that transforms the course discovery experience for learners, ensuring convenience and individualised upskilling. With easier access to learning materials, employees are encouraged to take charge of their own career and personal development.

L&D managers will also find the catalogue effective in improving employee training experiences, promoting upskilling, and cultivating a culture of self-directed learning among employees.

The Catalogue also comes with built-in search methods, which can be especially useful for learners and trainers when navigating the learning materials. Learners can benefit from the ‘extended search’ option, which supports all course fields, including user-generated custom fields. It incorporates adjustable priority settings for each field to configure relevance and is very efficient even with large datasets.

Introducing Moodle Workplace 4.4: Unlocking self-directed learning

The Learning Catalogue simplifies course discovery, allows personalised upskilling, and empowers L&D managers to cultivate a culture of self-directed learning among employees.

Expand your reach and attract more talent with public course offerings

The Learning Catalogue within Moodle Workplace empowers organisations to expand their reach by offering courses publicly. This facilitates innovative recruiting techniques by showcasing learning content to potential employees and also provides an opportunity for dynamic marketing and branding channels to attract potential customers.

Moreover, the Learning Catalogue streamlines course management, curation, promotion, sale, and delivery within a unified platform. This consolidation translates into significant cost savings, smoother workflows and an enhanced user experience, providing organisations who wish to sell their courses with a distinct competitive advantage.

Organisations can make their courses available to the public for a wider reach and to attract more customers as well as talen

Organisations can make their courses available to the public for a wider reach and to attract more customers as well as talents.

Efficiently assign managers and add new jobs for streamlined administration

The user upload feature in Moodle Workplace 4.4 has been enhanced to support manual manager assignments. Administrators can import manual assignments from external systems using CSV files, seamlessly integrating data into the platform. This feature makes executing mass updates and managing reporting lines easier, ultimately enhancing workflow and productivity within the system.

Gain greater control over report customisation and refine audience targeting to specific managerial roles.

Gain greater control over report customisation and refine audience targeting to specific managerial roles.

Administrators also now have the ability to improve audience targeting for reports to optimise communication channels. By narrowing down the audience to specific managerial roles or combinations of roles, they can ensure that important content effectively reaches the right people.

With the manually assigned manager option available on Custom Pages and Custom Reports, content can now be customised specifically for designated managerial roles within an organisation. These improvements not only optimise communication channels and audience targeting for reports but also contribute to an employee’s self-directed learning by facilitating efficient access to role-specific training and resources.

The People tab also has a new functionality where HR managers can add new jobs directly from the “+New job” button. This way, HR managers don’t need to change the context to create jobs and can assign jobs to several employees simultaneously. This further contributes to administrative efficiency by allowing HR managers to streamline their workflow. Additionally, effortless reporting line creation directly from the People management page ensures seamless reporting structure management, saving valuable time for administrators.

The People tab now allows HR managers to add new jobs seamlessly via the "+New job" button, streamlining the process and enab

The People tab now allows HR managers to add new jobs seamlessly via the “+New job” button, streamlining the process and enabling simultaneous job assignment.

Bridge language barriers with multilingual notifications

Moodle Workplace 4.4 introduces the capability to add multilingual appointment descriptions, enhancing communication for users across diverse language backgrounds. With this feature, learners and trainees receive notifications in their preferred language, facilitating better understanding and engagement. Trainers can effectively manage course notifications for diverse language backgrounds, promoting inclusive and globally connected learning environments.

Through the multilingual appointment descriptions, users can receive notifications in their preferred language for better und

Through the multilingual appointment descriptions, users can receive notifications in their preferred language for better understanding.

Streamline HR operations with centralised certification

Moodle Workplace 4.4 expands the existing centralised certification automation functionality by including automation. It allows L&D managers to automatically assign certifications to users who weren’t initially included. For instance, new employees not assigned to Health & Safety Certification will now be automatically enrolled.

Enabled by Dynamic Rules, this comprehensive automation enhances efficiency and simplifies the management of certification processes, promoting smoother L&D operations.

Moodle Workplace 4.4 effortlessly centralises certification automation, empowering HR managers to efficiently manage certific

Moodle Workplace 4.4 effortlessly centralises certification automation, empowering HR managers to efficiently manage certifications and simplify operations.

If you would like to explore more about the Catalogue, read our Learning Catalogue page in the user documentation.

Learn more about Moodle Workplace 4.4 by reading our new features documentation for an overview of the key features and improvements.

Cheers,
Emilio Lozano
Head of Workplace Solutions in Workplace Solutions

Specbee: Starstruck by the Drupal Starshot Initiative

Posted on by Michael G
DrupalCon Portland ‘24 seemed to fly by, but its impact was so profound and memorable that every Drupal community member will remember this for a long, long time.
Last week, Specbee proudly sponsored and hosted a booth at DrupalCon Portland ’24. Our VP of Sales and Marketing, Jim Barnthouse, and Head of Operations, Michael Weaver, attended. Before Michael left, he asked if I had any questions for Dries (if he got a chance to talk to him, which he did by the way). I had a question about the future of Drupal. I wanted to know how Drupal plans to compete with other competitors like WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, and Sitecore. As it turned out, Dries already had everything figured out! And in his Driesnote, he dropped the announcement of the Drupal Starshot initiative.
While watching Driesnote, I was fascinated by the fact that Drupal predates a lot of prominent applications like Safari, Instagram, & WordPress. This makes Drupal special since it has been around for a whopping 23 years. But the innovation has never stopped. From the adoption of Symfony components to build Drupal 8 to supporting OpenAI within months of its release. This constant strive for innovation makes Drupal a great CMS. All thanks to the contributions and efforts of thousands of dedicated people, making Drupal better every day.

What is Drupal Starshot?
Since its inception, Drupal has been pitched as a CMS that can build web applications using various core components and contributed modules. Often while building a Drupal website, we need various features like setting up patterns for clean URLs for the contents, adding meta information, spam protection, a form-building UI, etc. The Drupal Starshot initiative aims to be the new default Drupal installer (maybe called as “Drupal CMS”) that will include these various common features packaged in it incorporating the best-used contributed projects and best practices. Apart from this, Starshot is also built on top of recent new Drupal initiatives like Project Browser, Automatic Updates & Recipes for faster innovation and execution.
Drupal Starshot will introduce a new version of Drupal with great out-of-the-box experience. This doesn’t mean that Starshot will replace Drupal Core. The traditional Drupal core will still exist as it is for people to use and build applications with it. However, the “Drupal CMS” will be the recommended downloadable option over the traditional Drupal core to get started.

Do we need Drupal Starshot?
Drupal core provides a solid foundation for building a high-performance and innovative website. However, there is a steep learning curve when it comes to building a website using only Drupal Core. It often becomes overwhelming for new developers to get started because of the lack of certain general and common features in the strong foundational Drupal core. This significantly reduces the adoption and appeal of Drupal among beginners. Though this factor improves as people progress in the game and become more proficient, they learn how to leverage the different contributed modules and best practices to build a website using it. But still, this remains a downside factor for Drupal for new people coming in; the adoption and ease of use.
To keep up with the highly competitive market of growing CMSes Drupal has to grow to compete with them. This is where the Drupal Starshot initiative comes in that aims to ensure that a strong foundational Drupal core, combined with the refined common features with contributed projects, utilizing the best practices in the industry and new innovative initiatives, is easy to use out-of-the-box and make a lasting first impression on people who are trying it out for the first time.

Drupal Starshot Highlights
A recommended Drupal CMS
The recommended option to get started with the “Drupal CMS” will come packaged with default and pre-configured modules and configuration for basic setup of functionalities. This can include:

Drupal SEO functionalities like Pathauto for pretty URLs of contents, Metatag to add meta information for pages, and XML Sitemaps
Content authoring features like the Linkit module that provides an autocomplete interface for internal and external linking in rich-text editors
Content schedulers to schedule publishing and unpublished contents
Improving the authoring experience by adding Simple Add More or Type Tray
A further improved administrative theme like Gin
Spam protection using Honeypot or ReCaptcha

These modules can highly improve the out-of-the-box experience of a user to start building websites using Drupal. This significantly decreases the development time and cost to launch a Drupal website.
Not another Drupal distribution
Starshot is NOT another Drupal distribution or an installation profile. Although Drupal distributions are a great starting point for building a Drupal website for a purpose, there were certain challenges that came along with it. For example, they are difficult to keep updated, can’t be removed easily, and cannot be added after starting your project. To overcome this, the Drupal Recipes initiative was introduced to developers & site builders to incorporate Drupal functionality from predefined packages quickly and easily that can be added at any point of a project lifecycle.
Starshot will be built using Recipes that provide more flexibility and robustness to the Drupal CMS including various functionalities using contributed projects. Using recipes doesn’t lock you in like a distribution does. So, users will have the liberty to choose and include the functionalities that are required for a project.
Experience Builder
The “Experience Builder” is the new initiative to further enhance the page-building capabilities of Drupal replacing the Layout Builder page builder. The out-of-the-box experience of the page builder that Drupal core provides that is the Layout Builder lacks heavily in the authoring experience. Though it can be improved, it requires several modules and tweaks to make it user-friendly. This poses a huge bottleneck for the adoption of Drupal. The new Experience Builder addresses this issue by stitching in the best of Layout Builder, Paragraphs, In-Browser theming & SDC (Single Directory Component) with a JavaScript framework like React to provide a seamless experience for authors and site builders to build landing pages.
Future of Drupal
With the announcement of Starshot, Drupal cements its place to compete with the big names in the marketplace, making it easy to adopt and build beautiful web applications. This is definitely a big initiative that will change the paradigm of how Drupal is being seen and utilized. Since Starshot is not tied to the Drupal core release cycle it opens up opportunities for faster innovation and new features incorporating contributed projects to release more often.
New to Drupal? Check out this article to help you decode some of the Drupal jargon we have used in this article (like recipes, distributions, SDC).
Final Thoughts
Dries made a great point in his Driesnote: if we want to be a part of the web race, which is going to happen anyway with or without Drupal, we need our Moonshot moment. And that moment is now. Drupal needs your help in bringing this initiative to life. Specbee has pledged to contribute to the Starshot initiative as much as possible to reach its goal. You can do so too by taking the Starshot pledge here.

KDE 6 landed in OpenBSD-current

Posted on by Michael G

YES! KDE6 landed in OpenBSD -current

Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) writes in his most recent blog entry on KDE6 on OpenBSD, and goes on to say

We are currently in an excellent phase ahead of the upcoming OpenBSD release 7.6, which gives us plenty time to thoroughly test KDE Plasma 6. My goal is to make sure it works well and is stable for everyone.

Also worth noting is some still in progress work,

Stay tuned for more updates as we progress towards the integration of KDE Plasma 6 into OpenBSD 7.6.

But don’t just take our word for it, read the whole thing, KDE6 on OpenBSD over at Rafael’s blog. There you will find detailed descriptions of how to perform the upgrade, and a video of the important points.

Sneha Revanur on empowering youth voices in AI, fighting for legislation and combating deepfakes and disinformation

Posted on by Michael G

At Mozilla, we know we can’t create a better future alone, that is why each year we will be highlighting the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through our Rise 25 Awards. These storytellers, innovators, activists, advocates, builders and artists are helping make the internet more diverse, […]

The post Sneha Revanur on empowering youth voices in AI, fighting for legislation and combating deepfakes and disinformation appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.