An an experiment, we videotaped and published two student panels from last weekend's admission open house. Inspired by our recent work on a new web site design, I wanted to provide content that directly meets a priority audience need and fits how our audiences consume content.




We know that watching video has become increasingly popular online, and that it doesn't have to be very high quality to meet people's expectations. In fact, lower quality may connote greater authenticity than a highly polished product. We have also learned that middle and high school students, not their parents, are increasingly making choices among schools. We figure that students are even more likely to enjoy consuming information in a visual format.

We also know that prospective families want to find out directly what the student experience is like. What better way to learn than to hear from students themselves. Admittedly, the students were answering questions within the context of an admission open house, but their relaxed nature and eagerness shows the truth to the words they speak.

Simultaneously, I broadcast the events to uStream in order to practice this for the first time. It was so easy to do, aside from the fact that the audio didn't publish! I connected my DV camera to the Mac via FireWire, and then specified DV for video and audio input on uStream. One key lesson is that uStream dramatically reduces file transfer and processing time. Even if we are not interested in broadcasting live, the moment the event is over, we have a web-enabled, embeddable movie. Brilliant.

We will track statistics and listen to anecdotal feedback to determine whether we should post video or schedule interactive experiences more often. I can envision interactive chats with the Head of School or the broadcasting of sports competitions, arts performances, and distinguished speakers. Alumni in particular might enjoy tuning in to a substantive presentation from their old school. Parents might be able to watch a presentation from home that they could not attend in person. Automatically archiving everything is wonderful. Making the process really easy helps with adoption.


tags: ustream, video, brodcast, students

How ironic it is to read a commercial book about open-source software! I was nonetheless intrigued when Packt Publishing invited me to review a complimentary copy of Moodle Administration. Why not give book learning another try? I might find new value and improve my knowledge of Moodle.

Moodle Administration presents a clear and thorough review of essential concepts and tasks for Moodle site administrators. Büchner consistently focuses on his priority audience, staff who are tasked with installing and managing Moodle. He stays away from systems administration or course construction tasks. The guide will make sense in a variety of contexts, from campus-based schools and universities to virtual schools.

Moodle's own structure guides the book's organization. Chapter topics include installation, course management, user management, look and feel, security, backup and restore, backup and restore, and networking. This makes the book easy to use for a variety of purposes: an introduction to the new Moodle administrator, a refresher for a current Moodle admin, or as a quick reference for specific topics.

The Moodle community maintains its own documentation for administrators. These freely-accessible, maintained documents also cover the basics of site administration and follow Moodle's structure. Why buy the book? Overall, Büchner's focused effort demonstrates greater thoroughness and consistency than does the online documentation. One finds an appropriate level of detail and visuals throughout the book. That said, some explanations of the administrative interface reference and borrow from existing, free Moodle documentation.

The book helped fill a number of gaps in my knowledge, many of them new features in version 1.9 and some older. I will look into the Accessibility Options module as a way to provide screen-reading and high-contrast themes to three of our users. I enjoyed the clear explanation of how to set up parent roles using the mentee function, though I did not find the answer to my longstanding question of how to most easily provide parent access to their child's courses. I had heard of Mahara e-portfolio integration, but the book's explanation provided me with more complete context for the relationship than I had previously encountered. I learned a lot about how to synchronize enrollment with our student information system, which we may do one day. I also learned about file access via WebDAV, which could help teachers who maintain large file collections, but I was left curious when the book only demonstrated how to connect a Windows client to a WebDAV-enabled system.

I wish the book had spent more time on year-to-year transitions. Büchner alludes to year-end and start-of-year administrative tasks, underscores the importance of planning your course organization ahead of time, and explains both importing activities and restore from backup. Büchner could more fully explain different ways to help teachers who want to carry their course from one year into the next. I don't recall a reference to the Reset Course feature or manual approaches that teachers may use to keep some content and remove others from one year to the next.

Ideally, the Moodle community would make this quality of documentation available online. In the meantime, this book should find a receptive audience. I am pleased to read that Packt donates a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book to the Moodle project. I trust that Büchner's company, Synergy Learning, regularly contributes core code and modules to the Moodle project.

While academic technology specialists and teachers bear the most responsibility to understand how Moodle may support a constructionist learning environment, the Moodle administrator also plays a role. Moodle Administration misses the opportunity to educate Moodle admins on what makes Moodle different from its peers and competitors. The book could draw particular attention to configuration and maintenance tasks that facilitate student-centered instruction. For example, what block configurations typically accompany the Social Format for courses? How could students use their personalized calendar views to manage their own assignments? How may one allow more student control over course content? What features do students use to monitor course activity, especially in discussion forums? How does one configure inline commenting to provide more opportunities for teacher-student dialogue around completed work? In other words, it is great to know the function of each configuration setting, but should we not also teach the purpose?

The book encourages me to explore two of Packt Publishing's other Moodle titles, Moodle Teaching Techniques and Moodle E-Learning Course Development. These may provide more of the broader perspective on administering Moodle that I seek. On the other hand, how many school staff would spend about $150 US in order to purchase them all?



Moodle Administration fulfills its primary goal, to provide clear, comprehensive explanations of all of the major components of Moodle 1.9 to staff responsible for system installation and maintenance. It should serve as a useful introduction to new Moodle administrators or a reference manual for current admins. Advanced Moodle administrators may find the text useful as a refresher.



tags: moodle, moodle_administration, packt, books

Teachers make dozens of observations daily about students but have little time to share them with their colleagues. Students benefit when teachers have detailed knowledge of their talents and needs, yet often students exhibit different patterns of study and learning in different classes. How may teachers use technology to share their day-to-day student observations with each other? Doing so deepens the personalization of student instruction, a distinguishing feature of independent schools. It becomes invaluable during teacher-parent conferences, when teachers summarize the student experience for parents and simultaneously collect so much new information. A school that emphasizes awareness of student learning profiles needs such a system, because

In a web-based world, the core functionality of such a system is pretty straightforward. We even piloted this functionality in Moodle using a standard discussion forum and restricted course enrollment. The system needs a database to store the comments and a front-end for posting and viewing.



The fun lies in configuring the details of such a system. We have so far added the following features.

• Notes follow the student from year to year, so that institutional knowledge is retained.
  
• Blog-like format -- notes post in reverse chronological order.
  
• Student and teacher lists pull from school database, so they automatically stay up-to-date.
  
• Limit access to adults who currently have contact with student.
  
• Flag student learning profile information so that it's easier to find.
  
• Expire sensitive posts shortly, so that teachers may share urgent information with lower risk of exposure.
  
• Add second layer of password security so that system is not vulnerable to one lost password.
  
• Require SSL to protect information from packet sniffers.
  
• Each post generates an email notification to teachers, except when the teacher disables it or conferences are taking place.

Last year, we used such a system with two grades. Having declared the pilot a success, we have expanded the system to eight grades. Greater participation in the system has generated new, insightful teacher questions. Should we more narrowly define what kinds of information we post to the system? How does it alter the school's legal liability to permanently store information in a mySQL database that was previously either shared by email or not recorded at all? How much additional structure should we add to the system to keep notes organized as they accumulate? Is limiting access to current teachers too strict, considering the other meaningful teacher-student relationships that exist?

I am excited to continue to study and modify

tags: student_notes

I am spending a little bit of time trying to find a way to convert Flip video files into QuickTime or FLV format for posting on our web sites. This is not really a how-to guide, but rather a snapshot into my (limited) progress with this task at this moment in time. Perhaps I will make more progress later, or one of you fine readers will post a comment detailing a more helpful solution!

Our seniors spent a morning at the pumpkin patch with their first grade buddies and took twelve Flip Mino video cameras with them. They captured 340 video segments!



How may I produce one or more useful movies from these using the least possible effort? I don't want to simply post the videos directly to a site like YouTube, because some of the content is likely to be private or exceed their posting limits. I also don't want to require teachers to create YouTube accounts just to facilitate this conversion process.

Flip records in AVI format using 3ivx compression. If we go to QuickTime, we will want to convert into MOV format using H.264 compression. If we choose Flash video, then we will convert into FLV format (what does Adobe call their compression codec?).

Two issues are making this process more difficult for video than for audio. For one, Adobe and Apple can't seem to get along -- neither QuickTime nor iMovie has a FLV export feature, and I'm not about to insist that all of our teachers and students own a full copy of Flash to do this work. While some people suggest FilmRedux (formerly VisualHub) or FFMpegX, I have found these applications either too arcane for the average user or incompatible with either the import or export portions of this process. Is it possible that VisualHub used to have FLV export, but the SourceForge hosted version lacks that component?


QT Amateur (converted files but can't handle nested folders)


FilmRedux (wouldn't read 3ivx AVI or m4v files)


FFMPEGX (too many dependencies to foist on our users)


iMovie (successfully reads 3ivx files, allowing users to edit first)

QTAmateur looked to be a good option to batch convert the files into a usable format before starting editing work, but then I found that it took a long time to convert files in QuickTime format, and QTAmateur was not able to reach into subfolders to convert files located in there. Since I have twelve cameras, many files have the same name and must be stored in subfolders as a result.

Good news: iMovie '08 can use the video files straight from the Flip camera, once I have installed the 3ivx decoder that comes with the Flip (the software is stored within the camera memory). Given this, it may work best to do all of the clip selection and editing work in iMovie and postpone the task of format conversion to the end. This way, we are applying the time-intensive task of format conversion to the shortest length and fewest possible number of clips.

It will then be simple for a teacher or student to use iMovie's built-in Share tools to export to QuickTime, YouTube, or iPhone.



What about posting a FLV file to one's own web site? I don't see a straightforward way to do this that would be easy for other users to follow. If it has become difficult to build FLV conversion into desktop software, then let's push that task to the web site software, as YouTube does. This way, we won't burden users with that problem.

Drupal may fulfill the role of YouTube in this case. I will have to remind myself what modules provide on-the-fly conversion of uploaded files to FLV (Video, FlashVideo, FFMPEG wrapper, what others?).

Windows users may have more options.

tags: video, flv, drupal, flash, quicktime, flipvideo, flip

I spent a day and a half in Seattle to visit Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences and attend the PNAIS Teacher Conference. I got to spend a good chunk of time with Vicki Butler, who graciously toured us through the Seattle Academy campus and gave us an in-depth look into their Moodle installation.

Seattle Academy has deeply leveraged Moodle to organize assignments and track student progress. Every teacher maintains homework assignments for every course. Teachers and students thereby benefit from Moodle's aggregation features -- each person has a meta-calendar that shows all of their outstanding work program-wide. In additon to built-in features, staff have installed optional modules and written custom code to more effectively track student progress. On their course home pages, teachers can easily view what assignment submissions remain to be graded and advisees who are falling behind on their homework. Advisors can quickly view overall course progress of their students. The school is experimenting with Mahara e-portfolio integration. I hope to learn from their use of roles and permissions in order to create a way for our parents to view course content without having to enroll in each one.

I am most interested in using Moodle to create immersive, social learning environments for students. Vicki showed me several examples of students maintaining glossaries, posting science videos, and holding discussions using Moodle's activity modules.

After checking Michael Thompson's keynote on boy education, I soon settled in with my colleagues from Lakeside, Billings, Meridian, Evergreen, and Seattle Academy to plan the PNAIS TechShare conference, scheduled for June 28-30, 2009 in Welches, Oregon. We selected a theme, "Small World," an exploration of global education and social technologies. This should lead to sessions on GIS, trip planning, international collaborations, global education, Skype, Drupal, uStream, and more. We are also hoping to walk the talk by coordinating live, international participation in the conference through uStream and Skype.

We speculated that it might be particularly effective to put a single person in charge of the remote participants in each session. Instead of occasionally reading out remote contributions, the backchannel facilitator could arrange Skype connections with remote participants and pull them into the discussion.

I also added Billings and Meridian to my list of schools with Drupal-powered public-facing web sites.

Can you imagine how much richer our daily professional life would be if the staff from all of these schools blogged?

tags: moodle, techintegration, techshare, pnais

Here is another great Moodle design that two teachers are trying for the first time.



The teachers wanted a course site to replicate as much of their current course design as possible. Of all the different Moodle tools, Forum ended up being the most versatile, because it respects groups and allows students to easily upload files to share with the entire class (unlike Directory or Assignment).

The two faculty members teach six sections between them, which we created as groups. This will keep the class discussions sorted, just to make it easier to find the work of your classmates. If you give each group and the course unique enrollment keys, then the students will automatically sort into the correct section when they log in for the first time. You only tell the students the enrollment key for their section. No one ends up using the course enrollment key.



Throughout the course, students write each paper using the same writing and peer editing process. Moodle discussion forums allow each student to both make their work available to the entire class and specifically to the individual who will be reviewing it. The reviewer then writes a formal response paper and uploads it to the same forum. This keeps the original and review paired together (using Reply in the Moodle forum).



When the time comes to submit the final draft, the student uploads the file to the Assignment object rather than the forum. Why? This is the "instructor reviewed" draft, intended for the teacher instead of their peers in class. This is set up as an "advanced file upload" assignment object, though I renamed this type "Upload multiple files" in the English language file, because that more specifically indicates what our users will be using it for. Students upload their instructor reviewed draft and metacritical essay, and then the teacher responds using the Moodle grading interface, not to mark grades, but rather to upload a Word file that includes teacher comments as floating notes. This exchange between the teacher and student remains private.

Students complete WEDGE (Writing Every Day Generates Excellence/Ease) activities to start each class. These are posted to a separate forum. We take advantage of a nice feature of Moodle that allows any participant in the class to start a forum topic. This way, the students take charge of the operation of the class, creating the new container for the day.



Of course, the teachers also use the site for routine class management, posting syllabi, links, and calendar events to help the course run smoothly. They chose to use the Topics course format and organize the page by assignment type.



Most announcements will simply be posted as text to the front page or sent via email -- no need to take the extra steps to post to a News forum when the teachers are seeing the students most days of the week.

We considered using the Glossary activity for Word of the Day and then decided that a simple Forum would be just as easy to use and more familiar to the students. The teachers did not need the auto-linking feature that the glossary provides.



We only ran into two issues using these features. If the teacher creates a single forum prompt for all sections, then the students cannot reply to it! This Moodle "feature" is documented on Moodle.org but there do not seem to be any plans to change it. So, either the teacher posts the same prompt to three sections, the students post the prompt, or the teacher starts a thread to which you cannot reply and the students start a new thread to reply to it. A minor inconvenience that we will hopefully solve one day.

The other issue was the sharp dividing line between forums and assignments in terms of privacy of replies. Wouldn't it be ideal if one could post a "private" forum reply that only the author of the original post could see? Or if a student could submit an assignment but allow the rest of the class to view it?

Do you have experience setting up a high school English course in Moodle? What other features have you leveraged to make your course hum?

tags: moodle, english, highschool, secondary

Here are notes on my successful import of 200 classes into Moodle. This is part of a project to create a major assignments calendar for our upper school that calculates the number of major assignments by student rather than by grade, providing a more accurate view of potential conflicts before they happen.

First, I wrote a Perl script to export classes from Education Edge into a text file. I used the following SQL query and then formatted the results pretty.

SELECT DISTINCT
ea7classes.ea7classesid,
ea7courses.coursename,
deptentries.description as coursedept,
ea7courses.ea7coursesid,
ea7courses.courseid,
ea7classes.classsection,
periodstable.entryid as period,
ea7faculty.userdefinedid as facultyid,
ea7records.nickname,
ea7records.lastname,
ea7records.passportnumber as facultyusername,
ea7rooms.roomid

FROM
ea7courses
inner join schools on (schools.schoolsid = ea7courses.schoolsid)
inner join ea7classes on (ea7classes.ea7coursesid = ea7courses.ea7coursesid)
inner join ea7sessions on (ea7sessions.ea7sessionsid = ea7classes.ea7sessionsid)
inner join ea7academicyears on (ea7academicyears.ea7academicyearsid = ea7sessions.ea7academicyearsid)
inner join ea7classterms on (ea7classterms.ea7classesid = ea7classes.ea7classesid)
inner join ea7terms on (ea7terms.ea7termsid = ea7classterms.ea7termsid)
inner join tableentries as termstable on (termstable.tableentriesid = ea7terms.termid)
left outer join ea7coursefilters on (ea7coursefilters.parentid = ea7courses.ea7coursesid and ea7coursefilters.filtertype=163)
left outer join filtervalues7 on (filtervalues7.parentid = ea7coursefilters.filtersid and filtervalues7.recordtype = 1098)
left outer join tableentries as deptentries on (deptentries.tableentriesid= filtervalues7.filteridvalue1)
left outer join ea7classtermmeetings on (ea7classtermmeetings.ea7classtermsid = ea7classterms.ea7classtermsid)
left outer join ea7timetableentries on (ea7timetableentries.ea7timetableentriesid = ea7classtermmeetings.ea7timetableentriesid)
left outer join tableentries as periodstable on (periodstable.tableentriesid = ea7timetableentries.period)
left outer join ea7facultyclasstermmeetings on (ea7facultyclasstermmeetings.ea7classtermmeetingsid = ea7classtermmeetings.ea7classtermmeetingsid)
left outer join ea7rooms on (ea7rooms.ea7roomsid = ea7classtermmeetings.ea7roomsid)
left outer join ea7faculty on (ea7faculty.ea7facultyid = ea7facultyclasstermmeetings.ea7facultyid)
left outer join ea7records on (ea7records.ea7recordsid = ea7faculty.ea7recordsid)

WHERE
schools.schoolid = 'US'
and ea7academicyears.description = '2008-2009'
and ea7courses.ea7coursesid <> 404

ORDER BY
ea7classes.ea7classesid,
ea7classes.classsection

Then I installed and ran Moodle's Upload Courses contributed module. What a nice job the author did with this. Once I cleared all of the ambiguous teacher names, the courses imported in a flash.



I decided to create one Moodle class for each course/teacher combination. In other words, if one teacher teaches one section of ninth grade English, and a second teacher teaches two sections, I would create two Moodle courses. Teachers are pretty autonomous at our school, and this structure parallels what most teachers did with Moodle when I created courses only upon request. In cases where the teachers actually co-teach the course, I will need to remove one course and double up the teachers in the other remaining.

I embedded teacher initials in course IDs to distinguish them and provide a key for subsequent Education Edge searches based on this information, but will have to go back and embed them in the course fullnames as well -- the students can't currently tell the courses apart, because they only see the full names!

Rather than importing enrollments as well, I will allow students to enroll themselves on the first day of classes.

I edited config.php to show a limited set of default blocks for all the new courses. Unfortunately, the major assignments block I am working on did not show up, so I will have to add that subsequently with a script.

I am still working on a major assignments block for our Moodle that borrows concepts and SQL queries from Gary Anderson and pulls course enrollments from Education Edge. More on that later.


tags: moodle, blackbaud, educationedge

Our faculty wants a "major assignments" master calendar, in order to identify days on which too many teachers have scheduled major assignments before they impact students. In Moodle, students automatically see all the assignments in their courses. I want a way for each teacher to see a summary of major assignments schoolwide as they schedule their own. To complicate matters further, it would be most helpful for a teacher to automatically see what major assignments their students (not all students) have on a given day.

I am thinking about how to implement such a feature in Moodle. (I am an average programmer). Since we want to track only major assignments, we need to find a way to distinguish major from regular assignments. We also need to write a function to count major assignments for the given day only for students enrolled in the class.

Ideally, this counting function would fire as the teacher selects the assignment date. That way, the teacher could easily move the assignment from one day to another and see the impact on students' workloads.

In our school, it would be less work to create a new assignment type called "major assignment" than it would be to add a "major" checkbox to each assignment type. In our school, major assignments are not likely to be submitted electronically, and keeping the function in a separate module would avoid making changes to Moodle core code.

I could use your advice and feedback on this idea. Is anyone else working on a similar idea? Is there a better way to approach this task? Am I missing an existing feature in Moodle that could help me achieve this end?

Many thanks.

Update

I also posted this to the Moodle forums. Here's an encouraging reply I received only seven minutes after submitting the question. Isn't that amazing?

Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
by Gary Anderson - Sunday, 27 July 2008, 07:42 PM

Hi Richard:

We have implemented this at our school. We have teachers label assignments by putting them in bold (we have a patch that adds the tag to the title. We also have a simple block that looks for assignments that have this tag and counts the number of affected users. We have taken the extra step of having a user profile field that shows if they are in the class of 2007, etc.

It works nicely and has avoided many scheduling conflicts. While we are not prepared to put this in Contrib, hopefully the above ideas will get you started, and I can send you are code on an "as is" basis if you contact me.

--Gary

I also just figured out that Gary is from Seattle Academy of Arts and Science, which I hope to visit in October.

tags: moodle, homework

Facebook is apparently still learning how to handle married couples. Does that mean that I am too old/not in the right stage of life for it?



In related news, my friends from outside work are increasingly getting on Facebook. It's interesting to watch and participate.

tags: facebook, sns

A colleague asked about school intranets the other day. Here is my response.

What purpose does your intranet serve?

The insideCatlin web site provides tools and resources for those members of the Catlin Gabel community who come to school every day, students, teachers, staff, and parents.

What are you using your intranet for?

Course web sites, committee web sites, department web sites, publishing student work to the Catlin Gabel community, sharing photos from school events and trips, online discussions, parent-faculty association meeting recordings, library catalog, volunteer signups, carpool map, surveys, senior project reports, blogs, podcasts, wikis, videos, audio recordings, community service hours, bookstore point-of-sale, IT loaner tracking, online signups for special academic programs, teacher notes on students, curriculum map editing tool, teacher access to student schedules and information, school archives.

What format are you currently using? (ie. Drupal, Sharepoint)

Moodle, Drupal, Menalto Gallery, Follett Destiny, and custom Perl/PHP scripts. Most use a common graphic interface to provide visual consistency when moving from one tool to the next. They also share the same authentication databases (LDAP + mySQL), and two of the three have single sign-on. We provide database support in mySQL, and some scripts read data from Education Edge, our students information system.

How could we use the intranet to help the teachers/ staff/ students?

That’s a pretty big question. An intranet enables community members to continue to interact in rich ways when face-to-face interactions are not possible. So list the types of interactions or transactions you wish to amplify, and then consider whether they would work within an online interface. If yes, then build it, see how it flies, and then promote it heavily.

tags: intranet, moodle, drupal, webdesign

It's admirable that the Moodle development team wants to require a description for each assignment. The description field provides instructions to the student. It makes it easier to browse all the assignments for a course. However, I work with a lot of teachers who want to post as quickly as possible and who are not accustomed to a completely electronic, web-based course format. The solution? Make the description field optional, so that they are not required to enter something into this field for Moodle to accept the submission.

Open mod/assignment/mod_form.php
Comment out line 41, as follows:
// $mform->addRule('description', get_string('required'), 'required', null, 'client');

I assume you can modify other assignments in a similar manner.

We run Moodle 1.9.1

On a related note, I have heard of a school that has written their own Moodle modules. I am currently wondering how to blend teachers' requests for a school-wide major assignments calendar with Moodle's default categories of personal, course, and global events. Creating a new assignment or calendar type called "major assignment," or adding such a flag to the relevant assignment types, may be the way to do it.

tags: moodle, opensource

Open-source web applications continue to mature. This week, I successfully updated Moodle to version 1.9.1, Drupal to 5.7, and Gallery to 2.2.5. The process went very smoothly, except for one hiccup. The Moodle updater stopped partway through, somehow causing an runaway loop that caused the sessions2 table to balloon by gigabytes. Notwithstanding the fact that this brought the web server to a halt, the installer ran fine once I emptied the sessions2 table and ran it a second time. We discovered that we stored the database on the system volume, so now we will move it to the data volume.



I appreciate that all three applications ask that you install a completely fresh codebase. Old code and modifications go away, giving the application a clean start. In the case of Moodle, we had only tried two modules, iPodcast and Speex. Both were not successful and are now gone (except for some traces in the database). Drupal is modular by design, but it took less time than I had anticipated to install the 20 additional modules we currently use. Settings were already present in the database, so Drupal only needed the new code.

Gallery-Drupal integration required some additional work. It didn't work at all at first, when I had not yet updated Gallery to the latest version. Unlike with Moodle in the past, Drupal developers are keeping Drupal-Gallery integration 100% up-to-date. Just use the latest Gallery with the Drupal integration module. Following suggestions, I also moved Gallery to within the Drupal directory -- that only required one setting change.

I am also taking some time to clean up both installations, responding to user requests and making them easier to use. I modified all occurrences of Moodle's use of "enrol" in the English language pack, since I still have no figured out how to force U.S. English language use on existing courses. I trust that new courses will inherit the U.S. setting. For the most part, people don't notice the language difference, the notable exception being the use of "enrol!" I also simplified the default blocks layout for new courses to make the page less busy.

Finally, I succeeded in the installation of NanoGong. I have wanted in-browser audio recording for some time, especially for language classes. It looks like the good people at the Gong Project have really come through with a solution nicely customized for Moodle but able to run anywhere.

In Drupal, I configured Video to play movies within the node, eliminating the need for an additional click.

tags: moodle, drupal, gallery, opensource, web20

This year, we have made two survey systems available to our users, Zoomerang and an internally-developed tool. Yesterday, I got a call from a user who was experiencing page load wait times of up to two minutes. We weren't experiencing similar issues with other web sites.



She called Zoomerang, who promptly blamed us for the issue. Not helpful! Unable to produce the survey using Zoomerang, the user turned to our internal tool and had the entire survey up within minutes.



Although I have abused Zoomerang before, I will acknowledge that it is a perfectly fine survey tool. I am just surprised that a successful company would not provide better customer service. Whether or not the problem resided at their end was not really the issue. A "valued customer" with the "pro" membership was experiencing a problem isolated to their tool.

Today, Zoomerang is running normally. Go figure.



tags: survey, zoomerang

Check out PayPal Storefront, a little Flash widget that you configure on PayPal's site and then embed on your web site. It's very elegant and quick. I am using it to sell a benefit recording of the Maru-a-Pula Marimba Band. The widget even allows any user to copy the widget code for their own site, making possible the viral distribution of a mini-store!



tags: ecommerce, marimba

This week, I learned the next step: embedding a Google map with our data on our own (password protected) site. Twice in the past two years, I have created maps of students and employees in schools using BatchGeocode and Google Earth.

Given the flexibility of Google Earth, online resources cover a wide variety of ways to use the Google Maps API. Drupal's GMap module is best suited for user submission of locations as separate nodes or a RSS feed. BatchGeocode provides locations in a single KML file, which I learned is XML for maps. The Google Maps API can index a KML file directly, but I didn't want to submit our KML file to Google to index, and my tests of the strategy didn't work anyway. GMapEZ is a special set of scripts using the Maps API but requires you to format your placemarks as conventional HTML links. Ultimately, this article at XML.com provided the most successful strategy for me: embedding points directly into the page and then adding listeners to create the popup information boxes. Embedding all the points keeps the data within our password-protected space, too.

You can accomplish this basically in a one-liner per placemark:

var marker220 = new GMarker(new GLatLng(45.51584,-122.702752)); map.addOverlay(marker220); GEvent.addListener(marker220, "mouseover", function() {marker220.openInfoWindow("Richard Kassissieh");})

A student included me in this project to create a carpool site for the Catlin Gabel community. Families find each other using the map and then post offers and requests for rides.



tags: googlemaps, gmapapi

Today, I launch a new site, 3D Cell Explorer, a teaching tool for cell biology using visual representation. It provides 40 animations of cellular structures and processes, accompanied by audio narration. Anyone may comment on a page or copy the embed code to display animations on one's own web site.

Many students learn best from what they can see -- visual learners often struggle in science classes in which the vast majority of instruction is text-based. This site complements the textual materials an individual may already have. Text is kept to a minimum, so as to not distract from one's attention to the visual model. Three of the animations provide a simple level of interactivity.

The site is pretty much Web 1.0 -- lots of good content ready for consumption. The learning theory is primarily cognitivist. I want to help students of cell biology better comprehend basic cellular processes. Still, I did throw in a little Web 2.0 goodness. Comments are enabled on all pages, making it possible for visitors to start a dialogue about the animations. Providing the embed code allows teachers (or students) to integrate the animations into their own teaching materials, for example on a Moodle site or other CMS.



In 1994, I began to create simple 3D animations to help explain biological and chemical processes to my students. Over the following three years, I created dozens, especially on the topic of cell biology. A colleague and I decided to package the cell biology animations on a CD-ROM, but by 1997, CD-ROMs were no longer so popular. Although I did ultimately release the package, it never caught on, as teachers moved toward web-based instructional content.

In our enthusiasm to embrace Web 2.0 tools, we have left behind some of the strengths of the CD-ROM era: visual richness, simulations, interaction with content, and vast, visual libraries. I of course love the ease of distribution and social qualities of Web 2.0, but we must not discard the successful educational innovations of the past in our rush toward the future.

After a ten-year hiatus, I am pleased to re-introduce 3D Cell Explorer. Please do let me know what works and what doesn't, and do spread the word to potentially interested teachers.

Here are some brief technical notes.

I created the original animations using Strata StudioPro and Adobe (Macromedia) Director. The project was saved by the continued support for Director by Macromedia and then Adobe. Director was the standard for authoring interactive media, but like CD-ROMs, it quietly disappeared as Flash produced smaller, faster-loading web files. I don't know whether the new Strata3D can read my old StudioPro files. It would be good to preserve the time and effort I put into those models and animations.

To make the project more web-friendly, I exported all of the old Director files to QuickTime and then used VisualHub to make them into Flash Video (FLV) files. I kept the three interactive animations in Director format using the built-in Shockwave converter. I installed Drupal 6 for the content management platform and then built out a page for each animation. The Amadou theme gave the site a clean, modern look -- I changed the background to black in order to match the animation backgrounds. I used JW FLV Media Player to deliver the Flash video files.

Ten years ago, I was amazed that an ordinary classroom teacher could access great-quality 3D animation tools. Still, it took three years of evening and weekends to produce these 40 animations. Today, I find it incredible that I could convert the entire thing to a web-based format in about two days' time. Experiences like this provide a visceral reminder of the exponential increases in computing power over time.

Update March 31, 2008

I came across this very modern cell visualization from Harvard -- quite interesting that it's set to music.

tags: cell, biology, cellbiology, animation, visualization, drupal, moodle, flv

I received a pleasantly unexpected call from Stephen in Botswana yesterday to discuss Maru-a-Pula IT matters. Throughout the call, I could hear what sounded very much like a cricket chirping. Was it an artifact of the Skype transmission? No, it really was a cricket that had snuck into Stephen's office! Good think he wasn't calling from home. They are a challenge to find and catch.

Botswana cricket via Skype (mp3)

tags: skype, globaled

I am listening to our middle school students podcasting from Costa Rica. What a treat! Listen in below. David is trying this for the second year in a row. This year's posts are more detailed, articulate, and to the point. I will try at some point to find out how David prepped the students for their posts.



Sending periodic updates back home adds a new dimension to international travel. Parents and other interested community members can follow the trip progress from home. Students can share their reflections on the trip as it is happening, which adds a new twist to the task of reporting back. The conversation is one way, so that no replies from listeners intrude on the students' foreign experience. The collection of all of the recordings will capture a record of the trip that others will be able to use afterward. Podcasting by phone requires very little production time on the parts of the trip participants and no special equipment. GCast doesn't even charge for the service!

At the same time, trip leader Spencer has brought along a set of digital audio recorders, so that students may each record daily audio journal entries and reflect on them upon return. I will be interested to see how they will compare the educative value of these two very different methods of capturing thoughts in audio format during the trip.



tags: globaled, audio, podcast

A year and a half after my first attempt, I took another look at the accessibility of news web sites for the vision-impaired. My blind colleague reported that the Yahoo! mobile site I had provided had stopped working for him. Sure enough, the link had moved without any redirection, so I had to find the new link and bookmark it for him a second time. Also, Yahoo! changed their mobile site to use brackets >> instead of numbers to delimit each news item and removed the keyboard shortcuts that used to exist, making it more difficult to select a news item. Also, his screen reader reads the brackets as "right angle bracket, right angle bracket," downright confusing to hear just before the news headline. However, Yahoo! Mobile is at the moment the best option I can provide for George.

The New York times has remained an extremely difficult site to use if you can't see it. They neglect to include keyboard shortcuts that would enable one to jump past the dozens of menu items to the lead articles. Worst of all, if you visit their mobile site in a computer web browser, it automatically redirects you to the regular web page! We want to view the mobile site, which includes a minimum of graphics and links, and allows George to jump directly to a list of top headlines. It doesn't seem possible on the New York Times site.

Have you found an accessible news site for the vision-impaired? What strategies do you use to provide access to such users?

tags: accessibility, visionimpaired

I am using EventBrite for the first time to organize online ticket sales for an African AIDS orphan fundraiser in New York. The event features the Maru-a-Pula Marimba Band, a world-class African marimba group. If you're interested in attending the April 14 event, buy tickets here!

I appreciate that EventBrite provides a prominent location for an event logo and keep their own advertising to a minimum. They also place ticket selection and event description on a single page, reducing the number of clicks to make a purchase.



It's interesting that EventBrite specializes just in ticket purchase -- they link to PayPal instead of providing an integrated payment gateway. The time-consuming part of the process has been to register a new account for our organization on PayPal. I was impressed to find out how much PayPal has changed over the years. They present a much more professional image than before and provide a full range of payment services. I am in the process of configuring automatic transfers to our organization's bank account. Eventually, I should be able to use PayPal as a payment gateway without sending users to the PayPal site. I plan to use this feature to move online giving from Network for Good (where it is currently broken) to our site.

If I were already running the organization's web site in Drupal, I would have tried the Event and e-Commerce modules. However, this is still an old, static site, which I will find time to upgrade one day.

Riffly allows users to post browser-based video and audio comments on your blog. I was so excited about this new company that I immediately installed the Drupal version of the plug-in on our intranet. Today, Riffly went down, and with it our site! Fortunately, it was easy to disable in order to bring our site back up.



The advent of built-in video cameras eliminated the need to obtain, set up, use, and transfer from a video camera. Browser-based video recording eliminates the need run a video capture application such as iMovie, export the video to a different format, and upload the resulting file to a web site. With browser-based video upload, students may post video comments within seconds from school or home. This is a big deal for language classes and international exchanges! Teachers are extremely sensitive to the length of time technology adds to a student activity. When the time drops dramatically, teachers use the tool more frequently (or at all).

While I'm not thrilled about the idea of relying on an external site to host videos, this is far better to linking to YouTube, because the user never sees Riffly, and we don't have to provide the bandwidth. Of course, we will be putting our eggs in Riffly's basket, hoping that they will thrive and not change their revenue model. It may be a safe bet, considering that we should see competitors to Riffly appear over time.

At the moment, I'm waiting for a solution (or some time to investigate myself) to make the Riffly Drupal plugin actually insert the necessary code into the comment field. Get over that small hurdle, and we will be off and running! On recommendation, I disabled TinyMCE for the Drupal comment field, and then code insertion worked again! Unfortunately, now Riffly is experiencing a problem themselves, and Riffly is broken everywhere. We wait once more. I hope they will do whatever they can to ramp up again. They have a terrific product that could really take off.


tags: riffly, video, drupal

Too sad. Yahoo! Picks is closing its doors after 12 years. Nearly ten years ago, I mined the site for fresh graphic designs as I was just getting started in the field. More recently, as the web flooded with copycat sites, Yahoo! Picks has proven its staying power by reliably coming up with inspired, authentic, and funny sites. Luckily, we still have the archive.

Drupal's founder and lead, Dries Buytaert, has formed a company to provide Drupal services and raised $7m for the effort! In addition to the usual consulting and support services, he plans to develop pay versions of Drupal. Read his announcement and Acquia FAQ for more information. On the one hand, this makes me nervous. Dries' hopes for Acquia to become the "next Red Hat" is not necessarily great for those of us who anticipate using the free version indefinitely. On the other hand, it may be wonderful to see Drupal develop into a more robust, mature system with greater adoption and known legitimacy. We could definitely ride that wave.

Also of interest: Buytaert's site of Drupal sites -- some big names here.

Teacher 1: I believe your children know most of the words of their song materials; however, several asked for copies of the words. Please distribute these to your children in hard copy or by e-mail. I am all about saving paper.

Teacher 2: The children are doing well on the language songs and are reminded every time we meet them to check Moodle for the French , Spanish, and Chinese songs and Drupal for the Japanese songs to practice at home.

This exchange was a pleasant surprise to read. Our intranet has only existed for a year, yet all four lower school language teachers, including a full range of technology profiency, are posting text, audio, and video online. They saw a great fit between the technology and their teaching and learning objectives and jumped all over it. Good work!

I am building a list of school "front-door" web sites running on Drupal. We know that Drupal is practically indispensable for student and teacher publishing within school, but what about the school's public web presence?

Here's my short list of school main, public web sites running Drupal:

Amherst College

Katherine Delmar Burke School, San Francisco, CA

Lincoln High School, Portland, OR

Newberg Public Schools, Oregon

Lewis Elementary, Portland, Oregon

Seattle Academy, Seattle, Washington

Meridian School, Seattle, Washington

Billings Middle School, Seattle, Washington

Science Leadership Academy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Communication and Information

Peralta Elementary School, Oakland, CA

Yale School of Architecture

UC Berkeley School of Information

University of Calgary

Harvard Science

University of Minnesota

Arizona State

Ohio State

Washington University (St. Louis)

Hamline Law School

Slane College, Bradley University

Bainbridge Island School District

Note to self: find . -name ._*.doc -exec rm {} \;

Does anyone have a better way to prevent the upload of hidden Mac files to a Linux server? I was uploading a directory of files from my Mac to Moodle and ended up with a hidden (resource?) file for each document uploaded.

Also: Renamer4Mac, a nifty file renaming tool, essential in this case to replace spaces with underscores for batch upload to Moodle.

A number of posts have commented on the mysterious attraction of Twitter. Big-name bloggers love to Twitter but don't articulate what exactly they love. Today, the New York Times published an article on the topic, calling Twitter a "social safety net." Though the article directly concerns a suicidal Twitterer who discovers the power of his social network, it speaks to the general purpose of the tool. I have tried Twitter and then let it go. Does this mean that I already have a solid social safety net, or am I just introverted?

Over the past year, I have guided a number of different people in my school through the process of evaluating open-source software. Often, we need to compare both open-source and commercial software applications against one another, not an easy task when the development and distribution environments are so different from each other.

With commercial software, the decision-maker usually must evaluate the potential utility of a piece of software without actually being able to use the full version. We are overly reliant on the salesperson, an individual with a vested interest in completing the sale and often incomplete knowledge of the product's reliability and reputation.

With open-source, there is no salesperson, no automatic advocate for the software. However, one can install and evaluate the actual working software, with some effort. If a test goes very well, you may have already completed much of your implementation process!

Commercial software is normally a finished product that remains static for long periods of time. Open-source is often a work in progress that changes considerably over time. The decision-makers in your organization must understand this difference in order to appreciate the rough edges that often exist with open-source software.

Most free and open-source library systems are extensible and modifiable. During the evaluation process, I often try to excite the review team by making small, easy changes when requested. Change the color scheme. Re-order the elements of an item display. Integrate your organization's logo into the page template. Display the list of modules available from the developer community. Demonstrate the ability to install one. Demonstrate the interoperability between the FOSS system and other information sources. Draw on the strengths of the open-source model. Demonstrate the vast well of technical support available from the online user community.

Depending on the application, there may exist a recognizable brand name and known reputation. Although open-source library systems have existed for some time, they have not yet achieved the level of brand-name recognition as the better funded open-source successes such as Firefox or Moodle. A brand name can provide a significant amount of comfort to your review team. In fact, some people may have a hard time distinguishing open-source from commercial when the brand is sufficiently well established (see Firefox vs. Internet Explorer).

How long should one evaluate open-source software? Since control over the evaluation process is one advantage of open-source over commercial software, I have sometimes evaluated an open-source solution for up to a year. That is certainly much longer than what you will get with a commercial application! I have also set up multiple FOSS systems simultaneously, which is incredibly handy for the purposes of comparison and evaluation among different open-source options. Sometimes, I have taken the testing process incrementally, dropping some of the contenders when the first tests did not go well and investing further resources into the one or two leading test application. That way, the leading application presents as well as possible, comparing as favorably as possible to the commercial alternatives.

I hope that this provides some useful tips for guiding an open-source evaluation software evaluation process.

Here's a good story about a tool being used with great success, and the collaborative efforts required to resolve a technical problem with the tool. Working with a teacher, I found a known bug in the Moodle wiki in which students' wiki pages became nearly unusable -- slow at first and ultimately inaccessible due to errors such as "30 seconds exceeded" and "script error." In each item I examined, Moodle created hundreds of <div style="margin-left:15px;" class="indent"> tags, reducing the ability of the browser to display the content.

The good news is that the content was recoverable in all cases I have examined so far. If the problem is mild, you can edit a wiki page, switch to code view, and remove the leading div tags. If the problem is more severe, then you need to edit the database content directly using a mySQL admin tool such as phpMyAdmin (table: wiki_pages). Others are experiencing the same problem.

The wiki work happening in this class is terrific -- more on that later. I am glad that we were able to find a solution to let this excellent work continue.

I am starting a new side project to take a close look at open source library systems. I dabbled in this area twice in the last two years, getting to know the landscape of Koha and Emilda with two schools that ultimately went for major commercial products. The area seems poised for growth. New players Evergreen and Scriblio arrived on the scene this year, and the latter meets the challenge of Web 2.0 in libraries by a fascinating new method. Although interest levels are extremely high, significant barriers to adoption exist, and implementation rates are very low. Developers and support providers dominate the literature on these tools. My goal is to have first-hand conversations with people who have considered or implemented open-source library system tools and get a better understanding of conditions that lead to successful implementation. Let me know if you share my interest in this topic.