LearnShifting

Yesterday I attended an online webinar run by Microsoft as part of their tech Tuesday presentations for educators. The sessions are recorded and I hope to gather the playback URLs and embed them into our Moodle Learning Management System.

This post raises the question - can OneNote replace Mahara and introduces a new programming language.

OneNote

One of the things presented was OneNote which we have as part of our Standard Operating Environment.

I have heard that it is fantastic from other folks, but personally have had difficulty including it in my daily work... but with this presentation I think the penny has started to fall - albeit slowly.

Onenote is like a giant clipboard that you can arrange and share with other people. By sharing I mean that you can either just share your notes, clippings, research and links with other folks (like your students, or your teacher) or you can place your OneNote file on the intranet, a skydrive or the local area network and have other people in your team collaborate and contribute to the OneNote document. Call it collaboration or crowdsourcing, you have something that could be termed an e-Portfolio if it is a gathering of your own work or a team assignment.

Students could submit their assignments in OneNote and teachers could mark them up with annotations and even video responses to the work.

So, I am rethinking the Moodle/Mahara solution into potentially a Moodle/Skydrive/SharePoint/OneNote solution.

Kodu

I was also excited about Kodu, a a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input. This programming language apparently requires no learning. Those familiar with scratch and Alice will also want to have a look at this language. You can download it and work with it on your PC or on an XBox.

Of course I will be unleashing my 9 year old on it to see how it compares to Alice.

This entry was posted on May 11, 2011 at 3:58 AM and has received 663 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

There are quite a few situations where we want to engage people in an online social environment to create, sort, edit, share and if required to delete information. The popularity of Facebook and YouTube are evidence that people do engage with this approach. I'd like to use this entry to expand on the journey I have taken with two real uses of this technology and how it can benefit you as an educator, a parent, a club member or someone who needs a combined soapbox and filing cabinet out there in cyberspace - where it appears that now - everybody can hear you scream.

This article talks about about Microsoft's Office Live Workspaces which look uncannily like SharePoint and links to other tools that allow us to communicate and share information.

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This entry was posted on April 8, 2010 at 6:43 AM and has received 336 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Someone asked me if Moodle supported e-portfolios. My answer was yes in a rudimentary way. After a little searching I discovered an e-portfolio plug-in module which I dutifully downloaded and plugged in and it didn't work on my install of Moodle that runs off a little sony vaio laptop that is now too slow for even my goldfish to watch.

I went to add an e-portfolio block to play with it and it didn't work.

I tried to add any type of block and none of them worked. Bother. Google it and hey presto the magic combination of the latest release of PHP 5.3 and Moodle 1.9x breaks when you try to add a block. There was an unofficial code fix option (not good for production systems) or I could wind back PHP to version 5.2.1.

Okay, the next paragraph will probably sound like something out of a Doctor Whoo episode but...

First rename the PHP directory to PHP53 and after downloading PHP 5.2 install it with the works (including open ssl). I then copy the PHP.ini file from the 5.3 installation and overwrite the PHP ini in the freshly installed 5.2 version. Go to fire up the apache web server and I'm thinking "should I have cut the blue wire instead of the red wire?" Nothing starts and I get an error. Okay, we'll do the command line start. I get a more useful message about only having one PHP directory so I am into the apache config file as quick as a flash, rip out the offending duplicate line and apache chugs into life, bringing up PHP and Moodle along with it. To further add to the success, I can now add block in Moodle, including the e-Portfolio block from http://www.exabis.at/ with support from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.

Now, back to porfolios.

You can share portfolios, create categories and of course link to files or upload content. This is ideal in the VET environment where a lot of work is evidence based and the portfolio is a great place to gather that in a structured fashion.

This entry was posted on August 29, 2009 at 1:53 PM and has received 275 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.