Moving to Moodle 2.0: Pt.2 The Tools and Tweaks

Posted on 06/11/2011 by William Stites

Before begining any project you want to make sure you have the tools to do the job.  In the case of a Moodle 2.0 migration you better have a really good set of tools.

“Relax, all right? My old man is a television repairman, he’s got this ultimate set of tools…” ~ Jeff Spicoli – Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Jeff Spicoli was right and here is an “ultimate set of tools” to make migration magic happen.  This is not a “hot-to” of an actual migration, rather the set-up work that needs to happen before actually migrating a Moodle install to a new box, in this example, an Apple server.

The Hardware.

This post describes the steps to take when moving from a Linux server (CentOS) to an Apple Mini Server running Snow Leopard Server (10.6.7). The Apple server is configured with a 2.66 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB of RAM and mirrored 500GB hard drives.  As Snow Leopard server has Apache, MySQL and PHP installed there is little to do here other than to activate the services.

Continue reading →

 
Posted in Moodle, Technical | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Moving to Moodle 2.0: Pt.2 The Tools and Tweaks

Moving to Moodle 2.0: Pt.1 The Decision

Posted on 06/10/2011 by William Stites

It wasn’t easy and came with a lot of investigation, thought and discussions, but we’ve decided to make the move to Moodle 2.0 this summer (2011).

We have had a number of our teachers, students and tech staff playing with Moodle in a sandbox environment for the past few months.  We signed up for a course (Moodle Pathfinders with remote-learner.net) to learn more and even met with educators from other schools to talk about their experiences (including @peterkrich) and while there are some concerns as we make the move, we are confident.

We have been using Moodle for about 4 or 5 years (time blurs) and it is an integral part of our school.  In “Moodle: How big is big?” I have detailed the size of our install, but in short we have roughly 1800 users and over 1200 courses in the system.  We have been a self-hosting school the entire time and the while we have considered remote-hosting the size of our install makes it cost prohibitive (annual estimates have been roughly $10K).

Continue reading →

 
Posted in EdTech, Moodle, Technical | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Evernote goes social.

Posted on 05/14/2011 by William Stites

If you’ve update Evernote recently you might have missed the new arrow button in the menu bar.

Now I love this feature and find it very interesting because Phil Libin has said that Evernote is the anti-social, anti-viral software, that it’s about you and what’s in your head (see below).  However, now Evernote is allowing you to use both Twitter and Facebook to share what is in your head and it’s simple to do!

When you want to share something all you need to do is:

Continue reading →

 
Posted in Evernote, Social Media, Technical | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Evernote goes social.

Catalog your school’s archive with FileMaker

Posted on 04/25/2011 by William Stites

It always feels good to get your hands dirty in a good project and when a colleague, David Korfhage (@drkorfhage – The 1:1 Diaries), came to me with his archive project I was excited.

The project he was going to undertake involved cataloging the school’s archive into a database that could then be shared with the school community.  He was going to do this with some students as part of our school’s May Term program.

Currently, the archive lives in a large storage closet at our Middle School and its resources are largely unavailable and/or unknown.  The immediate goal will be to create a catalog of the archive so that the school can make a determination as to where to permanently house the collection.

Enter FileMaker and the need for a database.

Continue reading →

 
Posted in Schools, Technical | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Catalog your school’s archive with FileMaker

Syncing LDAP (OD or AD) data within Moodle

Posted on 04/21/2011 by William Stites

So we have a Moodle server at our school that is connected to our LDAP server for user authentication.  This works great for us as it provides for easy integration with out other systems that use this form of authentication (FinalSite web site / WebHelpDesk/Apple ODstructure).

One issue we had though was that certain data was being entered at the time of user creation and other fields we just left blank.  This was fine until we needed to get information out of Moodle and into our school’s information system (SIS), particularly student emails.

The issue was that while the Moodle database has an ID for each user this ID didn’t match anything in our SIS or LDAP directory (Apple OD).  The ID assigned to students in the LDAP/OD system is based on one generated in or SIS… so we needed to get that ID into Moodle.

Continue reading →

 
Posted in EdTech, Moodle, Technical | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Moodle: How big is big?

Posted on 04/19/2011 by William Stites

We’ve been using Moodle at my school for years and it’s a real workhorse for us. Moodle is used in classrooms K-12, for committees, clubs, activities and for numerous other school needs.

As we are prepare for an upgrade to Moodle 2.0 I need to take stock in what we’re doing, how we are doing it and actually how big of an install we have.

One of the main reasons for this is we are trying to determine if we should continue to host Moodle internally on our school network or outsource the hosting to Remote-Learner.net (@remotelearner), who we’ve been using for years for support.

As we look at our options we have to consider a number of things: file storage size, database size, number of users, number of concurrent users and bandwidth.

In order to make the best decision I would need to dig into our install and see where we stand.

Continue reading →

 
Posted in EdTech, Moodle, Schools, Technical | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Zero Inbox: Keeping yourself sane and organized.

Posted on 02/05/2011 by William Stites

For the past week I’ve tweeting about keeping my email inbox at ZERO and have gotten some funny comments back. Some threatening, some jealous, some were just mean, but really… why the hell was I tweeting about this?!

Organization.

A full inbox makes me twitch. It’s always eaten at me as if to say  “You still have stuff to do… You haven’t dealt with these issues, questions and comments… You can’t rest!!!”

I’d often go through the process of clearing through my inbox only to have it fill back up again.  For this week though, I’ve managed to keep it clear and am fairly confident I can keep it that way.

How? Why this time, when I have failed so many times before?

Continue reading →

 
Posted in Evernote, Randomness, Technical | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Evernote at my School: Part Two

Posted on 02/01/2011 by William Stites

In December I posted a video that Evernote shot while at my school earlier in the Fall (Evernote at my School).  The video provided a brief overview of how we are were using Evernote in the early stages of our 1:1 Initiative.

During the time that Evernote was on campus they conducted numerous interviews with student, faculty and administrators.  They have since written a post entitled “Evernote at School: The Montclair Kimberley Academy’s 1:1 Program, plus Q&A Webinar” in which they include more information about our deployment, use both in the classroom and beyond.  They focus on all of the work that our teachers are doing with our student to improve learning, as well as a second video interview with me about our choice to include Evernote Premium as part of our standard package of software.

There is also a link to the Q&A webinar in their post about our deployment, which is scheduled for Wednesday, February 9th at 2pm (EST) or you can click here to register.

If you have questions about Evernote please sign up for the webinar, post a question on their blog or leave me a note here and I will get back to you.

 
Posted in 1to1, EdTech, Evernote, Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

#edipad for the iPad in Education

Posted on 01/18/2011 by William Stites

I don’t know about you but I am tired of getting spammed by Twitterbots every time I type the hashtag #ipad into a tweet!

So… I am suggesting something simple for all of you out there that would like to carry on a civilized conversation about the iPad in education, let’s us the hash-tag #edipad.

Like some of the other “#ed” tags out there (#edchat, #edtech, #isedchat) we can finally categorize our tweets using this one simple tag.

I hope that you will join me in using this new tag (#edipad) to talk about the topic of the iPad in education, because I don’t know about you but I don’t need the spam.

 
Posted in 1to1, EdTech, iPad | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on #edipad for the iPad in Education

inService to unService and the addition of the Student Voice.

Posted on 01/12/2011 by William Stites

If you have never attended an unconference before I would highly recommend it.  I recently attended EdCampNYC (My day at EdCamp NYC 2010) and loved it.

If you are not familiar with what a unconference is or how it is organized the basics are as follows (http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/UnConference_’Rules’):

The event starts with an introduction by the organisers rearticulating the purpose of the event, the guidelines for conduct during the day and the parameters of the event.

The organisers then explain the start and end time of the event, duration of the sessions, breaks for food, how to access the network etc.

The basis ‘rules’ of the Unconference……

  1. The people who come are the best people who could have come.
  2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
  3. It starts when it starts.
  4. It’s over when it’s over.
  5. The Law of Two Feet (“If you are not learning or contributing to a talk or presentation or discussion it is your responsibility to find somewhere where you can contribute or learn”).

Like all ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ at a Unconference, participants should feel free to break any or all of these rules if they feel that they are not contributing to the intellectual rigour or content of the event.

Continue reading →

 
Posted in Conferences, EdTech, Schools, Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on inService to unService and the addition of the Student Voice.