NOLA Learning

Tim Hunt and the awesome Open University UK team have released new question types that they’ve been developing. It looks like we’ll see these integrated into the Moodle core in a future release, but for now you can head to the Moodle.org plugins page to download and install.

These are some of the most exciting new additions to Moodle I’ve seen for a while. Among them there are a number of drag and drop question types, allowing you to create questions that require your students to drag and drop in missing words in a paragraph or onto images. As well, advanced pattern match question type is one I’m probably most excited about. It allows you to create short answer questions that are then flexibly checked against sample answers for correctness. It appears to be much, much more flexible than the existing short answer type. Go check ‘em out. I can’t imagine any teacher won’t find tons of new uses for these. A very big step forward for Moodle today.

Update: If you want a tour of the new question types and get an idea of what they can do you can check out developer Jamie Pratt’s site or download a PDF from OU.

Moodle 2.2 is out with a host of new features from 2.1. Most impressive is the new rubrics grading method integration as well as a long awaited update to a new version of TinyMCE allowing iOS users to finally input text.

If you use CVS to manage your install a full upgrade is only a “cvs update -dP -r MOODLE_22_STABLE” away.

Full release notes on moodle.org

What is FOG?

My last school had almost 600 desktops and laptops of various makes/models/and configurations. Rolling out new applications and keeping them all up-to-date has historically required lots and lots of hands-on time since we don’t have rights to setup WGM policies in our Active Directory server. I spent a great deal of time last year trying to come up with a solution that was better than sit-down-at-every-machine-and-run-the-installer. Or worse yet, see computers going unused for months because they need to be re-imaged. I looked at Dell KACE, Symantec Ghost, and other commercial solutions before I finally found Clonezilla.

Clonezilla is a server based cloning and imaging solution that is 100% free and open source. It’s a great piece of kit, but I found it was only going to solve one of our problems: re-imaging machines. It doesn’t have any capabilities for machine management. I’d basically have to re-image a system every time I wanted to add a new application.

Enter FOG, or Free Open-source Ghost. FOG is an excellent imaging and software management solution, allowing you to remotely image machines, install software, change settings, log usage, and even generate inventory reports among many, many features. Best of all it’s 100% free and open-source.

Creating a mobile imaging server.

This how-to will walk you through creating an imaging server using a laptop for portability. As well, it’s probably WAY too verbose if you already know your way around a unix terminal and bash; for a more direct step-by-step guide, check out the Ubuntu 10.04 instructions on the FOG project site. If you don’t know bash from a BSOD, then keep reading.

If you have more control over your school’s network and can put a server in your school’s network rack the same instructions will still apply (for the most part).

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Bonehead troubleshooting on my part today.

I got called out of class this morning to take care of re-imaging a laptop lab that’s coming up for a state audit (was purchased with grant funds). I recently updated our mobile imaging server from FOG 0.29 to the spanky-new FOG 0.30. I run the server as a VMware ESXi virtual machine and I’m fairly religious about snap-shotting the existing server before any updates. Thanks to the miracles of Linux, I of course had not actually rebooted the server since updating, only restarted a few services. (more…)