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.

To those of you who have been waiting on updates (especially the FOG installation guides), I apologize. Real life has gotten in the way of me doing much other than teaching and sanding siding on my house these days. The major writing for my class this quarter is almost done and I’m only about a week away from having the house prepped to paint. After that I promise I’ll have guides up and running. The FOG guide is only an hour or so from finished, but as I said, unfortunately, my students and my family take precedence.

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

A new bill before the Senate (S. 1747) doesn’t look pretty for any school tech workers not on contract (via Ars Technica)

A bill recently introduced in Congress would greatly expand the exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act for IT employees, ending overtime benefits for many more types of workers, including network, database and security specialists.

Read the full article here.

After updating the test server to Moodle 2.2RC1 yesterday I failed to notice the second most important change (after rubrics of course): TinyMCE has been updated to 3.4.5, meaning that as long as your iPod/iPhone/iPad is running iOS 5 you can FINALLY do text input!

Great news for schools with iPad deployments and Moodle.

I just finished updating our test site to Moodle 2.2 RC1 (HEAD release for those of you always on the slathering edge). The biggest improvement, by far, is the inclusion of rubrics for a grading option. I’ve played around with it a bit and I’m looking forward to using it on a production server soon. It looks like the final release should be any day now.

If you want a more in-depth look, check out moodleblog’s “First Look at Rubrics in Moodle 2.2″

If you used the contact form to email me today, you’ll want to try it again (I broke the contact form earlier, but now it’s fixed).

I’ll be posting more about FOG, Moodle, Wiimote Whiteboards, iTalc2 and more in the coming days.

In the meantime, if you attended the presentation, please take a second to fill out this survey.

Links from today’s session:

For more on FOG imaging server, goto www.fogproject.org. Check back next week, I’ll be posting a full how-to on creating a mobile imaging cart. I’ll cover selecting hardware, installing all software, all the way up to imaging your first set of computers.

For more on moodle check out the moodle.org and Google Apps for education sites as well as the great books from packtpub. I’ll be posting full how-to’s for setting up moodle on shared hosting and private server hosting in the next week or so.

iTalc, the computer monitoring software can be found at italc.sourceforge.org. Expect a full write-up with instructions soon.

Finally, if you’re interested in creating inexpensive interactive whiteboards ala Promethean, check out smoothboard and Uwe Schmidt’s websites.

If you’d like to contact me for more information in the meantime, email me at eric@nolalearning.com or use the contact form in the upper-left.

Thanks to everyone who came out, I had a great time sharing with y’all.

I managed to sneak a peak at the various live-blogs of the iPad 2 launch in San Francisco during my lunch break today. They start shipping March 11 and I put in an order for 11 of the 16GB units with our Apple rep this morning (I’ve been waiting for the new ones to order another batch for our special education department). While I was really hoping for a dedicated Thunderbolt port (or at least a Displayport) for dedicated graphics goodness, I am happy to see the new Apple HDMI adapter for 1080p output.

One of the most potentially exciting things about new HDMI adapter is the USB port. Apple’s specs page says it’s for charging; I’m hoping it works like the USB port on the camera connect kit, meaning that USB human interface devices (like keyboards) work with it as well. In my dream world I could actually use an iPad as my primary teaching device, video out to my Smart Board (or equivalent interactive whiteboard) and have the USB HID from the Smart Board be able to control my iPad while I’m at the board.

Actually, my true dream setup (which is getting closer and closer to being possible) is being able to run a class anywhere with nothing but an iPad and an interactive short-throw projector. Literally one power cord (the projector) and nothing else. (more…)

We (the IT geeks of the world) know the iPad 2 is at least going to be announced tomorrow. I for one am hoping for at least a front-facing camera (and it seems pretty certain that there’s likely to be both front and rear facing cameras). However, what I’m most excited about is the various people at my school finally being able to stop asking me when the new iPad is coming and what it’s going to feature.

I’ve been an Apple person for almost 25 years, I was at one point a video software developer, I’ve even  had dinner with Phil Schiller, and I can always tell you one thing: no one REALLY knows what Apple is going to announce until they announce it. Most importantly, the guy you saw at the district principal’s meeting last Thursday, he definitely doesn’t know anything about what Apple is going to announce.

So, to any people in education administration out there: stop bugging your IT people for info and do what the rest of us would like to do, check out the live-blogging of the Apple event tomorrow (10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern) and learn all about the iPad 2 the same time us geeks do. And while you’re at it, go ahead and budget enough money so we can get one to “field test”.