Moodle: Day One

The state techs attended a Moodle training on Wednesday, part one of a two-day event.  Wednesday was all about the teacher/student side of the online learning management system.  Each participant walked through a series of examples, demonstrating the various types of forums, quizzes, resources, etc that can be used in the Moodle environment.

The biggest advantage to Moodle over other LMS set-ups: Moodle is free and open source.  There is also quite a large community of developers and installations. 

The biggest "issue" with Moodle (in my opinion): the interface.  The way units (or whatever you choose to call them) are laid out, everything is in blocks on the screen, giving the user a distinctly utilitarian feel for things.  Even with a custom skin/theme (we were shown some custom examples), the basic layout is the same.  Then again, maybe I am just growing weary of the "two-column" and "three-column" layout we seem to find everywhere online these days (just take a look at your Facebook layout, or heck even this blog's layout).  With Moodle, though, at least you can hide certain blocks until the appropriate time.  This allows for limiting the number of class units displayed, keeping things a little tidier.

I see Moodle as a way to complement the other online professional development offerings the state of Arkansas has: ArkansasIDEAS, iTunesU, and the new Digital Sandbox.  Though, the Sandbox is not really for PD, it is for teachers and students to conduct online collaboration in a closed environment.  ArkansasIDEAS currently structures its PD in a self-directed, self-paced manner.  A Moodle implementation would allow for facilitated (and/or blended) online professional development.  It would not surprise me if ArkansasIDEAS moved to a facilitated (again, and/or blended) course offering.

How would that work in our state?  Well, teachers are required to have so many hours of "seat time" (as it is called).  With a blended environment, teachers could take a 6-week course (1 hour per week) and get 6 hours of seat time credit.  It wouldnt even have to be that stretched out.  Let's say the course was designed for 6 days, one hour each day.  Still, the teacher received 6-hours of seat time.

Eventually, I see a hybrid model for PD where earned credits are tied to the course and material and not tied to how long someone sits in a chair.  Well, that's my hope, anyway.

Thursday's Moodle training takes us to the administration side of a Moodle environment.

Monday and Tuesday

Monday, I spent the morning working on several projects at once.  We had a demo of a very cool Okidata LED printer that prints banners, thermal transfers, etc.  To top it off, the demo model was being offered up for a quite attractive price, and we snagged it up!  I think this will create a wonderful opportunity to add services in the Teacher Center!

While the demo was going on, I spent time running back and forth to meet with the heat/air guy.  Evidently, a heating strip (whatever that is) came loose, was knocked loose, something - and it was shorting out the heating unit in one of our offices.  The heat/air guy was able to fix the problem and now the heat and air work perfectly!

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Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I am taking a training for Windows Server 2008 along with other state tech coordinators.  We are learning a lot and having a good time in the process.  I love trainings that allow for free conversation and examination of our various situations.  We can then bounce ideas off each other and the instructor can help try to solve the problems or offer suggestions!

Last Week

Monday (11/8) - general office work, as usual, so far as I can remember.

Tuesday (11/9) - 1/2 day at Blevins School District, worked on fiber connections.  Had to hunt down a few lines to figure out how the connection for the new admin building met up with the current demarc location. 

1/2 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (11/9,10,11) - I was out sick.

Friday (11/12) - Back in office for a morning training on new tech plan development (CIV from ADE).  That was followed by a local area tech meeting.  The afternoon was spent cleaning/organizing the technology closet.

Time Flies!

Whew! Keeping up with this everyday is harder than I imagined!  But, I will try to rebuild some of what has taken place outside of regular daily duties (ex: fixing computers, printers, etc).

During the past week, in addition to regular daily activites, I have done the following:

Installed camera control cable in conference room to rear camera.

Spent Tuesday still fighting internet connectivity issues.  With the help of DIS, we narrowed it down to a local issue (not sure what just yet) and on Tuesday, we jumped from 500k usage to 2.86Mb usage almost exactly at 8:45am.  Turns out, that is almost exactly when we turned all the Macs on in the computer lab.  At lunch, I disabled updates on both the Mac OS and in the Windows running on Parallels on the Macs.  Not sure what difference that has made yet.  Today (Friday), our connectivity seems to be stable between 2-3 Mb, even with a video conference going on.  That is good.  Now, I will fire up all the Macs next Tuesday and see what happens, since the problem is mainly on Tuesdays.

Wednesday, I worked at Blevins schools troubleshooting several issues - one of which was another scenario where someone had plugged a loose end into the same switch it had come out of.  Since this unit was up on a shelf, it would take a deliberate effort to pull that off.  We're starting to suspect a mystery plugger-inner! ;-)  Steve and I also walked through a few fiber runs and a new cat-5 run to be done, trying to determine where the wires went, where they originated, and how to patch things together for the relocation of the administration offices.  So far, we have at least two runs that don't seem to line up.  In my experience, this usually means there is an inbetween stop that we have not yet discovered.

Thursday - Met with other state techs in Conway at Video-Relaity for a demonstration of the SAFARI Montage program/appliance.  We also met with Beck Rains and Debbie Coffman.  The notes from that meeting (if I can remember) will be posted once they are officially adopted/approved.

Friday - ran fiber between floors for data, hoping to resolve connectivity issues.  That will be a metter of time before I know for sure.  Worked with Phoebe and Lindy on the outside light issue for our new building (the timer is, well, wonky).  We also discussed the alarm system and I used the surveillance camera software to review a situation from earlier.

I am hoping to run the wiring for computer/dl labs today (Friday)  and beef up security even more.  Frankly, I'm liking the security we have in place.  Very nice!

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

Wednesday, I spent the day hoping to help one of the schools, but instead had to wait on the elevator guy.  He got to the office and did his own troubleshooting.  When it was all said and done, he concluded that his modem had gone bad and thus was the source of our elevator communication troubles.  He bypassed the modem (the modem is not necessary for operation) and had us up and running with the phone securely connected and working! Excellent!

I passed time while waiting for the elevator guy by cleaning my office some more and installing Vineland one the early childhood computers.  I also began prep work for the TIE meeting coming up on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

I also answered emails, took phone calls, and had a discussion with an antivirus vendor about a new product.

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Thursday, I spent the morning in the monthly state tech meeting.  We met with Belinda Kittrell regarding ERate updates and issues, then met with DIS for their announcement of the new B.E.E. program to provide more bandwidth to schools.  It's a partnership between DIS and local telcos.  I will be sharing the information with my area techs, as they have been begging for a bandwidth solution for quite some time.

The afternoon presented itself with two great keynote programs for the TIE program: Tim Holt talked about problem-based learning and Tony Vincent talked about better presentations (specifically Pechu Kacha and Ignite).  The notes were taken 'live' and posted on Plurk, Facebook, and other social outlets.

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Friday, the group was broken into three subgroups for breakout sessions.  My order of sessions went from Tim Holt's Professional Learning Communities/Networks to Tony Vincent's Ignite presentation development session (we are to develop an Ignite-based preso for Saturday), and then to Jason Borgen's session on advanced Google.

Again, notes were streamed to Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I will try to collate notes and post those here for your perusal.