What is Mahara? Mahara? Mahara? Mahara?
Those interested in e-Portfolios - and in Mahara in particular - may like to check out the answers I have begun to formulate for four key questions about Mahara:
1. What is Mahara? (versus Moodle): http://derrin.biz/?p=74
2. What is Mahara? (versus Facebook or Ning): http://derrin.biz/?p=85
Ubuntu User Day
User Days was created to be a set of courses offered during a one day period to teach the beginning or intermediate Ubuntu user the basics to get them started with Ubuntu. User Days is a series of online courses where you can:
Moodle Moot 2010 Call for papers
Community members and visitors who are using Moodle in their schools or authoties might be interested in presenting a paper at April's UK Moodle Moot in London. The Moots are friendly gatherings with a stong culture of learning from and sharing with fellow delegates from all sectors of the UK Moodle community, and it would be great to have a strong representation from schools at this year's moot.
OpenOffice
Hi,
We've recently reviewed our position statement on Office applications, and part of this is to give schools the option of using OpenOffice in the Curriculum rather than Microsoft Office. We're now in the process of creating an msi to deploy OO via GPO. This potentially could end up in 400+ schools, so I'm keen to learn if other people have deployed OO via an msi, and if so:
Award Winning Open Source at Notre Dame High School
Paul Haigh, assistant headteacher (specialisms and innovation), describes how open source has provided a 'virtual school' for all the stakeholders at Notre Dame High School in Sheffield. Notre Dame is one of a number of schools using open source to have gained the prestigious Becta ICT Mark, and this year it went on to win Becta's Excellence Award for Best Whole School in Yorkshire and Humberside.
Here's what Becta have to say about the school:
Notre Dame is a Catholic secondary school with a diverse intake, with triple specialisms in technology, humanities and leading edge. It fosters an outstanding culture of innovation in its use of ICT across the whole school community. This is at the heart of its vision, and is driving the school forward both in the cycle of continuous improvement, and in the excellent progress made by students in developing and applying their ICT skills. Notre Dame also has a good reputation for collaboration and sharing ICT practice through its various activities with national organisations.
Notre Dame's virtual school is an excellent example of its innovative use of ICT to support personalised learning. This flexible and bespoke resource has improved communication between students, staff, parents and governors and incorporates Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, secure voting and live feeds. The content includes revision resources, teaching tips and e-safety advice. A dedicated innovation team supports these developments, and crucially empowers all teachers to share and develop their ICT skills through formalised curriculum innovation responsibilities.
A further strength at Notre Dame is its effective and efficient use of electronic data. The school follows the data management mantra of 'enter once, use many times' and has sophisticated electronic assessment systems, including a management information system that supports data collection, collation and storage. Parents have full access to their children's data in a Real Time reporting system that exceeds the expectations on the Online Reporting targets for schools.
Moodle Moot 2010 Announced
Next year's Moodle Moot is to be hosted by University of London Computer Centre on 13th and 14th April. Here are the details...
“We are very excited at the opportunity to host MoodleMoot UK 2010” says Mick Kahn, Head of Application Services at ULCC. “Moodle is now the VLE of choice for the UK education sector and a triumph for the Open Source approach and this conference will bring together teachers, developers and administrators to learn from each other and advance the UK e-learning agenda."
We will be hard at work, putting together two days packed with thought provoking keynotes and engaging workshops whilst offering you the chance to meet fellow Moodlers.
Sean Keogh from pteppic.net, a member of the Programme Group for MoodleMoot UK 2010, who organised MoodleMoot UK since it started in 2004, says "I'm very pleased to be handing over the reins of MoodleMoot UK to ULCC. With their engagement of all sectors of the Moodle community, I am sure that they will organise an excellent conference and I look forward to working with them". The conference will be held on 13 & 14 April 2010, at Senate House, the University of London’s iconic Art Deco building, which has recently undergone major refurbishment.
UKUUG Spring 2010 Conference
From UKUUG. See http://www.ukuug.org/events/spring2010/ for details.
UKUUG's annual Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference and tutorials will be held in Manchester on 23-25 March 2010 at the Manchester Conference Centre. The call for papers is now open and we are accepting submissions for tutorials and conference talks.
This conference is a must-attend event for system and network administrators.
The BETT Open Source Café
Open Source Schools and Open Forum Europe, supporters of open source and open standards, have joined forces to create something rather special for this year's BETT.
We hope that teachers, techies and leaders who are successfully using open source software in education will join us to share their experience and expertise in an informal, friendly environment at the Open Source Café on Stand L20 in the Supporting Next Generation Zone (formerly the Policy in Practice Zone). In open source barcamp style, there will be at least 24 slots throughout the four days for community members and supporters to host 30 minute sessions in a manner of their choosing; this could be a presentation, workshop or round table discussion. We plan to film sessions for later upload to YouTube etc.
Update: Press release below
Update: session sign-up wiki online, plus further details.
Open Source Schools will also be presenting a BETT seminar on 'Creative Computing with Open Source' at 15:45 on Wednesday 13th January. We will showcase a number of case studies about how school students are learning to program and contribute to the development of open source projects using a range of free, downloadable tools. Examples range from Scratch programming in primary schools, through Greenfoot in the secondary curriculum to the development of modules in PHP for web-based applications such as Moodle.
My experience with OSS introduction.
OSS Watch September newsletter published
Issue 2, September, of the OSS Watch Newsletter is now available [pdf] and includes news, articles, analysis and events and a theme of contributing to OSS projects.
REPRAP - resistance is futile ;)
Toby Borland of Magic Box SmartLabs at NESTA's Rebooting Britain conference demonstrating a REPRAP self-replicating 3D printer. Here he outlines what a REPRAP machine is. You can learn more about the REPRAP Open Hardware project here - with more resources to build your own. It might prove suitable as a school project....
Lug Radio Live 2009
http://www.lugradio.org/live/2009/
"LugRadio Live 2009 brings together a blistering barn-busting day of incredible content and speakers on the 24th October 2009, all underlined by the rock-conference atmosphere that LugRadio Live has become so well known for.
This year we get
School Closures
I'm working with quite a number of schools on http://myschoolclosures.com
The idea behind the project is that parents and teachers can be notified in the case of a closure, registration can be done from inside of a school learning platform/website and all school info is available using the api.
Moodle and MIS integration
I have been finally making some time in the holidays to make some extensions to the following Moodle block Moodle.org: Modules and plugins
This block allows integration with Serco MIS system. My contribution so far had been to document how to get this system working on Debian/Ubuntu based systems rather Redhat.Debian integrates with mssql/sybase and freetds differently so documented how to get apache/php playing nicely with the existing system.
Scholarpack
Scholarpack is a complete open source MIS system for UK schools created by Garry Saddington at Skegness Grammar School and presented by him to the OSS Unconference in Nottingham on 20th July 2009. This forum topic is meant to support discussion for those implementing Scholarpack or considering an implementation of Scholarpack.
The attached presentation file was used by Garry for the Unconference.
e-Learning Foundation - charity support for 1:1 ICT at home and at school (UK schools)
Hi there - I've recently discovered this forum, and was suprised not to find a reference to our charity yet, so I hope people might find a little more information handy. Particularly, this may be of interest to:
Software Project Hosting
How about providing a hosting service for software development aimed specifically at UK schools.