Braeburn is a group of International schools based in Nairobi, Kenya. It has several sister schools around East Africa that offer the British National Curriculum. Technology for learning, or 'blended learning' has been adopted using Moodle.
Adopt software solutions that will merge all aspects of the schools diverse ICT requirements, and benefit and empower all users in a world where Technological changes are constantly progressing and changing at a dizzying pace.
The elearning platform was initially experimental, but teachers gradually began adding resources, as well as activities such as discussion Forums and assignments.
We hope they can span their knowledge to the use of more advanced content authoring tools eXe, which allows educators with connectivity problems, or those who prefer working from home to create standalone courses which can than be uploaded into moodle as a SCORM package.Other activities that haven't been explored fully are the use of hot potatoes quiz.
Joomla
The school website is built using Joomla! CMS. The decision to adopt this platform arose from the need for updates to be made remotely, using a standard web browser. Besides cost savings, the platform provides a wide range of modules and plugins that can immensely extend functiionality, as well as being adaptable to changes.
Gallery2
For the schools photo Gallery, we've adopted a powerful, open source photo gallery package, Gallery2. The package is web-based, and unlike most galleries, has the flexibility to create an infinite number of Albums and sub albums in a hierarchy. The use of galleryremote allows users with priviledges to make bulk photo - uploads to the server.
Moodle
The school adopted Moodle LMS two years ago, and it spans across from the Primary School to High school, as well as for our adult education programmes.
We recently installed Mahara on a Linux server, to allow for online e-portfolios. The schools Mahara platform has merged seamlessly with Moodle through a SSO ( single sign on), where users who log into moodle have their details transferred to mahara directly.
This project is the major milestone for the school, which presents a new set of challenges, owing to the need to gain user acceptance. Teachers are often hesitant to embrace change, partly because it's unfamiliar to many.
Creating workable support Forums, documentation, Teacher training insets, are essential for these projects to gain a foothold.
Streamlined operations for the school, providing a facility where the Learners and Educators can share.
Powerful Marketing tool - School Photographs provide site visitors a tour or virtual visit of the school, and the numerous activities taking place.
Empowers staff and students to hone their ICT skills by learning how to work with computers to achieve desired results. Moodle for instance has a provision to upload compressed resources, which are unzipped to the server. Teachers can use these skills to prepare interactive learning material and resources, making learning fun and engaging.
Roll out Linux Edubuntu for our staff and students, and make the most of it through the use of packages such as GIMP for graphics, as well as the adoption of a viable School-wide SMS ( Student Management System) that will cater for Academics, with emphasis on Student Reports, attendance, timetabling, disciplinary, and
There currently exists very basic School Management Software that's open source. Packages available may not merge well with existing software. School tool and Free MIS are the most viable options currently, but are still limited in terms of functionality.
You might consider trying out the Poplog system as part of this package. It is free, open source, with a very liberal licence, but was once an expensive commercial package, used to develop several AI products including Clementine, a world-beating datamining package (now owned by SPSS who converted it to fit their software constraints).
Poplog contains incremental compilers for four powerful languages Pop-11, the core language used for implementing all the others, and also a very powerful teaching language, Common Lisp, Prolog, and ML, along with a programmable editor that 'understands' the library structure, an interface to 2-D graphics using the X window system, and a host of teaching libraries and tutorials, all of which can be adapted/extended repackaged by teachers to suit local teaching needs. For more on this, including samples of teaching materials, from elementary programming to quite sophisticated AI programming see www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html#teaching.
I have a draft pdf slide presentation about the teaching philosophy here: www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/#ncsl (also with a link to a flash version on slideshere.net).
There is a reduced version that works on Windows (without the graphics), though it is possible for Windows users to use poplog/pop11 with full graphics by installing XMing and a SSH client, then logging through to a linux machine running Poplog.
Poplog has a surprisingly small footprint for something with all that content (download is about 17MB, and when untarred it takes about 70MB (which can be reduced if not all the languages are used, and if sources are not wanted). The default start-up image size on 32bit linux is about 11 Mbyes so a modern PC can easily support 10 or more (perhaps 30 or 40?) remote users depending on memory available and speed.
This can make it a very economical shared resource.
If anyone wishes to try it there are download instructions here www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/latest-poplog including a 'get-and-install' script that can be copied and run.By default it will install everything in /usr/local/poplog so it is easily uninstalled using 'rm -rf'. (Read the section on prerequisites for ubuntu.)
Some of the facilities work better if Motif (or Lesstif) is available (+ -devel version) but it can be used without.
If anyone tries it please send any comments or questions to comp.lang.pop news group or join the pop-forum email list here mailman.cs.bham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/pop-forum (or ask me for help at A.Sloman at cs.bham.ac.uk).
There's plenty of scope for tailoring some of the elementary teaching files to locally apt examples, etc.. It can be used for collaborative mini-projects of various kinds.
One of the test demos available immediately after installation is a version of this 'eliza' chatbot www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/eliza/ If you have 'espeak' installed, there is a 'speaking' version of eliza.
All the teaching files are in English, but since they are simple text files, they can in principle be translated as needed. Translating all the online documentation would be a huge job, however.
Aaron Sloman