SubscribeMay, 2008
Interesting Article about Moodle from Consortium for School Networking and eNews
Submitted by Shelley_Chamberlain on Fri, 05/23/2008 - 1:45pm.
Recently learned about the NECC and the IST. Copied "about" blurbs below, taken from the NECC 2008 About Us page.
The next NECC event is this June 29 - July 2 in San Antonio, TX.
Here are some interesting sessions I found in this search:
- Using Moodle to Teach Teachers about Web 2.0 Tools
- Moodle: Hear It from a Sixth Grade Teacher's Perspective!
- Moodle Magic—Make It Happen: Exploration of E-Learning Implementation
- Use Your Noodle—Learn Moodle! An Open Source Learning Management System
- Free Open Source Content Management Systems: Powerful, Collaborative School Web Sites
- Share My What?! Exploring Open Educational Resources and Web 2.0
- Wonderful World of Wikis
- My Space, Your Space: Effective Social Networking Using Open Source
New NNHS Library Website created with Joomla
Submitted by kmcgrath on Wed, 05/14/2008 - 2:16pm.
Just wanted to share our new interactive library website (http://www.nnhs.net/library/). The new website is the result of months of work and was built with Joomla?, an open source? content-management system similar to Drupal?. We used an education template from www.joomlashack.com that includes nifty text-resizing buttons.
We were partly motivated by literacy studies that show teenagers, and particularly challenged readers, respond better to white space and 'non-cluttered' websites. The new site includes several univeral design features, blogs, polls, and many other Web 2.0? elements. Some highlights:
• Students (or anyone) can easily resize the text. This will be helpful for the visually challenged.
• Students and staff can register on the website. Registering allows access to private content, including passwords to our databases.
• Polls and a rating system for each webpage.
• Save, print or e-mail each page.
We tried for a while to covert our old site with Drupal, but in the end we felt that Joomla offered more design flexibility, as we wanted to maintain some of the look and feel of the old site. We've only tapped the surface of Joomla's potential and we're looking forward to adding new interactive features as they are needed to the library program.
In the process of writing a blog post in the Drupal in Education group, I did a little research to answer my own curiosity about what organizations structures are behind Chancery SMS. Here's what I found out. Please let me know if there are any errors.
Chancery SMS is the flagship product by Pearson School Systems, which also makes PowerSchool® Premier, PowerTeacher™, Pearson Inform™ and other products.
Global Education Collaborative, Moodle and Drupal groups on Diigo
Submitted by Erik on Tue, 05/13/2008 - 9:42pm.
In the process of exploring a the Diigo site that I just found, which provides link sharing and group discussions around specific subject areas, I found three groups of particular interest:
- Global Education Collaborative - A group to support the work going on in the Global Education Collaborative (a Ning Network)
- Moodlers - A group for people who use moodle? or are interested in using moodle
In a previous post (NPS Portal Possibilities), I talked about the different kinds of portals that exist or may soon exist in the Newton Public Schools. And I gave a brief definition of what a portal is.
Now, I want to breakdown and further describe how we might segment the functionality of a school portal into a few, well-defined buckets. I've been thinking about it for Newton Public Schools, I put together the following three graphics to define four major components, in terms of their purpose, functionality and technology behind the scenes.
KDI Funding for Drupal-based projects to enable community transformations
Submitted by Erik on Fri, 05/02/2008 - 1:45pm.
A posting on http://groups.drupal.org just caught my eye, so I thought I'd share it here. I'm thinking specifically about the potential to secure funding for improving the installation profiles for the SCI community portals, or for developing an installation profile for NPS? PTO web sites.
When I say "Installation Profile", I'm referring to the feature in Drupal? that allows you to install a new site quickly, specifying which modules should be enabled and
how they should be configured on the site. See more at http://drupal.org/project/Installation+profiles.
Here's a clipping from the post. Learn more at Knight Drupal Initiative.
NPS Strategic Planning - Working Groups kicked off today
Submitted by Erik on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 10:33pm.
This evening I attended the first half of the kick-off meeting for the NPS? Strategic Planning Working Groups. It took place from 4-8 pm at the Oak Hill Library. At least 80 people attended--impressive turn out!
The purpose was to get members of the three working groups acquainted, grounded in some of a common vision, and to begin developing long-term goals, objectives and actions for each group.
This is a rough sketch of the different kinds of "portals" that currently exist or may soon exist in Newton Public Schools.