K12IT

Our school district offers Moodle to the students, teachers, and administration as an excellent solution for content management. I have always encouraged teachers to place content online and offer students 24/7 access to learning. Many teachers took advantage of Moodle at various levels. Some teach their entire class from Moodle, others organize their course through it, and yet others use it as a simple drop box. Currently, we have a strong movement to place more content online, and we will start to utilize Moodle more. Moodle has always worked well from the base install. I recently upgraded to 2.2 which went well and this summer I really want to optimize its performance to give students and teachers the best experience possible. I have been reading blogs, Moodle docs, and posts on the LinkedIn Moodle group. To compliment my project research, I read the book, Moodle 2 Administration: An administration guide to configuring, securing, customizing, and extending Moodle by Alex Buchner. I enjoyed reading it and I can see many uses for this book. If you are a starting Moodle admin, the book walks you through the installation, performance tweaks, user authentication, and content design. For an experienced Moodle administrator, the book provides a refresher and discusses the updates with Moodle 2.0. I also see this book as an excellent reference guide. The book structures the chapters in a way that allows the reader to focus on the content they wish to learn. Several chapters really sparked my interests for my particular situation and environment. I found the performance chapter especially interesting. The suggestions make sense and the adjustments are fairly simple to complete. Buchner explains the three main OS (Linux, Mac, and Windows) configurations and tweaks, so he covers most Moodle environments. I also thought the maintenance section provided great advice and tips to keep Moodle performing well. Additionally, I am going to fine tune some of the user privileges to help teachers control their courses better. I’m making some of these modifications due to the upgrade changes in Moodle 2. Moreover, the chapter on plugins has me considering adding new options for my teachers. Finally any one going from 1.9 to 2 or 2.2, I would recommend looking at the quiz module as well. The Moodle 2 Administration book combines the Moodle doc knowledge base and multiple blog posts with Alex Buchner first hand experiences to offer an excellent reference guide. I have several technology director friends who are also taking on hybrid, open campus, and/or virtual initiatives powered by Moodle and I am going to recommend this book to them. I got my ePub copy from Packt Publishing (http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-2-administration-configuring-securing-customizing-extending/book), but Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Moodle-2-Administration-Alex-B%C3%BCchner/dp/1849516049/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331694517&sr=8-1) also carries it. Like I mentioned before it’s a nice reference for both new and experienced Moodle administrators. I think everyone will learn something from reading this book. Good luck Moodling!

Apparently, in SQL Server Management Studio, copying a database via Tasks -> Copy Database and choosing the “Detach and Attach” method can drop all user permissions from the source database. Awesome.

I’ve yet to figure out whether this always happens or if it’s only in specific circumstances, but I can say that I’ve had it happen to me multiple times. My advice: use the tried-and-true method of backing up the source database and restoring it to the new destination instead.

Is anyone willing to share their policies and procedures for downloading apps on mobile learning devices for teachers, students, and administration?

From day one in my role as Director of Technology I have been frustrated by our district's website.  The website is hosted by Schoolwires, and while it has some nice features and is fairly easy for the end user, it is extremely limiting for anyone who wants to go above and beyond a simple WYSIWYG post.

For example, before my time, the district had a custom front page made by Schoolwires.  We are unable to edit this front page!  That means no current events, no cancellations, and essentially, nothing current!

So why hasn't is changed?  As anyone who works in a school setting knows, things aren't always logical.  The high school budget was responsible for the payment to Schoolwires.  So, while I didn't care for it, it wasn't coming from my budget, hence it was low on my priority list.

Why is it changing now?  You guessed it!  It is now part of my budget, and I cannot justify the thousands of dollars we pay to Schoolwires.

So, I have set out on a quest to develop our district website, using a Content Management System (CMS), so that it is database driven and easily updated by the end user.

One CMS that is popular with schools is Dot Net Nuke .  While I have heard very good things regarding this CMS, it is based on ASP scripting and my experience is with PHP scripting.

After evaluating a couple of different options, including Wordpress, ModX, and Joomla, I decided to settle on Drupal.

While the other CMSs do this to some extent, I felt Drupal best met my objectives of being:

• written in php
• actively being developed
• a K-12 Community
• plethora of modules (that are actively developed)
• database driven (MySQL)
• Open for a hard core developer
• Once configured, and easy interface for the end user

As I move forward with this process, I plan to blog the steps taken to get Drupal from its basic form to a school district website with teacher created pages.

You may have a need to install SQL Server 2005 on a new Windows 2008 R2 server (application doesn't support a higher version of SQL Server).  During the install you will receive a warning message pointing to IIS on the System Configuration Check.  Not only do you need to have IIS installed, but you also need several features that are not part of the default selection.  Microsoft has a KB article here listing the components you need to add.

Another area where you may receive a warning is the Windows Firewall.  You will need to configure the firewall to open up the proper ports.  A discussion of the ports is available here.  Microsoft has a KB article here that provides a script that you can use to open up the proper ports.

This can be come tricky when working with a named instance since SQL Server uses dynamic ports for those.  There are two different options for dealing with this, the method I have used is to configure a fixed port for the named instance.  Directions for doing that are here .

Join.me allows even the least tech-savvy user to share their desktop, or view yours.

 

Many of us have used some sort of screen sharing application to join a meeting (Webex, GoToMeeting, etc.). I've just been introduced to the simplest screen sharing system yet, join.mefrom LogMeIn.

Join.me allows even the least tech-savvy user to share their desktop, or view yours. As long as they are on a Flash-capable machine and have an internet connection. For presenters, join.me lets up to 250 other people join your session. It is a great troubleshooting tool for anyone in a support role, letting you quickly see what the user is seeing. Remote control and an audio conference bridge (toll call) are also included.

And, great news for iOS and Android device users! There are mobile versions of the viewer.

For a more detailed review visit: groovyPost

Q: What do the following have in common?

• an island in Indonesia to the south of Borneo; one of the world's most densely populated regions 
• coffee: a beverage consisting of an infusion of ground coffee beans; "he ordered a cup of coffee" 
• a platform-independent object-oriented programming language

Correct... they're all 'Java'.

I can confidently explain the first two. It's the last one that I'll stumble over. And where is it? It's like Chuck Norris- it's EVERYWHERE. Seriously, as an IT professional i get asked that question quite a bit, based on the Java update pop-up bubble. And i honestly didn't have a 'simple' answer, or one that made sense to the people I interact with daily. I decided to look for an answer that was both intelligent and easy to understand.

Once I began to research Java I realized it is 'everywhere'. It's in web browsers, cell phones, home appliances, and the list goes on. I was pretty surprised at how much I DIDN'T know about this little.. what? is it software, is it a program, what exactly IS Java? Let's get started, kids...

Java is a programming 'language'. Its original claim to fame was that (at least in theory, and heavily promoted by marketing hype) you could write and compile the code once, and then run it anywhere there was a suitable environment (this is where “write once, run anywhere” comes from).

In the early days of the Web, one of the environments that Java could run in was an applet- think of a Flash movie, because Flash really filled that niche in the end. The idea was you could bundle up a chunk of Java written to a certain specification, the web browser would run it in a special secure environment, and this would let you have most of the power of a full programming language, but working in any browser.

(Meanwhile, Netscape had been experimenting with client-side scripting, and produced a language. In one of the more idiotic marketing moves ever made, they named it Javascript, even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with Java.)

Practically speaking, Java applets were a flop, because Java was only ever supported by Sun on three platforms—Solaris, Windows, and Linux—and even then, making sure the version of Java you had installed on your computer matched the version the website expected was always tricky.

Java did find a niche – it largely replaced C++ and COBOL languages for big corporate applications, the sort companies maintain a base of for in-house programmers. On the web, the interactive and multimedia aspects have been taken over by Flash, and the complex applications have been taken over by Javascript using AJAX techniques.

So, simply speaking, our friend Java is a 'programming language' that is simplistic enough to communicate on a multitude of platforms and devices, yet complex enough to function fairly efficiently with a large variety of hardware and software.

'How' it does this is my next project...

In my last post, I had given a brief overview of web services and it many components.

From my perspective, web services are very useful when provided by a database and it is a safe way to indirectly expose data to an external source without having to provide direct access to the data.
 
The following is a great article which describes how web services can be hosted by sql server 2005/2008 
 
http://www.developer.com/net/asp/article.php/3767311/Creating-Native-Web-Services-in-SQL-Server.htm

I’m always surprised by how many users aren’t aware that they could be browsing their Sharepoint files with Windows Explorer instead of a Sharepoint List. Sharepoint provides this functionality with Explorer View.

In a Sharepoint Document Library, Explorer View can be accessed from one of two places:

1) Actions -> Open with Windows Explorer

 2) View -> Explorer View

Either way will simply open the folder that you are currently viewing in an Explorer window. From there, you can browse to any other directory you have access to. This can make moving files and manipulating directory structures much less of a burden. It will also give you a more complete view of what files exist in a directory as not all files and directories are displayed on a list view. Security settings still apply so this is safe for use by end users. Note: This feature is only available in Internet Explorer.