Education
Schools, Universities, ITO's
Great news out of the Mahara community this week:
Here are my notes from my presentation on 'The Open Source School' at ULearn.Post comments if you've got any questions...
This is great. Host a party to help launch Windows 7. As the guy says: "Can you believe Microsoft put the launch of Windows 7 in our hands? Are they nuts or what?"
Must be school holidays because it's conference season. First up is the SLANZA conference in Christchurch where I'm presenting with our wonderful librarian Sharon on Koha the open source library management system.The second conference is ULearn, also in Christchurch. I'll post the slides from that presentation soon.
I'm presenting at the SLANZA conference next month on Koha the open source integrated library management system, and so I thought about ways to spread the word among delegates. 'Surely a tastefully designed flyer for the conference pack' I thought. I got in touch with the conference organisers to see if I could slip something in.
We care about learning so much that we canceled classes on Wednesdays. Are we crazy? Well maybe, but what if I told you that some of our best learning happens on Wednesdays? At Albany Senior High School, Wednesday is Impact Project day. Students work with a supervising teacher to take an area of passion for them and turn it into learning. It's project-based learning and the 'impact' side of it comes from the requirement that it must make an impact on the community; it must give something back.
I discovered this trawling through the Linux Journal. From the site: "LongoMatch is a sports video analysis tool for coaches and sports scientists, to assist them on making games video analysis. It simplifies video analysis by providing a set of intuitive tools to tag, review and edit the most importants plays of the game. It allows to group plays by categories and adjust the lead and lag time of each play frame by frame through a timeline.
This is an old post, but it's the first time I've seen a screencast of this feature in action. It's SSO between Moodle and Mahara demonstrating the function of pushing an artefact from the assignment module in Moodle through to the Mahara files area. As I see it, this is fundamental to a useable LMS/e-portfolio system. Good to see it's on its way:
We recently featured in an interesting article in the New Zealand Herald. One quote captures our philosophy more than others: "What we were wanting to do when we were putting the school together was to give the students a broad range of skills and a broad range of tools so they could deepen their understanding of what they were learning and present information in new ways."Read the full article here.
We have 100 student desktop computers running Ubuntu 8.10. Each machine has the following software installed:Office:
- Open Office
- Freemind
- Planner (Project Management)
Education:
- Stellarium
- GBrainy
- KSeg (Geometry sketchpad)
- Graphics:
- Blender 3D
- Gimp
- Inkspace
- Ocular
- Scribus
Video and Audio:
I have over fifteen years experience in systems and network configuration and support. For most of that time I have been working with Open Source Software, and believe that Open Source software provides the best solutions for business, educational and personal use.
