February 1, 2010
Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.
Back in the day, before I ever learned about Moodle, or had a care about “the power of the internet to empower students to learn,” I purchased the domain mrmalley.com. I saw it functioning as a place to offer content for my students online. No presumptions. No grand expectations. Just a website.
Well, as the story goes, in looking for a system to manage my content, I stumbled upon Moodle 1.5, and before long I was administering my own online learning environment. It was fantastic.
I only used mrmalley.com for online learning for one year before my district asked me to install and develop Moodle for use in our upper grades. Since then, my old site has been missing a purpose.
I’ve just completed a little project to reuse that space.
Using Expression Engine, I’ve built a lesson plan repository that will collect, store, and organize my lesson plans for the next few years.
I plan to start with my Introductory Psychology class (because it’s in need of an overhaul). Then, I’ll post my AP Psychology plans, and finally my plans for U.S. History. I’m going to take my time posting them to prevent fatigue and to give each class it’s due attention.
I’ve organized Expression Engine into three weblogs – one for each course – and have created custom fields that make writing lesson plans as easy as filling out an online form. Here’s an example of what the backend looks like:
As you can see, this isn’t fool proof. I still have to enter some HTML into the content boxes to get lists to display properly on the page, but it works great for a guy like me who is fine with such a thing.
The front-end is organized into three parts. The first shows a table of academic units (which are just weblog categories), the number of lessons in that unit, and a short description of what will be taught.
Selecting a unit shows another table of all the lessons in that unit with objectives. They are ordered by “day.”
Selecting a lesson plan from within that unit will show the contents of the plan.
I’ve used conditional statements in Expression Engine to only show fields that contain content. For example, if a particular lesson has no “practice” or “anticipatory set,” it will not be included on the page.
In total, I’ve put about 20 hours into creating this new system from top to bottom. In the end, though, I think I’ve created a system that will save me a great deal of time and effort. Since this is a rather geeky way of creating and sharing lesson plans, I thought I’d share. Enjoy!
January 23, 2010
Dates for this year’s Goshen MoodleMoot have been set for July 26-28. Last year’s Moot was a great success, and I’m happy to have been so involved. Goshen College is only a 45-minute drive from my house. The facilities and catering there are fantastic, and last year’s Moot offered something for everyone who attended.
The highlight for this year’s Moot?
Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, will attend the Midwest Moot and present the keynote address. There will be informal opportunities to meet Martin in person and to discuss the future of Moodle.
My wife is due to deliver our second child around the weekend of this Moot. I’ve contacted Floyd Saner, the Moot organizer, to let him know that I plan to attend and hopefully present at the Moot. But, of course, I can’t make any commitments. We’ll have to wait and see.
January 13, 2010
Here’s a quick video from Dave Mozealous that goes through the process of finding, changing and installing Moodle themes.
In it, he says that Simplicity is a core theme. That’s not true. However, there is a good chance it will be included in the core for Moodle 2.0.
December 11, 2009
My new home page.
December 9, 2009
Abilene Christian University has just completed the first year of a pilot program to give incoming freshmen their choice of an iPhone or an iPod Touch to use in their classes.
The verdict? It’s working quite well. 2,100 Abilene students, or 48 percent of the population, are now equipped with a free iPhone. Fully 97 percent of the faculty population has iPhones, too. The iPhone is aiding Abilene in giving students the information they need — when they want it, wherever they want it, said Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies who helped plan the initiative.
December 4, 2009
Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust:
“Our research suggests a strong correlation between kids using technology and wider patterns of reading and writing”
I logged into my bank website just a few minutes ago and noticed I have a considerably lower balance in the account I used to order my new Quad-core i7 iMac. I checked my account history and, sure enough, the charge is from Apple Online.
So, I called Apple to see if this is any indication that they are shipping the iMac soon. The representative I talked to informed me that their practice to charge only once the products ordered are ready to ship. He followed this by saying that this probably means that my iMac will be on its way within the next couple of days.
Now, I’m not typically the type to get excited about such news. But, I put my old 24″ iMac on Craigslist the night that I pre-ordered this new one thinking that it might take a couple of weeks for it to sell. I sold my old iMac within two days and have been working exclusively from my laptop for the past week or two.
This might be nothing, but I thought I should put the word out there.
Update: This was nothing. When I made my purchase on Oct. 26th, Apple held onto funds in my account for a couple of days, then released them. They did the same thing here. On Nov. 6th, they held my funds. This morning, they are back in my account. No iMac for me yet.
Update 2: I woke up this morning to a shipping notice from Apple. My iMac is in transit and should arrive this Friday.
October 30, 2009
Fascinating use of technology to help students learn from the University of Utah.
October 21, 2009
And, if you’re too busy to check the site, there’s even an RSS feed.
Good to know.
September 29, 2009
There’s a lot of good tips in this article by Paul Haigh. Here’s my favorite:
The best system is to use one public site as a portal for all stake holders to use. This way the site gets all the traffic through one initial front page and this can be used to promote the ethos and character of the school.
Edit: It appears that the author of this article has taken his site private.
September 15, 2009
Best argument I’ve read for an act that is sometimes tough to defend.
My blog represents me not as an edited professional voice, but as a human being struggling to express ideas, thoughts, reactions, dreams, and general b.s. via a means that uncompromisingly allows for the immediate feedback of strangers and fellow wanderers.
August 26, 2009
A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media — texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more — do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.
August 9, 2009
The New York TImes:
Children who spend a lot of time watching television have higher blood pressure than those who watch less, even if the children are thin and get enough exercise, according to new research.
I’m heading off to Goshen, Indiana tomorrow for the first annual Midwest MoodleMoot at Goshen College. Since I signed on to participate in this moot early, I’ll be quite busy.
A Quick Overview of Moodle Themes: During this 50-minute session, I’ll explain the files in the standard theme folder and share resources that will help locate and change the Moodle theme code. Just enough information to help get started with themes.
How to Structure Your Course for Reuse: Fifty minutes of me telling you what you’re doing wrong on the course page and why I’m doing it right! I see a lot of courses that are very unorganized and ugly. With time, this can get out of control for the teachers that use them (where is that file?). Moodle offers a great deal of flexibility but needs to be tamed to do the things that you want it to do. In this session, I will do my best to share my experience with Moodle: how I organize files, quiz questions, and course sections in a consistent, manageable way that has kept me sane for over four years. This was a really popular session at the Oklahoma MoodleMoot.
Five Game-Changing Activities Using Moodle: This session will highlight five activities using Moodle that get students working collaboratively and constructively on the content in your course. Basically a rundown of what I wrote about earlier this year.
Computer Access Issues in K-12 Schools: It’s tough assigning homework on the web without knowing what sort of access your students have at home. During this session, we’ll discuss possible creative solutions to help bridge this gap in accessibility.
Moodle 2.0 – What is next?: Basic overview of everything coming with Moodle 2.0. I’ll be co-moderating this discussion with Paul Ortman from Goshen College, and he has installed a demo of Moodle 2.0 to show what we’re talking about.
How to Create and Modify Moodle Themes: During this two-hour hands-on workshop, participants will create their own custom Moodle theme. The goal is to install the Stripdown theme and start making changes as soon as possible so that everyone feels confident enough to make their own theme when they leave.
Well, writing this makes me realize how busy I’ll actually be; I had better get back to work! If you’re going to the Moot, I look forward to meeting you. If you can’t make it, I’ll be twittering occasionally with the hashtag #mootin09. Be warned, though, that I’m more likely to tweet about lunch than I am to tweet about sessions.
July 14, 2009
The New York Times:
At William H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn, for instance, a nearly illiterate student racked up many of his credits through after-school remediation programs. He was promoted to 12th grade still unable to write full sentences or read a line of text, his teachers said.
No child left behind.
Amazing set of photos from this year’s Running of the Bulls. This is the tenth Fiesta de San Fermin since I attended (and ran) in 1999. Love it or hate it, it’s an awesome spectacle to behold.
Last month, I did a two-hour theme workshop at the Oklahoma MoodleMoot. While in the Cincinnati airport waiting for the final leg of my journey, I created a new theme – an antitheme really – for workshop attendees to use as a starting point for their projects. I decided then that this would be a good thing to share with the community.
Stripdown is nothing more than a stripped-down theme that loads the Moodle Standard stylesheets first. It actually contains no style of its own. That’s for you to work out. Before adding these styles, it looks just like the Standard theme. That’s because your browser is calling Standard before it calls Stripdown, and since Stripdown is essentially empty, all that’s left to display is Standard.
The reason one builds a theme on top of Standard is because Standard gets updated with every new Moodle version. When you update your Moodle installation, you update Standard. If your theme is built on Standard, your theme has less chance of breaking from version to version.
All you have to do to make Stripdown “non-Standard” is add your CSS to the styles.css file inside the theme folder.
Some may like to know just what I’ve done, so here’s a rundown on how Stripdown was created.
$THEME->sheets = array('styles');July 7, 2009
Great piece from Malcolm Gladwell on the problem of selecting teachers without knowing whether they’ll actually be any good at the job until they’re actually doing it for you.
A group of researchers … have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
I'm an educator, web designer, husband, and father. I believe in lifelong learning, and like stuff that's cool. Read more.
