Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category
More cold water…
As the school year is coming to an end, it is time to evaluate what time and energy I have spent on my Moodle install.
All in all, I think that testing Moodle in one of my classes was a positive experience for both me and my students. They’ve acquired technological knowledge, had fun while learning English and did more of their homework than before. 
All valid reasons to broaden the experiment to further classes next year!
I’m ready to jump into the cold water…
..that is: I’m ready to test Moodle in up to three of my classes. I’ve taken down my personal website and installed Moodle 1.9.x (weekly whatever) on it.
So far I’ve already started a course for the book I’m reading in an English class. Two history courses (on industrialisation and the First World War) will be added shortly. Tomorrow evening, the first bunch of students is going to get their feet wet with creating accounts in Moodle and giving the system a go.
I plan on using one lesson to get them ready with the system and another two hours of first real work in it. This should give them enough time to try out forum and chat as well as the glossary and whatever nice tasks I can think of.
BTW: as a starting point, this book is a nice introduction to Moodle.
Educational Linux distributions
If you are looking for an educational Linux distribution, you have at least three choices:
- openSUSE Education is a live and install DVD based on openSUSE 11.2.
- Edubuntu is the education version of the quite popular Ubuntu.
- LernTux and KinderTux are Mandriva derivates created by Dieter Schütze.
- UPDATE: Skolelinux based on Debian. (How could I forget this classic?)
KinderTux is especially interesting, because it isn’t aimed at pupils or teachers but at younger children to help them enjoying computers. The only alternative to KinderTux I could find was Quimo, which uses Ubuntu as base system.
Bitten by Metacity: Bug 555027 – autologin failure …
I got bitten by this ugly bug (Bug 555027 – autologin failure …) and could no longer login to my lovely Gnome. With the help of the fine lads at #opensuse-gnome on Freenode and in the forum, I was able to find a patch here.
Now everything seems working again.
Inkscape classes
If you (like me) have no idea of what to do with Inkscape, hop over to Inkscape Class Day 1 « Máirín Duffy for an eight session course by Máirín Duffy.
Originally held for 7th grades in the Boston area, all of us can enjoy the course via blog and PDF.
Impressive!
Moodle for 2nd language and history teaching
This book (Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching) seems to be exactly what I was looking for. Strangely, there are no reviews on Amazon for it yet. The contents are impressive, as is the price tag: a hefty €35-40.
The book is promoted in the Moodle Language teaching community and probably worth the money, so I’ll get it eventually and read it.
Now, is there a similar book for history teaching?
For starters I’ll read the teachers’ manual here (German).
If Gnome hangs while you log in …
… this might help you: GnomeLoginHang < Computing < LEPP TWiki.
It sure helped me this morning.
