Hintonblogger

I know it has been a long time since I've posted, and, like everyone else, I have just been super busy. My family and I moved so that my commute time would be less and we have enjoyed it tremendously. The house is nice and we are loving it.

I should also mention that I've been searching for a CMS solution that I really liked. I thought I liked Mamob/Joomla, but the split concerned me and brought to light several limitations of Mambo that i had known of but simply overlooked. I still like Mambo and it is a terrific system. Based on preliminary testing, however, (very preliminary I might add) I think I'm going to go with Drupal. I love the flexibility it is being built to have and (aside from the wrapper feature from within Mambo) I like what I see.

I've also had the opportunity to work much more extensively with Moodle as an online learning environment. What a terrific open-source educational product. It is built (and licensed) the way educational products should be. I have begun some testing with 4th graders at one of my schools, and going to begin doing so with some Mesquite Junior High classes. We are just beginning to explore all that Moodle can do. It is most certainly still a maturing product and development on a number of key modules is still moving a little fast and free for my liking (i.e. requiring dependencies on another module with that module also changing rapidly) but for a 1.5.x release it is terrific. I already have teachers who are excited about the interactivity with students at home that it might allow. While there is certainly privacy and protection issues with that type of work and access, I think it is a terrific step at helping students realize that learning extends far beyond the classroom walls.