Hintonblogger

Well I just got the exciting news that Moodle 1.9 has been released. The release notes for 1.9 look awesome and I'm excited to get the final release installed over at HintonWEB Learning Center to start playing with it. Here are the features that I'm most excited about having:

NOTE: If you are not familiar with RSS you really should be, check out these links to learn more about this great technology, (PDF warning)here and here.

One of the ways I think we can get the word out is by aggregating interesting, valuable articles (via RSS) on our main CoreWEB resource site and in some of the online professional development courses we are running with our teachers. By putting relevant information in places that people already frequent, we get greater likelihood of click-thru. This is especially true of teachers, who are notoriously a curious bunch. The effect of this can probably be accentuated as we restrict the display of articles to items relevant to what the user is currently viewing.

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.

You hate to jinx yourself, but I have to say that today worked out great and I'm really grateful. I hit all three sessions I wanted to get to and each one of them was awesome in their own right. The three I attended were:

1. Enhancing Teacher Quality with Online Professional Development
2. Delivering Educational Tasks with Online Portals - MyBPS
3. Use your Noodle - Learn Moodle!

My brother would have liked the MyBPS presentation as they shared how they streamlined their workflow by developing a portal in .NET. I will be filing a report on the session with eSchool News and there will be more on that session in my report. These people are truly doing some amazing things with streamlining the educational workflow and exchange of ideas. Their site is closed to user login only, but the presentation showed some of the site interior and examples of the types of content it contained. The one thing I found amazing was that with all the work they went through and go through to have an incredibly usable portal internally, they mentioned they have no plan or requirement for their schools to have an external presence. My only guess for the "why" of that is because parents have access to MyBPS and the information that an external school website typically contains is in MyBPS.

Here is my report I filed with eSchool News.  I haven't seen any of the two reports I've filed with them posted yet, but I'll keep you posted.  Here are my notes from the terrific morning workshop I attended.  It provided some great ideas and motivation for rolling out online professional development in our school district.  I even had the opportunity to begin setting up my own sample online professional development class in Blackboard. It is an excellent system.  I'm looking forward to the Moodle workshop that is starting right, so I better go...

Well it is about midnight here in Philadelphia on Monday, June 27th, 2005.  I'm excited for NECC to start today and am trying to put last minute plans together to start the day of successfully.

I'm looking forward to a number of sessions about Online Learning, including using Moodle as an open source alternative to Blackboard.  I hope to get a number of ideas on effectively blending traditional face-to-face learning with the online learning environment in Blackboard or Moodle.  There are many powerful advantages to blending face-to-face and virtual learning for both student learning and professional development for teachers, and yet it is an area that is fairly underdeveloped in K-12 education.