Moodle

Let’s talk about Moodle.

From the Moodle website:

Moodle allows educators to create online courses, which students can access as a virtual classroom. A typically Moodle home page will include a list of participants (including the teacher and students) and a calendar with a course schedule and list of assignments. Other Moodle features include online quizzes, forums, where students can post comments and ask questions, glossaries of terms, and links to other Web resources.

Moodle is a great way to extend the classroom and to really get kids involved with their classes online. The great part is that teachers can post all assignments, quizzes and tests and make them available online for both students and parents to view.

This is Saline’s second year of using Moodle and we are really excited to empower teachers to use this great online tool.

Interesting article: Building Educational Websites with Moodle

Until next time,
Ken

SAS Website

You may have seen my message about the new website moving to Joomla! but I didn’t mention all the great extensions that are available for Joomla. You can load in everything from calendars to directories to authentication plugins to blogs. The list is endless. There’s also some great tutorials available on the site along with reference links to hosting providers that host Joomla!.

Interesting Link: Here’s my super secret Apple info site where I find out all the new Apple stuff coming out.

Until next time,
Ken

Good Article

Real quick, I wanted to share this article from Yahoo, I think it’s a good indicator of where we’re going:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080707/tc_nm/usa_education_technology_dc

Until next time,
Ken

SAS ITD is going green

That’s right the Tech department of Saline Area Schools is going green. We have started a green initiative to reduce, reuse and recycle.

In the last 3 weeks we have managed to turn off 13 servers in our server farm. What we have done is convert these servers to VMWare Enterprise Servers or Virtual servers. These 13 servers are still available, they are now simply living in software. By turning these servers off we have significantly reduced our power consumption. Here’s a calculator to show you how big a difference 13 servers makes:
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/green/calculator.html

In the next 3 weeks we plan on turning off another 6 servers bringing our total to 19 physical servers, using energy 24/7 365 days a year, that we have turned off. Talk about taking a bite out of global warming, that’s like planting 380 trees and giving the district a savings of $12,500.

In the fall we are hoping to move our efforts out to each building and reduce power consumption and paper use significantly. I am hoping to get staff volunteers and possibly members of the community together to assist us in reducing our carbon footprint.

Here’s a great article about Going Green in Education: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/20/BAgreenschools.DTL

Until next time,
Ken