Randy Orwin's blog

Professional Development for All!

Last week I taught an Open Office class to paraeducators from our district. The skill levels were incredibly diverse which made the class a bit difficult to teach. As I was teaching the class it made me think about how often times we leave out the classified staff in our thought process regarding professional development. These people are an integral part of the instructional process and truly impact teaching and learning. I personally need to make sure that I think about the classified employees more when I develop a training schedule.

Social Bookmarking for Elementary Schools

This past summer we replaced a lab at one of our elementary schools.  The lab was an old macintosh lab and was replaced with a Windows lab.  The folks in the building had been manually placing bookmarks on the Macs for the kids to use using remote desktop.  When the crew installed the new Windows machines they were frozen using DeepFreeze.  This is the practice in most of our labs to reduce down time due to messed up computers. 

Open Office: Making the Transition

This post contains links to the files that I used in my "Open Office: Making the Transition" presentation at the 2008 K12 Open Minds Conference.  This presentation was given on Saturday, September 27th from 11:00 AM until 12:00 PM.  If you have any questions about what I said or want some clarification please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post.

Presentation as a PDF

I've got Moodle! Now what? Part 2

OK, slap me around a bit for not following through yesterday.  Things got a bit hectic and too many folks wanted to chat, so here is the follow up to my presentation yesterday.  I showed a variety of different uses of Moodle and the questions were what modules did I use to accomplish those things.  Given those things, here is a list of the modules that are used to allow teachers to do things like podcasts and record audio directly into Moodle.

I've got Moodle! Now what?

This morning at 10:00  I did this presentation at the K12 Open Minds conference in Indianapolis.  I promised those that were in attendaance that I would add my materials as a blog post so this is what I promised.  I felt it was a good session and they even brought in a bunch of extra chairs so people didn't have to sit on the floor. I talked about a windows based multimedia conversion tool called Super. 

K12 Open Minds Road Map Session

I am sitting in the K12 Open Minds National Road Map Session participating in a discussion with 18 folks from all over the country.  The goals of this session are to brainstorm ways to increase the adoption of Open Source in K12 environments.  So far this has been a great session with discussions around successful implementations and what was done to get them to be successful and things that need to be done to make other implementations successful as well.  We are currently talking about what deliverables do we want to come out of this session.

Open Source H.323 Video Conferencing

2 years ago I wrote a grant to state office of education to get a video conference unit for our school district.  We were awarded a grant that included a Polycom VSX7000, a projector and a cart to keep everything on.  The popularity of this unit has grown in leaps and bounds over the last year and we are now experiencing problems where the system is now double booked.  Most of the calls with this system are done through the Washington State K20 video network that is predominantly based on the H.323 protocol.

Embedding PDF Files in 1.92... Not!

Last week a teacher called me and said she was having a bunch of problems with PDF files on her Moodle site.  She said that when she clicked on a link the embedded window showed up but it was nothing but garbage in the window.  If she went to the files area of her site and clicked on the same file it opened just fine in a popup window.  I thought this was very strange as did the teacher.

Making Moodle Less Moodle Like

Okay, it has been more than a week since my last post so I need to get caught up here.  Things have been a bit hectic so hence the extended absence.  At least it wasn't months like the last time. 

Moodle Nanogong Module

About two months ago I started playing with the Nanogong Module for Moodle.  Nanogong is a part of the Gong Project and is a Java based audio recorder that integrates with Moodle. It worked OK in 1.8 but when I upgraded to 1.9 everything went south.  Over the last few weeks the developers, the "Hong Kong University of Science and Technology", have done a lot of work on the module and just recently made the module Open Source.  I upgraded to version 3.1 last night and things seem to be working quite well now.