Randy Orwin's blog

K12 Open Minds Conference

I am passing this information along from the folks at the K12 Open Minds conferrence.  I must admit up front that I am on the planning committee for this event.  I would encourage anybody that is interested in open source to attend.  It is a great conference.

 

Fantastico Install Moodle, Do Not

I spent some time today looking at a Moodle install on a dedicated server being hosted at a large hosting company. The organization had multiple installs of Moodle and were experiencing problems getting any course backups to run. They thought they were having some issues with their database configuration so they had the hosting company bump up the max_allowed_packet size from 1MB to 32 MB. Still no go on the course backups. There were also some errors related to some session stuff so we tried settting the save sessions to the database setting as well.

OpenOffice and MYSQL Part II

Just a quick followup to my earlier post entitled "Moodle, Open Office and Professional Development."  As of this afternoon I now have a direct connection to the MYSQL database from OpenOffice.  I installed the JDBC driver into OpenOffice and created a new database with Base using the JDBC driver to connect to the Moodle MYSQL database.  In Base I took the queries that I had already created and copied and pasted them into the SQL Query builder and then saved them.  Then I went to OO.o Writer and opened it up and clicked on the "View data sources" option and "BANG!&

Moodle, Open Office and Professional Development

Well today marks the end of the registration deadline for our summer institute.  Summer institute is a two week period in August where we teach a bunch of tech classes, along with a bunch of curriculum related courses.  We currently have a Moodle site setup for teachers and other staff to find out all they need to know about the classes being offered.  They can also use a choice activity to register for each course.  I am sure there are better ways to do this but this works just fine.

Tweets from Drupal Blog

Okay, I am spending way too much time working on this Drupal blog thing.  Now I am seeing if Drupal will actually send a tweet to my Twitter account.  Do I really want to do this?  Could be a bit annoying for those that follow me, but probably not too much since my blogging record has been so poor.  So don't hold your breath for too long waiting for me to post.  You might turn blue and pass out.

Drupal as a Blog Tool

Well I am now back up and running.  My host has been down for the last hour so I have been researching more things about Open Source in the k12 space.  But, that is not what this post is about.  This post is all about what I have done to get blogs setup and running on this installation of Drupal.  It has been interesting to take a look at all of the other modules that are available to make your blog more, I hate to say it, blog like.  So here are the modules I currently have installed specifically to augment my Drupal blog.

Installed Modules:

Back Again!

Okay, here it is, just about one year since I last posted on my consulting blog.  I once again will give the blog thing another shot.  It isn't that I haven't been doing things that I could blog about, it's all about not wanting to stop what I am doing and write about it because that would take up precious time.  LOL.  Well, if I am going to get the word out about Open Source and its use in schools and other non-profits, I guess I need to get my head out of the projects on occasion and get some stuff written down.  So, I am really going to make a concerted effort to blog at least once a w

Open Office Roll Out

Well we are well on our way to rolling out Open Office in the Bainbridge Island School District. Two weeks ago we started our notebook boot camps. These sessions are trainings for teachers that are getting new laptops. If a teacher wants to get a laptop they must attend the training. To date we have taught over 150 teachers on their new laptops. Part of the training is an introduction to Open Office, which is important since all laptops only come configured with Open Office.

Here we go!

OK, I have talked about it for a long time, and many of you have urged me to start blogging. Well I have started on a number of occasions and just haven't kept up. So here we go again, and maybe this time I will keep it up. After the NECC conference I am pretty stoked about the potential of Open Source in schools. Yes, I know that I am already an Open Source junkie, but it was great to see so many people interested in it at NECC that it has really raised my spirits and made me feel like I am not alone anymore in my reliance on Open Source technologies.