setting up Moodle Language Lab

Moodle Language Lab is an activity module developed (and being developed) by Campus Saint-Jean and Oohoo.biz that:

replaces the traditional cassette tape language lab. There is a module for students to record themselves and teachers to review and grade the work. This version also includes a class monitor. So, if a teacher uses it inside the classroom, he/she can monitor student progress the same way they used the traditional language lab by listening to live streams of the students, responding live to students, giving a thumbs up and so on.
It also offers an integration with the Moodle WYSIWYG, allowing recordings to be done virtually in any activity or resource wihtin Moodle. This feature has been used in our classes throughout the past year. For example, we had an oral forum instead of a written forum. Professors would leave spoken messages in the grade book.

It requires three programs running on a server (on the same server or separate ones):

1. Moodle 2.0.x
2. Red5 Media Server (version .8)
3. Palabre XML Socket Server edit: Palabre is no longer needed

Here's how you can set up the three parts of Moodle Language Lab on a Windows server. The process will be similar for other operating systems.

Red5

1. Download version .8 from code.google.com/p/red5/ (I recommend the ZIP file, and 1.0 RC1 worked for me)
2. Unzip the files into some folder (not publicly accessible)
3. Install Java, if it's not already installed, and make sure your JAVA_HOME variable is defined
4. Run Red5.bat
5. Go to http://localhost:5080/ to test that Red5 is running, and click "Install a ready-made application"
6. Install the oflaDemo
7. Make a note of the server's Internet-accessible IP address (or FQDM)

Palabre

1. Download the source files (Windows installer didn't work for me), untar into some folder (again not a publicly accessible folder)
2. Install Python (2.7 or so)
3. Edit the Palabre\etc\palabre.conf file, these are the two lines that I changed
• ip = 
• alloweddomains = 127.0.0.1 moodle.______.ca #put your own value(s) on this line
4. Run Palabre.py
5. Test by running one of the Palabre clients
6. Make a note of the server's Internet-accessible IP address (or FQDM)

Moodle (this is just pasted from the Developer's readme file)

1. copy all folders (filter, mod, lib ) into the appropriate moodle(root) folder.
2. Login to Moodle with admin rights.
3. In the Site Administration block, click on Notifications. This will setup the database tables for the languagelab module
4. In the settings block, select Site administration -> Plugins -> Activities Modules -> Manage activities -> Language lab -> settings
5. Enter the IP address or the FQDN that you noted previously in the appropriate fields and save changes.
6. You're done. Go into a course, turn editing on and add a language lab activity.

CAD CAM CNC routing workflow

After experimenting with many different programs for CAD (3D design) and CAM (turning that design into code for a CNC router), I've come up with a good workflow using easy and free tools:

• Google Sketchup
• guitar-list.com Sketchup plugin for converting a model to an STL file
• FreeMill
• Mach3 (which was included with the CNC routing table)

The process that works for me is

1. design a 3D model in Sketchup
2. export the model to an STL file using the guitar-list.com plugin
3. load that STL file into FreeMill
4. generate the toolpath and post it to a G-code text file
5. import the G-code into Mach3 and run it on the CNC machine

Hopefully this will be simple enough for students to start designing and cutting things.

transferring videos to my 5th generation iPod (with video) on Ubuntu

This is more for my own notes, so that I remember if I have to do this again.

1. HandBrake to transcode the videos to a format appropriate for playback on the iPod
2. install gtkpod
• sudo apt-get install gtkpod
3. install support for m4v files in gtkpod
• sudo apt-get install libmp4v2-0
4. transfer the files by drag and drop onto the iPod in gtkpod

Moving photos from a camera card with AutoHotkey

Just wanted to share a somewhat rough script I wrote using AutoHotkey (since my Python skills are weak and Windows-only is fine) for moving files from a camera SD card to folders organized by month.

I also set up an AutoRun.inf to run the compiled script when the card is inserted, similar to these instructions.

; AutoHotkey Version: 1.x
; Language:       English
;
; Script Function:
; Moving files from camera card (E:\DCIM\{etc}) to photos folder (H:\Photos\{date}) and then deleting them
; You may want to change H:\Photos\ throughout the code to something that actually exists on your computer.

#NoEnv  ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.

; Since the script is running from the camera card, we can use the variable A_ScriptDir to tell which drive letter the card got mounted as
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%\DCIM\

IfNotExist %DriveLetter%:\DCIM\
{
 MsgBox, 1, PhotoMover, Something is wrong, perhaps the camera card is not in the card reader.
 IfMsgBox, Cancel
  Return
}

; show a (sort of fake) progress bar and set the initial variables to zero
Progress, b,, Moving Photos, Moving Photos
Progress, 0
PhotoProgress = 0
VideoProgress = 0

; move the JPG files
; the 0 means don't include folder names, the 1 means recurse into subdirectories
Loop, *.JPG, 0, 1
{
; trim the date variable to the format YYYY-MM
StringLeft, FileDateYear, A_LoopFileTimeCreated, 4
FileDateMonth := SubStr(A_LoopFileTimeCreated, 5, 2)
FileDateYearDashMonth = %FileDateYear%-%FileDateMonth%

; make a month folder, if it doesn't already exist
IfNotExist H:\Photos\%FileDateYearDashMonth%\
 FileCreateDir H:\Photos\%FileDateYearDashMonth%\

; move the file to the appropriate folder in H:\Photos
FileMove, %A_LoopFileFullPath%, H:\Photos\%FileDateYearDashMonth%\

; Show (and increment) a progress bar
PhotoProgress+=1 ; increment the PhotoProgress variable
Progress, %PhotoProgress%
}

Progress, Off
if ErrorLevel
MsgBox, Well that didn't work... %ErrorCount% photos were not moved.

; and now move the MOV files
; first the progress bar
Progress, b,, Moving Videos, Moving Videos
Progress, 0

; the 0 means don't include folder names, the 1 means recurse into subdirectories
; we should probably do this for *.AVI files too
Loop, *.MOV, 0, 1
{
; trim the date variable to the format YYYY-MM
StringLeft, FileDateYear, A_LoopFileTimeCreated, 4
FileDateMonth := SubStr(A_LoopFileTimeCreated, 5, 2)
FileDateYearDashMonth = %FileDateYear%-%FileDateMonth%

; move the file to the appropriate folder in H:\Photos
FileMove, %A_LoopFileFullPath%, H:\Photos\%FileDateYearDashMonth%\

; Show (and increment) an approximate progress bar
VideoProgress+=1 ; increment the VideoProgress variable
Progress, %VideoProgress%
}

Progress, Off
if ErrorLevel
MsgBox, Well that didn't work... %ErrorCount% movies were not moved.

podcast presentation

So you want your students to podcast

What’s a podcast?

Episodic downloadable audio (or video) content.

Does not require an iPod.

Usually has an associated RSS feed.

Recommended Podcasts

Technology: This Week in Tech

Science: Quirks and Quarks, Science Update

Social Studies: Stuff You Missed in History Class

Math: Math Grad

English Language Arts: CSTW Writers Talk

Arts: CBC Arts Podcasts

Medicine: White Coat, Black Art

How to create

Hardware (microphones, pop filters, etc)

How to create

Software

GarageBand

Audacity Portable

Myna

How to publish/share

hosting and syndication

technochild.net

mypodcast.com

ourmedia.org

feedburner.google.com

Music/Sound Effects

jamendo.com

audiofarm.org

musicalley.com

wikipedia.org/wiki/Podsafe

Legal Issues

Copyright or Creative Commons

Now let’s podcast…

picasa recognizes people

I'm a big fan of Picasa photo organizing software. They just recently introduced face recognition/tagging, which is very cool. It even seems to do fairly well at distinguishing the photos of our toddlers from their cousins, even though they look fairly similar.

We have a lot of photos (over 80 GB and counting), so it takes a while for it to scan through all of those to recognize faces, but it's doing fairly well so far.

new to Microsoft Office 2007?

Our school district has recently upgraded all computers to Microsoft Office 2007. For users unfamiliar with the "ribbon interface", Microsoft has a great resource:

Guides to the Ribbon: Use Office 2003 menus to learn the Office 2007 user interface

free office suites

An office suite is a set of programs for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and usually some other things.

You're familiar with Microsoft Office, the office suite that all others are compared against and basically sets the standard.

You may have heard of OpenOffice, a great free (and open source) office suite.

You may not have heard of Lotus Symphony, a good looking free office suite from IBM.

I've also talked about Google Apps here, so I'll just mention it again.

photo mosaics

If you're looking for a different way to present photos, especially on posters, AndreaMosaic is a free photographic mosaic creation program. It's great for sports teams, international field trips, or even for the school yearbook.

Basically you give it the image that you want to create, then a lot of other images to use as tiles. There are a few settings to tweak if you'd like, and the images it creates are very cool.


On the Mac, there's a similar program called MacOSaiX.

free tax software

I've been meaning to mention this, even though it isn't related to education technology unless you are a business education teacher. StudioTax is a free NETFILE certified tax preparation program. I haven't used it yet, but I've been NETFILEing for a number of years with paid programs, but this year I intend to use StudioTax.

some software recommendations

Some free (and/or open source) software that I recommend:

Paint.NET image and photo editing
GIMP image and photo editing
IrfanView image viewer
Picasa photo organization and editing
CutePDF pdf writer
Foxit pdf reader
ZoomIt for drawing on the screen

Firefox web browser
Thunderbird email client
Pidgin for IM (MSN, AIM, etc)
Skype internet phone

VLC video/music player
iTunes for music libraries and podcasts
YamiPod an iTunes alternatve for iPod management.
Miro for video podcasts and RSS, etc.
MovieMaker 2 video editing
PhotoStory for making slideshows easily
Audacity audio recording/editing

CD BurnerXP for burning CDs and DVDs
InfraRecorder for burning CDs and DVDs
Avast antivirus
Spybot S&D AntiSpyware
Ad-Aware AntiSpyware
uTorrent for downloading torrents
TightVNC remote admin
XP PowerToys
7-zip file archiving/unarchiving

antivirus

I'm often asked about antivirus for home PCs, and I always recommend Avast Home Edition.  It is a free program with free updates, but it requires (free) registration.

It works as well or better than other paid products, which is why I recommend it.

I also only recommend free software.