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.

Google Apps slideshow

Here's the link for my Google Apps presentation:

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AbaUeSUXFiIrZHNjdGhiY18xMmZmMmhocw&hl=en

recommended podcasts

A few podcasts that teachers may be interested in listening to:

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

This is just a preliminary list to get you started, there are certainly others. Feel free to comment if there are others that you listen to.

new features in Google Docs

Just a quick post to mention two new(ish) features of Google Docs.

The word count now includes some readability information.

It is now possible to insert an equation using an equation editor (LaTeX syntax, just like Wikipedia).

Facebook fan pages

If you are, like some schools, using social networking with your students, Facebook fan pages may be a better way to go than "friending" your students. Having students as fans rather than friends means you have more control over the interactions and you can't see their status updates, or in fact any of their private information.

Of course a Ning or even a Moodle would probably be a better idea for online social network-style interactions with students, but that would mean another login for them and for you. These are also less likely to be blocked by your school district's network policies. This is still relatively uncharted territory, though, so it is recommended that you proceed with caution.

Wolfram Alpha

As someone interested in both Science and Technology, I need to mention Wolfram|Alpha. It looks sort of like a search engine, but it's more like a calculator. Their stated goal is "to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone." Basically they want to collect data and algorithms in order to have a system that answers questions.

It's obviously a work in progress, but what they have accomplished already is pretty cool. They have some example queries that you can try in order to get a feel for how it works. I think that Educators in particular should be very excited about the possibilities.

audiobooks and podcasts

Our school library is starting an audiobook collection, as the start of a digital collection, and we were thinking to start with some creative commons and public domain titles.

I've mentioned before about some sources we use for free content, but I wanted to be a little more specific about some of the resources we're looking at for starting the digital collection.

Librivox - volunteer-read public domain works
Spoken Alexandria Project - creating audio books of creative commons works
Podiobooks - free serialized audio books
Lit2Go - a free online collection of audio stories and poems
Project Gutenberg - human read public domain audio books
X Minus One - a series of science fiction radio plays, not technically audio books
Cory Doctorow - an author who creative commons licenses his works, a number of them have been recorded as audio books by him or by fans

creative commons and free

For a media class that I teach occasionally we are often looking for media that students can use to create videos and such. To model digital citizenship, we endeavour to use media that is at least free (gratis), but preferably public domain or creative commons. There are, of course, some creative commons licences that allow sharing but don't allow derivatives, which means that they are not useful for us.

There are a few caveats about using creative commons or public domain works, though. Since students don't tend to be as familiar with the works/artists it often takes them longer to complete their projects than if you just let them bring in their own (usually quasi-legal) media. As well, the onus is usually on you to point the students in the right direction.

To help with this, a few sources of media that I've come across are:

Video:
Archive.org (also has other types of files)
CreativeCommons.org/video

Audio:
Jamendo
SoundSnap

Photo:
Morguefile
Stock Exchange
100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
and, of course, Flickr

Vector Graphics:
Free Vector Graphics
Vecteezy
Quality Vector Graphics

a new presentation tool

I was recently introduced to an online presentation tool called Prezi. Since I spend a fair amount of time lecturing with PowerPoint (and Keynote occasionally), I'm always interested in cool ways of presenting things. Even though it's a beta product, I've starting using it for some of my lectures.

Writing about it doesn't do it justice, though, check it out at http://prezi.com/prezi/27/try/.

filtered Internet access with OpenDNS

Whatever your views on censorship of the Internet, I think it can be argued that preventing phishing at least is a good reason for some filters. Our school district uses FortiGuard which is administered at the Central Office, but for the network in my classroom as well as at home, I use OpenDNS.

OpenDNS can be set up on each computer, or in the router that they all use to connect to the Internet. You can choose categories of sites to block, or even blacklist or whitelist individual sites. It's quick and easy to set up and make changes, and it's free.

email reminders with Google calendar

Whether you have recurring events, or just events that you don't want to miss, it's possible to set up reminders for yourself using your Google calendar. These reminders can email, pop-ups on your computer (if you have your calendar open), or even text messages (SMS) to your mobile phone.

If you have your calendar open, perhaps from calendar.google.com, click Settings at the top right, then the Calendars tab near the top middle. You'll see a link for Notifications for each of your calendars. This allows you to change the default notifications, I'd recommend setting it to Email 3 hours before each event, but you can also change the notification types for individual events.

You'll also see options for setting up your mobile phone, calendar sharing/publishing, and many other things. Have fun.

buying cables online

I've mentioned monoprice.com before as an online supplier of cheap cables (for classroom projector/computer as well as home theater), but since they are based in the US there is the exchange rate and longer shipping times to deal with.

I've recently had two similar Canadian online suppliers recommended to me. While I haven't yet bought cables from either of them, apparently they are both very good: InfiniteCables.com and CableSalesCanada.com, both of which are based in Toronto.

Let me know in the comments if you've bought from either one and your experiences with it.

moodle introduction

Our district is just starting to introduce Moodle. In looking at some of its features, I came across a presentation that explains what Moodle is using Lego.

making a password protected website with Google sites

If you find that you need to have information available on the Internet to a limited number of people, perhaps your students, you can create a website using Google Sites. Google Sites can be used with a regular Google (Gmail) account, or with a Google Apps account (as I've discussed before.

When creating your site, you can specify if you want it viewable by the whole world, anyone from your domain, or specific users. You can also invite users to be collaborators, meaning that they can edit the pages on the site.

One thing to be careful of, however, is that it seems the option "Anyone at may viewedit this site." is not the default option. If you don't want your students to edit your site, you'll want to change that.

digital marking

There are a few different ways I have students hand in digital assignments. For larger projects (video and audio files mostly) the students can just save them in their profile folders or on our school media server. However if you don't have this set up, or if you want to be able to do marking at home, there are a few other ways.

USB flash drives: either student or school provided, students can save their work to individual flash drives, or have multiple students save their files on a single flash drive.

Email: I usually have students email their completed assignments to me, since we have gmail accounts set up for students and teachers with about 7 GB of storage space each. I can then mark the assignments on any computer with Internet access.

TurnItIn.com: our district subscribes to this website which provides originality checking and online marking, as well as opportunities for peer review.

Learning Management Systems: online systems can be set up for assignment submission as well as peer interaction et ceteras using something like Moodle or Ning.

I'm sure there are other ways that teachers are marking digital assignments, but these are just a few I've experimented with. Feel free to comment on some of the systems you've used or seen in use.

creating your own blog

Chances are, if you're reading this you know what a blog is. If you're not blogging already yourself, I wanted to recommend Google's free blogger.com. Creating a new blog is very easy, especially if you already have a gmail address, and it's very easy to create new posts on your blog.

As well, you may have noticed that there is a "listen now" button for each of my blog posts here, that's a free service from odiogo.com. That's also relatively easy to set up, and then you can say that you are also a podcaster, since your blog posts are automatically converted into audio files that can be subscribed to.

electronics kits

If you have students starting to solder and want to teach them a little about circuit design, I'd like to recommend the kits at http://ladyada.net/make/ . They are relatively simple to construct, if you students can solder a cable end, they should be able to follow the (excellent) instructions on the site and make a usable device. I recommend the MintyBoost kit, athough the TV-B-Gone is not much more difficult and seems to be somewhat more popular with the kids.

replacement lamps for data projectors

Projector bulbs, or lamps as they're called by those in the know, are ridiculously expensive.  That being said, I wanted to share where I've just started buying replacement lamps from: projectorlampexperts.ca.  For many projectors they have not only the OEM lamp, but also a cheaper "alternative lamp".  I tried one of those, and it seems to be working just fine.  It's easy to find the lamp you're looking for, shipping is free and quick, and they are the cheapest source for projector lamps that I've found.

I sometimes think I should get paid for these endorsements, but perhaps that would cloud my journalistic integrity.  I only write about things that I use and would recommend to my friends.

converting midi files to mp3s

A somewhat more obscure topic, but hopefully of interest to some. You may have some (musical instrument digital interface) midi files recorded on a synthesizer or downloaded from the Internet; these are music files that the computer (or synthesizer) plays and are essentially like sheet music. In order to play these on a CD player or mp3 player, they need to be converted to sound files (mp3, wav, or others).

There is software for doing this, but an online one that I've used is on hamienet.com. Unfortunately the site launches some "pop-up" advertising, but you can just close those windows. The process for creating an mp3 from a midi file should be fairly evident from the instructions on the page. It basically involves uploading the midi file by clicking the Browse button, then setting the options (or leaving the options as they are), and clicking Convert File. After it converts the file, it gives you the option to download it as an mp3, which can then be put on your music player or burned to an audio CD.

online storage

Last week's post was about cloud computing, so on a related note let's explore free online storage options.

There are a number of companies that allow you to store files online for free ("file hosting services") for personal use, public sharing, or a combination of the two. These are sometime ad-supported and sometimes supported by a premium tier. Or else the company is just offering the service for good will and to build their brand.

Some that I've used and liked are:
Box.net - 1 GB, ad-supported, many features
SkyDrive - 5 GB, pretty easy to use, by Microsoft
DropBox - easiest to use once set up, automatic syncronization
YouSendIt - mostly for emailing large files (upload the file then email a link to the recipient)
Mozy - 2 GB, designed for data backup

There are, of course, others available.

I should also point out that your data are not necessarily secure as soon as you upload it somewhere else, such as to one of these sites. As well, there may not be any guarantees of availablility of your files, particularly with free services. That being said, I find these very useful.

Edit: SmashingDownloads has a more comprehensive list of free online storage options.