Easy, Nearly Instant Website

Posted on 6:03 PM, under ,

This evening I wanted to tell you all about a super easy way to start your own website. If you have access to a decent computer that you want to dedicate to running a website then TurnKey Linux is for you. To quote their site,

TurnKey Linux is a new open source project that aims to develop high quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free.

In a nutshell, we believe everything that can be easy, should be easy!

Packaging a solution as a software appliance can be incredibly useful because it allows you to leverage guru integration skills to build ready to use systems (I.e., turn key solutions) that just work out of the box with little to no setup.

Drupal is an awesome web application that does most of the work of managing a website for you. In their words
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

Now for the really good part... TurnKey Linux offers a downloadable CD that has Drupal already setup for you. Literally, all you have to do is
  1. Download and burn the CD
  2. Put it in the computer you want to make a web server
  3. Boot it up
  4. Choose the install option
  5. Answer a couple of questions
  6. Power off the computer
  7. Remove the CD and power up your new server
Has this perked your intrest? If so, or if you just want to see an example of a site running on this setup, check out http://www.wgretc.org




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Here is one that is for college age students. If you are not on a slow connection, click the HQ link on the video once it starts.


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A Vision of K12 Students Today

Posted on 3:35 PM, under

Watching this video may make you think differently about technology and education at the K-12 level... I hope you enjoy it.


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My take on Moodle

Posted on 3:18 PM, under ,


As I mentioned in my last post, I believe that Moodle can be very beneficial to educators. Some of the key ways in which it can make a teacher’s life easier are by providing accountability on the part of the students, allowing for less paper to be used, allowing for instant grading, and allowing for self-paced work. The accountability part comes from the fact that Moodle logs all access to pages. This is helpful because the teacher can verify that a student was on the site when they claim to have been. Less paper is needed because reports and the like can be written directly on the site or in a word processing application then uploaded… no paper copy needed. Quizzes and tests can be given and graded as soon as Submit is pressed. Lastly, during an assignment, a topic can be talked about with a brief skills assessment given afterwards. If the assessment shows that further instruction is needed then it can take the student to that, if not then the student can move on to the next topic. There is much more that Moodle can do, this is just enough to wet your appetite for it… I hope.

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Technology & Education

Posted on 6:05 PM, under

As the title suggests, I am passionate about technology and education... particularly in the way that it relates to K-12 education. Too many schools are uninformed about all the options that are available to them today. No longer do you have to follow the party line and only use products that cost huge ammounts of money. There is an entire world out there called FOSS. FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software. In the realm of education, the first two tools that can benifite educators are Moodle and TeacherTube. I am not going to go into detail about these now as they will be topics of future posts... just sufice it to say that there are a multitude of ways in which these tools can support, facilitate, and enhance an educational environment.

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