Top 5 Reasons to Use Moodle

There are many reasons why you would want to use Moodle to build a fully online course or a blended learning course.  Let’s be fair.  Edmodo is king of easy social networking.  It is limited to that though and not really designed for sharing content and having blended learning activities.  Schoolology is really nice too. … Read more

iBlog is now Updated to Wordpres 3.9

We just finished updating to WordPress 3.9.  All teacher and school websites can now enjoy the new features WordPress has to offer.  The most noticeable feature being drag and drop of photos into posts.  This is a great addition to text editor.  A full announcement is coming for our teachers. Happy Blogging! Example of Drag … Read more

Ubuntu Desktop For Me

Yesterday I made the decision to drop Windows and move to Ubuntu Desktop!  I completely wiped my harddrive and installed Ubuntu and I couldn’t be happier.  I use Ubuntu for a lot of server stuff and I admire the ease of use and great tools for web developers/computer geeks.  I also did my home laptop … Read more

Digital Book Reviews using Moodle

Have you ever wanted to do a school-wide or classroom book review?  Moodle is a powerful tool that allows a teacher to do many types of projects with students.  A good example of how you can use Moodle for a project is doing Book Reviews.  With Moodle you can have a central location for book … Read more

WordPress App Builder and Digital Storytelling Plugins

App Presser We use WordPress for our school websites.  I just discovered this new plugin that allows you to transform your wordpress site into a Mobile App which can be published for Apple or Android devices. The plugin is called App Presser.    Seems worth exploring as the pricing is very reasonable compared to others … Read more

What does an Open Source K-12 Web Portal look like?

In Dearborn Public Schools we utilize many open source products.  For a variety of reasons we found it advantageous to pursue usage of  open source tools.   I took a step back today to look at what exactly what we have going on – and there is a lot going on.  Here are some of the projects, programs, and tools that make up our K-12 District Web Platform.  We focus on providing lots of publishing options. 

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Reading an eBook created using Pressbooks plugin

Over the weekend a teacher began creating a book via our Moodle-Pressbooks integration (post one and post two on Moodle-Pressbook integration).  I downloaded the initial work he had done and wanted to see what it looks like on my phone.  Below are a few screenshots.  Currently there are no images or links in the text … Read more

Moodle 2.6 is coming – Here are a few highlights

So here are some of my favorite improvements in the upcoming Moodle 2.6 release. MDL-37717 – Teachers are warned before suspending own enrolment in course – VERY MUCH NEEDED.  We always have teachers fool around with enrollment settings and lock themselves out.  A warning is nice. MDL-39985 – Full MariaDB support – With Oracle at the helms … Read more

Pressbooks and Moodle Integration

Creating an ebook has never been easier Using the plugin from Pressbooks.com you can transform a WordPress Multisite into an ebook publishing powerhouse.  At Dearborn Public Schools we have fully integrated the eBook tool with Moodle by using LTI to create a single sign on setup.  This allows for a teacher to simply add an … Read more