Tracy Poelzer's Friends

View All

Tracy Poelzer's Page

Latest Activity

Profile Information

About Me:

Teacher, Librarian, Mom, Wife, Tech Advocate, Musician

Job Title:

Teacher-Librarian

Grade Level:

K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Favorite Subject Area:

I teach 'em all!

What do you want to get out of Teachers 2.0?

Ideas for integrating technology into classrooms and strategies for moving my reluctant staff members into using it too!

Website:

http://library.parkcrest.sd73.bc.ca

Comment Wall (3 comments)

You need to be a member of Teachers 2.0 to add comments!

Join this Ning Network

At 1:53pm on July 2, 2007, Tracy Poelzer said…: Wow! Thanks, David. You've provided a lot of information here. I'll definitely be taking a look at the University of Manitoba link that you provided, and will pass it along to my husband and his staff as well. Thank you!

At 8:49pm on July 1, 2007, David Bowman said…: Forgive my absence this past hectic month of June, Tracy. It is a real pleasure to be of some help here in your quest for FOSS (Free Open Source Solutions) to your distributed learning initiative.

My experience over the past two decades has been as a strong advocate of all things Unix and open source as a model for long term growth in an otherwise Windoze M$ World.

To that end I am a specific Linux distro (Canonical) advocate. This implies an impending recommended date of October 2007 for the new release of Ubuntu 7.10 This version will add emphasis to the global success of Kubuntu and Edubuntu as an OS designed for learning. Your husband has been using WebCT in the past and quickly relaised the significance of Moodle. Your having tinkered around with Moodle this year in Science Fair committee work has sold you already, The challenge will be to go beyond the school labs and plan a migration of the entire administration office staff including the ever important librarians. This definately has its challenges and is made much easier by restricting the activity around secure free open source software AND operating systems.

As far as Course Management Systems (CMS) go, Moodle has many devotees as you are both well aware. Specifically I might direct you to The University of Manitoba experinec to be found at http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/ They continue to be an outstanding example of successful conversion to an all FOSS Moodle and Linux activity here in Western Canada.

Such a Course Management System (CMS), or Learning Management Systems (LMS), or is it better when we use the term "Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)" has a significant global user base with 25,281 registered sites with 10,405,167 end users in 1,023,914 different courses (as of May 13, 2007).

To me the critical issue is that Moodle also runs without modification on Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS/X, NetWare and many other systems that support PHP, including most webhost providers.

Data is cleverly stored in a single database. While MySQL and PostgreSQL were the only feasible options in Moodle 1.6. Version 1.7 was released November 2006, and this version made full use of database abstraction so that now other databases can be used just as easily (Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are merely two specific target DBMSes).

The current version of Moodle, version 1.8, was released only recently, in March 2007 with major improved roles management features added.

If there is any more support and encouragement I can provide you and your husband, feel free to let me know.

Regards
David