Education is Technology

If you have old computers in your school, or have one with a lot of memory that can support virtual machines with a free virtualization platform like VirtualBox, Turnkey Linux @ http://www.turnkeylinux.org has a vast library of “turnkey” appliances: softwares that make installation and configuration a breeze for anyone with admin access to a computer.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/mahara: digital portfolio platform w/ social networking features. Great for faculty and students alike. Useful for transition services, IEP implementation.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/statusnet: microblogging for inside a campus. Useful for teaching precision and concision, net citizenship, audience awareness and rhetoric.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/elgg: social networking for campus - again, training for real world citizenship in the digital ages. Restrict to campus.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/etherpad: we use for real time collaboration in meetings and composition classes.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ for the full catalog of turnkey appliances. There’s a lot of wiki options if you want to encourage authentic writing.

bogking:

I’m hoping others will contribute to this list of potential outside readers for students looking to STEM fields, particularly CS or software engineering or hardware engineering after secondary schools. In anticipation of Common Core adoption - and in the interest of best practice - I’d like IT courses to promote reading across the curriculum. This is intended to be a list of readings beyond assigned reading and research. What’s missing? (I’ma try to embed the etherpad - if it doesn’t work, please click the no-hassle link). If you’ve never used etherpad before, it’s a breeze for collaboration. You may consider clicking the human silhouette and setting a name for yourself, and perhaps the color wheel to choose a color for your contributions; neither are necessary. Hope the embedding works.

How to teach undergrads how to become open source contributors without writing any code

TurnKey Linux: Rsync the entire TurnKey library from a mirror close to you in under 5 minutes!

Contrary to all reports, Remastersys is alive and well. I’ve just installed on Oneiric lab machine and will report if it doesn’t work as it had.

Ubuntu installation, from the site itself:

Starting with version 3.0.1-1 for Ubuntu there is a proper signed repository that can be added to your system.

The Synaptic Method:

[Pain in the ass in oneiric, and you will definitely have to remove the source repo manually from sources.list (last line of the section):]

1. In Firefox, go to :

    http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu/remastersys.gpg.key
   
save file as text someplace where you can find it.

2.  In synaptic, go to Settings/Repositories; select “Authentication” tab and “Import Key File” just downloaded.

3.  Still in synaptic, go to “Other Software” tab and click “Add”, then enter the apt line and replace oneiric with either lucid, maverick, or natty to match your Ubuntu version:

    deb http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu oneiric main

4.  Leave the repositories tab and “Reload”.

5.  Search for “remastersys” and select for install.  Edit/Apply Marked Changes.

NOTE:  There is no source repository so if you see a line starting with deb-src you need to remove it.

[This is the method that makes the most sense to me, however there is an error somewhere and I haven’t sorted out where. I get a (broken pipe); I think I see - the way this is written, I must su -; sudo doesn’t cut it:]

The Manual Method

As root, download and apply the repository gpg key.

wget -O - http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu/remastersys.gpg.key | apt-key add -

Add the following line that corresponds to your version of Ubuntu to your /etc/apt/sources.list

#Remastersys Lucid
deb http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu lucid main

#Remastersys Maverick
deb http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu maverick main

#Remastersys Natty
deb http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu natty main

#Remastersys Oneiric
deb http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu oneiric main

Now just apt-get update or reload in Synaptic to have the new Remastersys signed repository ready to use!

Gobby Server in Three Easy Steps

I find Gobby essential in both the writing lab and the advanced technology lab.

Some have begun teaching peer review and revision in high school using Google Docs. Fair enough, if your school has committed to Google Apps accounts for everyone in the community.

Our alternative is Gobby. Gobby is a collaborative, synchronous text composition and editing tool. Given its feature set, it’s clearly designed for programmers and coders (syntax highlighting, for example). Nevertheless, it is no less effective for writers in English 11 than it is for the coders in advanced information systems.

Gobby is the client; Infinoted is the server side tool that keeps track of who’s editing where, stores the documents, and color codes the contributions.

It’s home on the web seems to be here. Per the site:

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

Featured are cataloged here, screenshots are available here, and testimonials here. I don’t think the website does it justice. Gobby has become an essential tool for composition for the juniors I work with: in one scenario one student composes while rest of the class works on either mechanical, grammatical, conventional polishing, or else on more substantive revision - word choice, concision, verbs that convey action, awareness of audience, unity of purpose.

I’ve left out that I work exclusively with student with language-based learning differences that can severely affect writing fluency and adherence to convention. However, using Gobby, a single composition that’s been filtered through the peer revision of everyone in the section or even the entire junior class demonstrates none of the markers one might expect from a member’s work.

If you’d like more information, please don’t hesitate to ask.

It gets better: my lab is entirely free and open source software (excluding flash); Gobby paired with afterthedeadline and LibreOffice is a strategic win.

On Monday, all but one student came into first period with a tablet. For students with or without executive function challenges, effective notetaking seems to be an epic struggle. New tools, tablets and smart phones, can’t immediately become powerful assets in this struggle if students still struggle differentiating main ideas from support, identifying types of support - reasoning vs. concrete details, etc.

—Unless there’s something inherent in the structure of the tool that is novel and exercises these skills.

That’s what I’d like to learn about Evernote, available for Android and iOS devices, as well as Macs and PCs. Evernote users can take notes on their devices in a variety of formats, with or without attachments, and sync them to cloud storage. The notes can then be recalled and reviewed on any system on which the client has been installed and internet access is available.

As I was teaching the students with Android tablets this strategy for using their tools productively, it caught on. The remaining student installed Evernote on a laptop running Ubuntu Linux using Wine. That was a positive sign, and the results by the end of class were encouraging: pithy, economically efficient notes were taken by all.

What surprised me is that word clearly got to other students, because by 4th students had their smart phones out and Evernote already installed. Their thumbs poked and prodded at the material as we discovered and constructed an understanding of it.

I’ll sum up my observations at the end of two weeks. In the meantime I intend to introduce some strategies to use with Evernote: Make PDFs of handouts with cam/scanner and attaching them to Evernote entries; scanning QR codes to make data entry quicker, etc.

A new range of possibilities for young IT students facing budget-strapped courses:

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

$25-$35. They’ll have to cunningly fashion their own cases. When? Before you’re back from break, if not sooner.

OpenTeacher

OpenTeacher is an opensource vocabulary training application that helps you learn a foreign language!

Enter a list of words in both a known and a foreign language, and OpenTeacher tests you.

OpenTeacher 2.2 has the following features:

• Smart question asking and interval training
• Think answer, shuffle answer and repeat answer input modes
• Easy symbol, Greek and Cyrillic input
• Read and write T2K (Teach2000), wrts and read ABBYY Lingvo Tutor files
• Save and open your online WRTS lists
• Print your word lists
• Available in Arabic, Trad. Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

OpenTeacher 2.2.1 is available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Ampache is an outstanding audio streaming server/technology that has potential to serve all kinds of minds. Although developed “for the love of music,” Ampache has a place in education. For example, Ampache provides an opportunity for the population I work with, gifted thinkers facing difficult reading challenges, to access developmentally and academically appropriate content that would be either inaccessible or demeaningly leveled. Most I’ve received feedback from prefer listening at their own pace to both Kurzweil and a human reader.

Let your imagination run with it: combined with a tool like audacity, guide students as they work through homework; provide students working on fluency and expression to record material for others to decode or with which to practice making inferences.

Too abstract? This link takes you to a demo: use the username hackers and the password untie.

I start from TKL’s LAMP stack; they’ve just released a new revision (based on Lucid) - their next will be based on whatever the codename for the new LTS is.

TKL makes it easy to install to bare metal or to a virtual machine.

During the simple TKL configuration, do make a note of your root password and your MySQL root user password, you’ll need them. You’ll need to generate two more passwords later: one for the ampache database user and one for the ampache admin account.

We do the rest with SSH, not shellinabox. Why? Took us about a year of working with TKLPatch before it hit us: copy and paste.

We go the long way around, but should not anymore; this can be done in two commands concatenated, iirc:

cd /var/www
wget http://gitorious.org/ampache/ampache/archive-tarball/master  [nightly build]
tar xvzf ./master
mv ampache-ampache/ ampache/

Oh: chown -R ww-data /var/www/ampache/

Configuration of the db has to be taken care of (in fact this is not the case if you’re using the alpha build - I provide steps in case one decides to go with the version in the repos or stable 3.5.4. Use myPHPadmin (built into the distro, port 12322), drop into a MySQL shell, or execute direct from the command line. This is the gist:

CREATE USER 'ampache'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '***'; GRANT USAGE ON * . * TO ‘ampache’@’%’ IDENTIFIED BY ’***’ WITH MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_UPDATES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 0 ;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `ampache` . * TO 'ampache'@'%' 
FLUSH PRIVILEGES; [?]

The rest of the configuration is taken care of via web interface. Point a browser to http://<ipaddr>/ampache. Fill in the db info and set a password for the admin user (database config looks unnecessary with this (really really impressive) alpha version - including nevertheless).

Change at least one php parameters.

nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and double the memory_limit parameter to 64M. Can’t find it? Search in nano with ctrl-w (that is to say, “where?”).

Assigning the admin account password is the final step.

Next, check out documentation at ampache.org to stock your catalogs. The documentation is comprehensive.

Boggled by the instructions? A prebuilt and preconfigured appliance is available here.

Advanced Information Systems class took a break from Axzo’s Linux+ Powered by LPI. We’re working through the third unit, a much needed review on manipulating files and directories; however, the unit ends with a skimpy sequence of exercises introducing vim.

We’ve chosen, rather, to rely on the fantastic vimtutor resource.

On Ubuntu,

apt-get install vim-gnome

seems the least circuitous way to install this fantastic tutorial. Following the tutorial, students chose the vim cheat sheets most appropriate for their learning styles. Here’s an example of one no one chose:

Students are building location-based narratives using a Ushahidi instance on TurnKey Linux’s LAMP stack 11.2. So far, lessons have emphasized

• dialog,
• setting,
• indirect and direct characterization,
• and moving from first to third-person voice.

Above all, we are concerned with producing compelling prose that will not leave the reader asking “So, what?”

Each student will ultimately produce three narratives, and choose one to include as a portfolio piece.

1. Best or worst dialog with an instructor: a dialog that will stay with them forever.
2. Personal narrative tied to neighborhood.
3. Fragment of neighborhood oral history transformed into unified writing.

The instance is public, so students are occulting personal information and fudging enough on GIS coordinates to leave them safe.