This week

This week has brought a number of challenges

1. Working with publishers - I was asked to be part of a meeting with a publisher around the changing environment of textbooks. This was a fantastic meeting as over the Christmas holiday I had been working with a client on developing moodle courses based upon the information that already existed as pdf documents, hot pot quizzes and shockwave and powerpoint files. This has allowed for the CD at the back of the workbook that if it goes missing that the students still have access to the work. We are also in preparation for the installation of wireless technology at school and BYOD for students. These devices also probably will not have a CD drive available for it to work.
Though one aspect that is work considering is the the idea of digital learning objects, these objects are going to have a place in teaching more in the next couple of years, however the aspect that we need to look at is how to find related resources and common resources. The Ministry of Education had in the last couple of years written documentation in helping define the meta data required to assist in the searching and development of these resources. But it has been difficult in finding these resources.

2. Moodle - I have been busy in installing a new module for python development for moodle, its called pycode, i will include some installation notes later.

3. pycode, i have been working on getting pypy and pycode up and running on one of my virtual machines, not the best idea as I am finding that the machine setup is so underpowered that it is failing some of the unit tests that the developer has told me should work. This has involved a lot of work around understanding the moodle environment, and where specific parts go. This has been a great development opportunity to work through my skills in ubuntu and try new things out. However, the development now need to be put into a production environment. Documentation is going to have to be sorted. At the moment there is limited documentation and most of it has been from an initial email, and some follow up questions, Kind of wish there was a README file on the git hub where the material was downloaded from telling people where it had to be installed and what other sections have to be added and placed as well. One of the biggest issues was not reading an email properly, where it told me to run a Unit Test, "question/type/pycode", had I carried this out at the time I would not have wasted a couple of hours reinstalling moodle from scratch and placing the files in the correct location. But on the upsite, it means that I have a moodleinschools 2.1.5 version with the pycode setup in the correct locations.
I have been asked by an associate to provide a tarball and database copy so he can install it on his system so he can continue the production of this.
We are looking at providing this as a development for the Watchdog moodle hub, however we need to find out, if someone enrolls in the course through the moodle hub, where is the content stored and will pycode-pypy be available for them to run.