Development of Environment

Since joining with the school, I have busy implementing a number of half finished projects that need to be up and running.

First was Moodle 2, this was up and running from the hosted supplier in May, however the issue was the SMS system doing a sync of teachers, students ad classes. This was first completed on the 8 June, and has not been run since, today was the next successful update.
It seems the issue was around java, since java failed on the system the upload did not take place. It has taken two days working with the supplier to get this working. The next issue is that when the upload takes place, the moodle sync requires user intervention currently, after a month of running this will be automated.
One issue I am having is with the auth/SAML module, as the module we are using is out of date with the one that is now available.

Next was Google Apps, we use the Google SAML module to manage this between Moodle and Google Apps, since we have been getting Single Sign On working, we have had to disable the module till some work happens

SSO, we have SSO up and running, this required up to enter each students SMSid into a field in Active Directory. We have had a number of false starts with this, but now it seems like it is up and running.

myportfolio is our eportfolio system, this has been up and running on an internal authentication system based on the hosted site, we have just gone through and linked it into our SSO, however, it requires that I go through and link up each student with there network username. There is only one issue that I see with this currently and it is around what the students called themselves when they signed up, I have a number of students that I am trying to work out who they are so I can get them access.

I am looking at other SSO server, luckly we have just had a site called www.iam.school.nz created to help us. I am thinking what other things we use, or have potential to use,
 
Once thing that is not helping me, is the data that is being brought out through the SMS - LMS interoperability, as the SMS is not provising all staff users, one thing is that the principal needs access and is not include, also we need to think about the teacher aides that work with students, they nee access to the moodle courses that there students are in.

Once thing I looked at today was the SMS providers blog, I decided to post a few comments around some the issues:

Is our SMS doing any work around how it handles IAM/IDE requirements that school are now looking for as we move towards Single Single On.
Is our SMS doing anything around being able to handle Single Sign On requests on it Library webOPAC?
How is our SMS taking a more leading role as SMS schema v3 is being developed?

It will be interesting to see how they are going to respond to these questions.

Single Sign On update

Hopefully we will have all of our services running on the watchdog iDP.

One thing we are finding though is that the iDP is very picky about what site the that login information is sent from.
we have out http://schoolname.knowledge.net.nz which is how most of the connections are made, but today I don't know where I managed to get this was http://www.schoolname.knowledge.net.nz, I didn't pick it at first, it was an email to the developers that pickup up the www. in front.

So things to note is come up with is a list of websites that you will be connecting with,

ie.
http://schoolname.knowledge.net.nz -knowledgeNET connection
http://mail.student.schoolname.school.nz - googleApps connection
and http://myportfolio.schoolname.school.nz - myportfolio connection

and make sure that you reference these in all you sites and developments from now on. you will need to note that the www. is not needed or supported.

This has been a great development opportunity and is allowing us to try different things within our lessons, rather than the worry of students not knowing passwords or forgetting information that was needed to be able to login successfully.

One of the next steps to look at is branding of these sites and being able to link between them, one suggestion has been to add links into KnowledgeNET for this to happen, this would then create that LMS portal, so students login to one place and use that to access the other services for their learning.

Single Sign On - watchdog iDp

We have been in a process for the last couple of months, in reality since the knowledgeNET conference. We have been working with watchdog on implementing their Single Sign On service. This has been a busy development for all parties involved. It has required knowledgeNET to finish developing the requirements for SSO, in which they have completed and we are the first successful school to use Single Sign On with them, and it has now reduced some of the issues that we have had with passwords.

In the past we have had to add all of our students manually, well export them from our Student Management System, SMS, and we implemented the websync service just after it was released. This now makes provisioning students a lot easier. Though we still have an issue with the format of our student logins, which require someone to change manually.

Another issue we have found is the issues of the original development and focus of knowledgeNET, which was schoolsonline.co.nz, this is what is represented in the google search for our knowledgeNET system. This is causing a few headaches, but we are slowly working our way around this and updating our school website and login pages to show this change, we wish that there was a reload or a refresh when someone logged in through the schoolsonline page that would then point it straight away to our knowledgeNET site.

The second service that was activated was google apps. This has been a simple change over and is working well.

The third service is mahara, myportfolio.school.nz. This one is taking a little bit longer to get going and implemented. At the moment we have one student who is using the SAML login, which does not work, I am hoping that this week will be when we get all of it working. There is still one more service that we can get activated for our iDp service, however, I am unsure at present what we get...

Also with knowledgeNET we are after some real estate on their navigation bar, this will mean that we can include icons on the bar for students to access these service straight away. this has now been added as a development ticket for future work.

Wether it be, access-it library, wikieducator, or a number of other services. This will be a conversation that we next have at our ICT meeting.