[Moodle] Learning Management: managing learning? managing students?

[Laurie Savage]

Hi Paul,

I'm sorry, but I hate my mobile phone and I hate my son's iPhone. I don't
like the style of input, which I find slow and cumbersome, and while I'm
comfortable with 11pt screen fonts, my eyesight is quite poor so a mobile
device screen is unfriendly. I like having a large screen with two or three
apps open simultaneously so I'm happy using Outlook and One Note for my
administration. For me, and I suspect others with failing eyesight,
usability trumps size every time.

(Oh! and I don't, and do not ever intend to, own a Kindle - you can't
physically flip the pages to find the quote you annotated ten years ago or
the marginalia your friend added when you last lent them your copy of "<add
your favourite title>". And nothing beats new book smell ... except maybe
for old book smell!)

Laurie Savage
PVGC

-----Original Message-----
From: moodle-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:moodle-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Paul Shirren
Sent: Monday, 9 November 2009 12:36 PM
To: The Moodle Users' in Schools Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Moodle] Learning Management: managing learning? managing
students?


Add Catholic Education in SA to SOCS and Ultranet as Oracle L360
customers I think.

On 9/11/09 11:09 AM, Donna Benjamin wrote:
> http://schooltool.org/
> SchoolTool is a suite of free administrative software for schools.

I feel like I am hijacking this thread a little but I am really
interested in more teacher focussed systems and mobile ones at that.

My wife approached me several months ago wanting to do more on her
Ubuntu netbook. She wanted to ditch her teachers diary and use her
netbook for absolutely everything: admin, curriculum, personal
organisation etc.

Being OpenSource nuts we decided to give SchoolTool a go on her netbook
for some of these functions. It just didn't click with her and she had
some usability issues. So we kept looking.

Anyway, with every student and teacher with a mobile phone and or ipod
in their pockets, any talk of a PE teacher carrying a netbook or running
back to their office to enter student class attendance in a desktop
computer is looking dated. And I said as much and suggested the netbook
take a backseat and we explore alternatives.

Mobile apps for iPhone/iPod and Android tend to fit the Unix/web2
philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which we all seem to
like. Exposing a supersuite like Ultranet to a mobile device is asking
for trouble privacy/security wise compared to keeping everything teacher
centric if you ask me not to mention the likely performance.

There are lots of good generic smartphone apps. Calendars, lists,
calculators, dictionary, thesaurus, browser, social networking etc.
Unfortunately there really isn't anything much in the mobile space
specifically for teacher productivity. We found an attendance app that
is very good but it is closed source on a closed platform and we need a
few other apps to complete the puzzle.

I would like to pursue this area further with open source offline
webapps that will work on iPhone Safari/Android or desktop
Safari/Chrome/Gears. Is anyone interested in getting a group together to
explore these ideas?

And to bring it back ontopic there is no reason such mobile apps
couldn't integrate with Moodle in some way ;-)
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