Archive for October, 2004

Science for Monks

Sunday, October 31st, 2004

The Science for Monks Web site is about science and Maths training for Bhuddist monks. The five teachers involved found teaching the workshops a challenge. Stamatis Vokos has described a session in some detail.

A secondary agenda is about keeping the Tibetan language current by developing a scientific vocabulary. This unusual Web page came from one [...]

Sans Institute

Friday, October 29th, 2004

The SANS Institute has a good Web site where you can download articles about a wide range of topics – look for the Reading Room link from the front page. There is even a 13 page tutorial on using an Apple Mac laptop running Mac OS X as a forensic analysis station – the Mac [...]

40 questions…

Thursday, October 28th, 2004

Download a 6 page worksheet

Following the TROL example, I am adding some PDFs of worksheets here. The first is 40 short questions for revision for students taking an Access course – this first test is non-calculator. Topics covered include

Whole numbers, fractions and decimals
Percentage and simple percentage problems
Basic Unit conversion
Ratios (including foreign currency)
Basic probability

Students will get [...]

Teacher Resources On Line (TROL)

Saturday, October 23rd, 2004

Teacher Resources On Line has a lot of downloadable PDF files with quizzes, problems and mini-investigations. Could be useful. The arithmetic practice PDF file has 12 pages of puzzles around tables and simple arithmetic operations but presented in a puzzly way with number squares and other visual shapes. Could be handy for use with Access [...]

Maths in vocational context

Tuesday, October 19th, 2004

A big thankyou to the University of Hull Study Advice Services crew for making their worksheets and leaflets available online without password protection.

I’ll be using the excellent Mathematics Practice for Nursing and Midwifery (a PDF file) available to my access students over the half term as revision and a bit of a challenge for the [...]

Decode this…

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

guvf zrffntr unf orra rapbqrq hfvat gur fvzcyr vqrn bs cynpvat gur yrggref bs gur nycunorg ebhaq n qehz naq ebgngvat rnpu yrggre 13 cynprf, fb n orpbzrf z. v’yy or hfvat vg gbzbeebj jvgu fghqragf nf n fvzcyr rkrepvfr. gur fghqragf jvyy unir gb

jbex va cnvef
hfr n gnoyr bs crepragntr serdhrapvrf bs gur yrggref [...]

Why keep it simple?

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

I suggest you use a very simple page design and navigation for course sites
In my opinion, that means…

** a home page that acts as a course diary

** a contact form

** a page with downloadable files such as the scheme of work

the course diary should have carefully chosen links added each week at the top of [...]

The Hacker Crackdown

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

Bruce Sterling’s 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is still available free on the Web. Sterling had the uncommonly neat idea of reserving the digital rights to his book and putting out a free copy. As Bruce says…

“The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown, and commercially the book has done well. On the other [...]

Moodle 1.35 uses a lot of php memory

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

Moodle 1.35 asks for more than 8 Mb of RAM from the php process when installing all modules
The workround is to delete modules and then continue to install
Set up the admin account and added a thumbnail (at last) which displayed properly
Got Internal Server Error on index.php
So back to Moodle 1.41 (which is on the main [...]

Black square problem

Saturday, October 16th, 2004

Moodle 1.4.1 has apparently a problem with saving a blank config.php file and not displaying profile images on some combinations of Apache, PHP and MySQL (including the bodmas server apparently)
Trying a download of Moodle 1.3.5 – older release
C’est la Vie
Enough of v 1.4.1 is working to evaluate the pedagogy and see how usable the teacher [...]

Moodle is installed

Saturday, October 16th, 2004

Seems to be working OK
14 Mb of the 25 Mb of script files are actually language packs. Missed most of them out.
Only problem so far is that I can’t get the thumbnails to display properly in the user profile – probably an image processing module missing on the bodmas server
Once files uploaded, and the database [...]

Moodle upload

Saturday, October 16th, 2004

25Mb of scripts to upload
College connection is a bit lumpy
WS-FTP LE complains now and again so have to upload folder by folder
lang and mods are big folders

Some ideas

Friday, October 15th, 2004

The ILT category has just a few ideas that have worked for me. The emphasis is on

things that require little preparation other than the teaching plan
30 minutes a week rule
ideas that increase interaction between students in the classroom
ideas that keep students in touch with teachers, peer group or the material in the periods between class [...]

Using a guestbook to post links for students

Friday, October 15th, 2004

You can use a simple guestbook script (such as Big Sam) to post links and a brief description of what was covered each week for students, especially evening students who come to College once a week and who will inevitably need to miss lessons now and again.

The best strategy is to use a script [...]

Blog templates changed

Friday, October 15th, 2004

hacked WordPress templates to match the very plain style used in the rest of the site
not xhtml compliant and currently no DTD specified
removed the comments link
removed all the trackback gubbins

Installing Moodle

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Moved bodmas.org to server space that should allow Moodle install
24 Mb of php files in the Moodle folder so will upload from fast connection at college
Control panel not usable thru’ firewall so will have to configure from home

A lot of gateway timeouts

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

More than I have had recently
Control panel won’t get thru’ firewall – funny ports
Time delay on scripts

First it wasn’t and now it is

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Got internal server errors on first uploading this
Now working
What gives?

Hello world!

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!