Moodling

May 31, 2007 · Filed Under Work · Comment 

Moodle, if you do not know, is a course management system or CMS (Joomla is a CMS too, but in Joomla’s case CMS stands for Content Management System). Moodle basically allows people to develop and run just about any course for just about any subject on-line.   It’s open source and its free.  The Open University in the UK is working on a Moodle based e-learning set-up for its students.  If it is good enough for the Open University, then it is more than good enough for me.  I intend to use Moodle to develop and manage learning materials.

At present, I link to various on-line exercises from my website, but, although these on-line exercises are OK, being a picky type of soul, I like the idea of being able to develop excercises myself and aim them at the specific needs of my students.  I’ve yet to decide just how I shall exploit Moodle, in fact, I’ve yet to install Moodle on my webserver due to the MySQL version not being the one I need.  I have spoken to my very efficient hosting service, HostingPlan who are willing to move my site over to a server which has an acceptable version of MySQL.  Thanks HostingPlan!

Once I have the right dbase stuff, I can proceed to install Moodle, which is not difficult if you have some familiarity with the web server administration system CPanel, which I do, luckily.  While I’m waiting for things to be transferred, I can install Moodle locally on my laptop and have a play to get myself familiar with what it can do and what you need to do to make it do what you want.  Once I know a little more, I can have a think about how to set things up and start creating courses and adding content.

My only gripe with on-line solutions for language learning is that it is not yet easy to practice that most essential of skills, speaking.  However, this is coming and with PHP5, CSS3 and Moodle 2.0,  something called “VoiceXML” will start to be implemented and developed and voice based interaction will become possible.  Yes, I know that this is not real conversation, but with a little imagination prompted conversations can be developed and should help non-native speakers of a language to deal with real-life situations more confidently.  The potential of this technology is without bounds in my opinion.  I find it fascinating.

I shall report on my progress.

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Danea Easyfatt 2006

September 12, 2006 · Filed Under Work · 2 Comments 

If you happen to be registered for IVA - VAT in the UK, then you will have to prepare VAT invoices and it is nice to have some way of monitoring when and what people actually pay you. You can just rely on Word and Excel or you could invest in some ‘tax-deductable’ software to help you. Last year I bought a program called Business Monitor (Buffetti chain of stores) to keep things under control and regretted it. The program was not at all intuitive and, to be honest, was aimed at larger organisations than my tiny set-up. However, even simple things like setting up a customised invoice was not at all easy and finding information were fiddly to say the least. Enter Danea EasyFatt 2006, which I got at the start of this year. How I wish I had invested in this program before. It is a joy to use, intuitive, flexible and regularly updated - for free, unlike Business Monitor which required that you paid more to obtain a year’s worth of updates.

EasyFatt allows you to make amendments easily (correct silly mistakes) and to keep your invoice numbering sequential, which Business Monitor could do, but only with some serious messing around. Danea also exports invoices to .pdf format, so you cannot easily mess things up. I can even set up different invoice styles for different organisations if I want. Everything is clearly at hand and the initial summary screen with its task list and list of outstanding payments is very useful too. Creating new invoices is greatly simplified by the fact that you can use an existing one as a basis, so you don’t have to go typing everything in all over again. Business Monitor could not do this, despite giving the impression that it was more ‘professional’. Not that EastFatt’s functionality is limited. Not at all. It has plenty of functionality and is easy to move from one computer to another should the need arise. You can even export data to Excel and OpenOffice Calc.

OK, the program is all in Italian, but I’m in Italy working in the Italian system so that is just about to be expected. The only way you could get an English version would be to have someone build you the software, which would be expensive, not to mention difficult because you would need to instruct a translator and errors could creep in. At least I can be pretty sure that Italian software is going to be well geared towards the Italian system.

I would recommend this software to anyone who needs to produce invoices but does not have the time to set something up themselves, or simply wishes to keep everything in one simple to get at place and at 79 Euros it cost almost half as much as the other software I bought last year. Danea does some other software too and I reckon its Professional Manager, which integrates with EasyFatt, is worth looking at too.

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ProShow Gold 2.6

April 20, 2006 · Filed Under Digital photography · Comment 

It's been quite some time since I had fun with a computer program, but ProShow Gold is proving to be one of the best applications I've played with for a while. As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to try to create a DVD with some of the masses of digital photos we have. Should be a breeze, or so I thought. After all, went my reasoning, I'm very late into this game - DVD writers and digicams have been out for the technology timescale equivalent of eons. Well, yes and no. There are many programs which will allow you to create DVD slideshows that you can then show to all and sundry, but not many really exploit the medium to the maximum, with the distinct exception of ProShow Gold, that is. OK, it costs quite a bit at $70 for the download version, but you are getting a fine app and if you have a play around, the results of all your 'labours' will mean your loved ones will be amazed at your computing prowess.

The thing which grabbed my attention the most is the wild and wacky ways in which you can add titles to your snapshots - and these here titles can add to the mood of your photos. Imagine a picture of a really cold and snowy day which includes a caption which actually shivers into sight. Brilliant. Another fantabulous feature is the way in which you can pan, zoom and rotate images. Hours of happy and creative fun can be had with this gem - beats watching the gogglebox any day.

You can even use it to create your own personal screensavers.

There is the slight danger that one may go OTT and end up with an end result which makes its watchers cringe, but then that could be said about any creative effort. It's not the tools but who uses them that counts.

So, if you've been wondering what to do will all those digital photos and there is nuffink on the TV or the rain is a pouring down, splash out on this program (assuming you have a DVD burner (if not, I know a good one)). It could even be more social than the TV as you and the family while away many a happy hour arguing, no sorry, discussing just what photos should or should not be used - but leave the captions and effects to yourself, otherwise you'll never even get to finish one DVD, let alone burn your entire collection onto DVD.

A quick play and I'm off to the land of nod.

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