Christmas Sonic Pi

Computer Science, , , ,

This week my Year 8 class asked if they could do something festive with me for their last lesson before we break up next week. Now I am not a believer in stopping work just because it is the last week of term, but I thought I could probably give them a Computer Science lesson and easily add a Christmas theme to get the best of both worlds. I gave them the choice of either using Python Turtle art to create festive pictures, or use Sonic Pi to “code” some Christmas music.

The class went for Sonic Pi; so I thought I would share my lesson plan here.

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Hello Minecraft World!

Minecraft screen shots with your Raspberry Pi

Computer Science, How To, Tech Articles, , , ,

We are just about to begin teaching our Python and Minecraft unit at school so I began testing everything out on our latest Raspberry Pi image to make sure we were ready for the lessons and adjust any of the lesson plans if necessary.

Our latest Raspberry Pi image runs Jessie. Now one of the improvements Jessie brings us is that the Print Screen button on your keyboard has been set up to run Scrot in the background to save a png screen shot into your home directory. You can read more about it here.

Now that is great as for quite some time taking a screen shot on your Raspberry Pi involved installing Scrot and then running it from the terminal; not the most user-friendly way to get students to take screen shots!

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iSAMS to Moodle Sync – One Year On

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So we have been running my iSAMS to Moodle sync for over a  year now at my school and I thought it was probably time to write an update about how it has gone and what changes I have had to make to the system.

This July we had our first academic roll-over with the system in place and this highlighted a few things which need adjusting.

I had been thinking about the best way we could set courses up within Moodle using the iSAMS sync for some time and decided that the best way to continue was to allow the iSAMS sync courses to operate purely as enrolment courses and to be connected to the “live” Moodle courses using the “Course Meta Link” functionality of Moodle.

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Getting your Raspberry Pi to update through your school firewall

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I have seen many posts on both Twitter and CAS about teachers having issues getting their class Raspberry Pis to update and install software through their school firewalls, so I thought I would share the simple solution that I have implemented at my school.

It actually leverages something that I put in place for our Ubuntu Linux servers, but works just as well for Raspberry Pi devices too.

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Updating our Raspberry Pi Image

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We have just purchased a set of Raspberry Pi 2 boards to upgrade our Raspberry Pi B+ / HDMIPI set-up which we have been using for Computer Science this year. I will not go into the reasons why or the specifications of the Raspberry Pi 2; but needless to say the performance increase seen will make teaching with these devices much easier!

So we received our new Pi 2 boards and got straight into removing the old B+ boards from our HDMIPI set-up and installing the new Pi 2 boards. Pretty soon I ran into an issue though; having replaced the Pi board and using one of our SD Cards with our current image installed on it, the system would not boot; it just sat there at the rainbow boot screen. It turns out that the Pi 2 has an updated ARM processor and therefore needs the latest updates installing for the Pi to boot.  Now I could have just downloaded the latest Rasbian image and been up and running, but we have quite a few customisations to our image which I wanted to keep

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Writing an effective whole school Digital Literacy programme

Digital Literacy, Pedagogy, , , ,

This post was originally posted on Rachel Jone’s blog and is one in a series of posts which Rachel co-wrote with other teachers from Twitter.

Jon:

Introduction

Firstly there are a number of questions which should be addressed when we look at creating an effective whole school digital literacy programme:

  1. What is Digital Literacy?
  2. Why should we be teaching it?
  3. Who should be teaching it?
  4. How are we going to teach this?

If you start with these questions and ensure that the answers are relevant to your individual school, then I feel that you will be well on your way to creating an effective and personalised Digital Literacy programme.

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Ubuntu, RAID and SMART

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We have a number of our physical Linux servers set up to use Linux MD RAID to provide either RAID 1 or 5 fault tolerance on our disks. This is all great so long as it is working as expected! I came into work to find that after a reboot from a kernel update one of our servers could not bring up its swap drive. The swap partition was a RAID 1 array made up from two mirrored disks.

I began to look at mdadm to find out what was wrong. Running:

# cat /proc/mdstat

revealed that one of the drives had failed putting both arrays into degraded mode and to make matters worse the only remaining good disk had now developed errors in the partition used for swap! Thankfully the second array / partition which contained the system files was still on-line, albeit in a degraded state.

So the first thing to do was to get a new disk into the array and synchronise the data onto it. After that I needed to remove the other original disk and replace that too. Once all that was done and the data re-synchronised onto both new disks I wanted to look at how we can increase our monitoring of disks so that we don’t get in this situation again!

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Creating Student Detail Exports from iSAMS for LimeSurvey

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We have LimeSurvey installed at school for creating and managing web-based surveys. For those who don’t know LimeSurvey it is an Open Source fully featured web-based survey system. It runs on one of our internal web-servers and is being used to survey staff, students and parents about a whole range of different topics.

One of the challenges with using survey systems can be ensuring that only the users you want to can access the survey, and that they only complete the survey once. LimeSurvey gets around this issue by making use of “Tokens”. You can read more about this on their on-line manual here: https://manual.limesurvey.org/Tokens

This post explains how to export student details from iSAMS in a format that LimeSurvey can accept and how to import them into your survey.

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Moodle User Pictures from iSAMS

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Having linked our Moodle installation with iSAMS to automate course creation and enrolment I began looking around at what other things we could link up and automate. Whilst spending some time on the Moodle forums, I came across this post: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=272020 which linked to a command line script someone had added to the Moodle Docs to allow for synchronisation of user profile pictures.

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Computer Science and Moodle Quizzes

Computer Science, Pedagogy, , ,

I have been teaching our Year I (NC year 7) girls Computer Science since September now and I am approaching the end of the course, when it will rotate to the other half of the year group. I thought it best to carry out some assessment of their learning of the previous unit before we start the final unit on Web Design.

As all of my resources and grades for the course are set up within Moodle I thought what better to use for the assessment than a Moodle Quiz.

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