Well things are starting to gain momentum. There have been several new subscribers in the last few days and I’m hoping that some recent conversations are beginning to bear fruit. I have opened the site up to comments without being registered and hope to have some content up very soon.

I have been invited to participate on a panel at a Technology Directors meeting on August 13th in Raleigh, NC at the Department of Public Instruction on using Open Source software in education. It has been awhile since I did a presentation of any sort so I’m trying to put together some thoughts and ideas to share.

We had great success with moodle last year at www.eclass.haywood.k12.nc.us . We set up individual teacher blogs using wordpress as well and although it turned into a bit of an administrative nightmare it was quite a success as well. This year we will use WordPress MU or multi-user to ease the administration issues and I’m looking forward to getting it up and running very soon.

Does anyone else have a WordPress MU site up and running?

I’m not going to be able to offer single login until I get a dedicated server hosting account and they start at around $150 a month and run up to around $450.00 so if you want to play you’ll need to create accounts on each of the services I’ve got set up here. We may not need everything so I’ll adjust according to usage.

The Wiki is wide open and someone has been nice enough to set up the front page, thanks! I’ll leave it open and we’ll see how that goes. I was thinking that the wiki would be a great place to start the list of courses that everyone would like to see here. To be quite frank with you I haven’t used mediawiki before so I’ll have to get on and play with it to figure out exactly how to use it. Feel free to start without me.

I’ll get a snippet of a linux course up here the first of next week to get some feedback.

Feel free to leave comments here rather than emailing me personally so people don’t think I’m just talking to myself.

I’m attempting to configure all these different apps to use a single login but I’ve not received a response yet from Tech Support. A couple of these programs are in use at our district where we use ldap to handle logins. I have more control over those severs than I have with this one so I guess I’ll just have to wait awhile longer.

In response to a few requests at the last NCET conference and some ideas I’ve been mulling over for a year or so I decided to breathe some life back into this site. I am working on a couple of videos and tutorials right now, one on StarOffice/OpenOffice and the other on setting up a blog server for teacher pages. I have requests on setting up mail, samba, moodle and using wordpress. Some of these are from teachers in my district that I need to do also, might as well kill two birds with one stone! I must admit I have not set up a wiki before now, although it’s on my todo list at work, I figure I’ll try it out here first.

If you’ve got a moment or two let me know what you’d like to see here. I want to cover the technical stuff but I’m more interested in providing some real world examples of using the current software available with easy step by step instructions for students, teachers, techs and administrators to use on a daily basis.

K12 Linux is really about education, not so much about a particular distro or package so let me know what you think!

Thanks for stopping by!