Hello good afternoon. So we're in the workshop room so we'll be doing some collaboration this afternoon. So firstly I wanted to do some introductions. I'll go first. I'm Steve Watts and I really identify as a lifelong learner and some of the photos express some of my interests outside of my professional work. And the one I'm most excited about recently is this one down here. I live on a farm in Australia and amongst other animals, chickens and alpacas, we have sheep. And just before I left we're coming into springtime and the sheep were expecting to have lambs and I had one sheep that was huge and was huge for days and days before I left and I was very worried that something was wrong and she should have had lambs by then and I got advice at the local feed store and on the morning that I left I went out and this huge sheep had had three lambs. I was so excited.  Actually were any of you at the music jam night last night? Nobody, one person. Okay so I was the tryhard on the piano for a little while and for a long time people knew me as Steve the musician and it's been a long time actually since I've been able to do that. It was heaps of fun but since then I've learned so many things in my life. I now know how to drive a tractor and to build rural fencing and to take care of sheep and one of the things I love doing with my family as well is traveling and sharing that joy of discovery, discovering new places and learning new things. So part of what I want to do today is to celebrate lifelong learning and it doesn't have to be formal education as we heard this morning from the presenter from UNESCO. There's informal as well and it keeps us alive. So that's me. What about you? I would like to use Menti today so please point your smartphones at the QR code. This should bring up a Menti poll and I'm going to ask you some questions together. So I'm going to flick over hopefully to, how am I going to do this? I'm going to flick over to my Menti poll in a browser so I would have to close my presentation I guess. Okay and right so if you've missed the code as anyone still needed the little boxes down there now it's bigger. If anyone need more time yes okay I'm seeing phones still pointing. I don't want to leave you behind. Okay all right so I'm going to ask you some questions to help you introduce yourself. Firstly what is your favorite fruit? Today I'm going to be talking about the Moodlebox project with runs on a piece of hardware. Does anyone know what the hardware is called? There's a big clue on screen. Raspberry Pi. All right great great to see these coming in so we get to know each other a little bit what fruit we like. Lots of love for mango. So we also have fruit on our farm. We grow cherries for the birds at the moment. They're the only ones that eat the cherries. Apples. Awesome I love these. Okay that was the warm-up activity just to make sure you're using the polling and can use your phone. Welcome for those who've just walked in. We're using Menti meter if you can go to menti.com and then you can put the code at the top of the screen. You can join in too we're just getting to know each other. So the next question I'm super interested to learn where we all work and I may have missed a few categories apologies. You can select more than one if more than one applies but do you identify as working in international development and or formal education informal are you with an ed tech company corporate learning or something else. We can get a feel for who we have in the room. We have a lot of service providers. I feel like we should have a stream at these international moots for international development people to meet each other because I don't know who you are. I think I might have met one down there. So there's nine people in the room working in international development that's exciting. For people who work in other does anyone want to call out what sector you're working. You don't wish to be identified. That's OK. This is Europe. We you know we keep our data private. I understand. So I'm going to take a huge risk as a workshop facilitator and actually ask you why you're here. And I'm willing to tailor the session. At least the emphasis a little. So some of you might be here because you're interested in learning the basics about how we can serve as learners who have no internet and the basics of learning offline and Moodlebox. Some of you are here because you just are curious and want to try it out. Some of you might have gone a bit further and actually want to get a sense of what works and what doesn't work. I'm going to tell you a lot of things that don't work today. Or some of you might be wanting to find others who use Moodlebox. All right. So everyone's got the hang of this going great. A couple more votes coming in. So this is perfect for me. Well done. Everybody because we will start at the beginning and we'll learn the basics of Moodlebox. There will be an opportunity for at least seven of you to try hands on. That's fine. And we will get to learning lessons of success and failure with Moodlebox. So only three of you want to find out from others. OK. This is a workshop. We're meant to learn from each other but maybe we won't spend quite so much time on that. OK. I'm going to come back to the PowerPoint deck. I've probably broken it by stopping presenting. So do I click present live again? Resume session. Very good. Thank you. OK. So for those of you who'd like to learn the basics of Moodlebox, I'm going to give you a quick intro. Yes. Then I'm going to talk about a project that a couple of us in this room have been involved in in Kenya. And I will show what we built and what we worked with in Kenya. And I'll talk a bit about some of the customizations that we made to the box to overcome some of the limitations. And then we'll see how we're going for time. But we'll have an opportunity for small group discussion. And if we're still hungry for more content, there's another project in Cambodia that I can talk about. But I'd like to think that you'll go away from this session with a basic understanding of the Moodlebox project and the potential of offline learning. But also that you will have seen and potentially experienced the way that works and will have an opportunity to learn from each other and consolidate those learning. So when you leave the room today, hopefully you will be informed. And if you are going to run projects using the Moodlebox code on Raspberry Pi, then you can learn some lessons that we've learned over the last two years, the hard way, and maybe you won't make the same mistakes and you'll be even more successful in the spirit of open source. So I want to start off with a question. Why? Why do we need to think about supporting offline? And if there's nine of you in the room that come from a development background, you will already have a sense. This is a three minute video that introduces the work that we do at inclusive education and really sets the scene for context where we might need to support learning in what we like to call low tech or low resource settings. Haven't been done by a lot of people in a lot of places. There's no reason now why every child in the world can't have access to the world's knowledge. We want to empower thousands of teachers to reach millions of children. God has the right to learn anywhere. 50 million children. We want to put technology in places that's going to mean that a child can learn. So education technology is fundamentally about bridging the gaps. It's about saying no matter where you live, no matter what social status you have, no matter what cultural background you have, no matter what disabilities you may have been born with, then you should still have access to equal educational opportunities to anyone else in the world. And the only way to do that is for educational technology. When we think about the right to education, it means the child has a right to a school, a teacher, but there are so many things that can get in the way of that from COVID climate events and conflict to cultural and religious beliefs, economic pressure on families and enormous class sizes. There are many factors that can stand in the way of access to quality education, but we know technology can help with so many of these. One of the things that inclusive education does is develop technologies that bridge that digital divide. For kids that don't have electricity or can't get to a smartphone or a computer, we're finding different ways to bring teachers to them. I think the craziest thing we're doing is trying to deliver online learning in an offline environment. Currently, we are deploying a learning management system into schools in Cambodia where there's no internet. I think often educators' technologies are misunderstood because actually education has always used technology. Without the piece of chalk and a duster or it's an overhead projector or it's an online service, technology is actually a really important part of the education process. The crucial thing now though is that we now have global technologies and we have things that can work immediately across huge distances. Tech can bring a teacher to a child. For a child in a school that doesn't have a library, tech is access to books. Tech can connect children with other children and a learning community where otherwise that would be impossible. Tech is a way to move outside our buildings to where people meet us. My experience is it can just take one teacher to change the life of a child and I want us to be the organisation that helps that one teacher. That's the work that we're passionate about and in particular we get excited about capacity building, helping people learn to use these tools effectively and about digital inclusion, which in our space is really challenging. I'm going to keep clicking this, hopefully it goes. It's really challenging because we found and perhaps you have to that when you're designing a project in international development, that inclusion is near the top of the list if we're starting to think about use of technology and so you may have a context where 80% of your learners or trainers or teachers or beneficiaries have access to internet but 20% don't and you're probably going to get told by a program designer, well then no internet because the 20% will miss out and that's not fair. So I would like to think that for those 80% access to the internet is pretty much a, you know, it's a digital right these days and we want to make sure that we don't artificially create a digital divide in our programming. On the other hand, we need to figure out how we can be inclusive from a digital point of view, digitally inclusive. So we want to provide a bigger diversity of technologies in the video talked about a blackboard being a technology, an overhead projector is a technology, a book is a technology and Moodle is a technology. These are all learning technologies. We want to make sure that people have access to education in the best way possible regardless of their setting. So if you haven't seen it, this is a screenshot from the Moodle box website. So it's Moodlebox.net and the URL is down the bottom. This is an open source project. Is anyone involved in this project? I should check. Awesome. Being open source, there's a sponsor but there are contributors and anybody can download this code and have a go at running it yourself which is what we did. So part of the workshop today is talking about our experience of working with the Moodlebox code. It runs on a Raspberry Pi device and I actually have one sitting on the stage for those that can see down there. It's plugged in and we'll be using it in a moment but if you're curious and you go to your Wi-Fi network, you may see a Wi-Fi network called ILP box. It stands for the Inclusive Learning Platform Box. So it's broadcasting a local, help me out here, wireless access. Local area network. Thank you, local area network right now and there's nothing being broadcast other than what's on the box. There's nothing that can be accessed other than what's on the box. So the purpose really of this project is to make Moodle work offline on a device which is small and mobile and will offer its own Wi-Fi access point. So that solves the problem for learners that may not have access to internet but we want to provide opportunities for them to use e-learning. There's some other problems though that we may have present in our projects. For example, electricity or a digital device. I'll come to that in a moment. Okay, so what we've built, we call the Inclusive Moodle box and a lot of times we've seen this used to support continuity of education or training. And as you saw in the video, there are lots of reasons why our programming gets disrupted. We work in Tonga and every year they have cyclone season and pretty much every year cyclones will destroy or disrupt damage some of their schools and they have to shut down. It's a predictable disruption to their education continuity. There are other contexts that might be related to conflict, migration, pandemics. Let's not mention that. There are a number of reasons why our programming or formal education programming might be disrupted. And so one of the things we've been thinking about I think as a community is how can we make our e-learning and our education more resilient to those kind of disruptions. So the idea of the ILP box is to provide another option, another way that we can reach learners and make our e-learning available for them. So let's talk about Kenya. We were really fortunate to be able to collaborate with Save the Children who are an INGO. I think they're the world's largest child facing INGO and they're a shareholder in our social enterprise Inclusive Education and we teamed with Sesame Street who are a brilliant organisation and together with a partner in Kenya called Agitab and Maxwell is here today from Agitab somewhere at the back of the room. We designed a project called Watch Play Learn designed to bring opportunities for some basic education into the DADAB refugee camp in Kenya. So just quickly, so the project was running from mid last year to mid this year, it's just wrapped up. The implementing partner was Save the Children and what we wanted to do was strengthen classroom learning during free choice, maths and creative activities. So we wanted to reach 320 early childhood development learners and work with a whole bunch of facilitators. So we ran two classrooms and two schools each to estimated reach of 80 students per classroom. You might ask 80 students per classroom. If you haven't worked in international development, yes, that's not uncommon. So this is Patrick from the Agitab team setting up for training sessions. So we have a lot of training sessions. And what we did was we started out with train the trainer activities. So we had two courses and I can show you a quick look in a minute. One was basic digital literacy on how to use the tablets, digital tablets. And that's often a starting point in my experience for our projects. And then secondly, an introduction to the content, but also the concept of playful learning. So this is something that would have been negotiated with our instructional designers. And some of you would recognise that playful learning is not commonly the kind of education that's practised. There's a lot of rote learning. Sometimes they're singing. But this was a different kind of concept that the team had had come up with that they wanted to introduce. So there were some specific things that were included in the design project to support digital inclusion. One was the way that we thought about the content. So rather than lots and lots of words, we're working with video and audio. So we're not assuming a level of literacy among the children here. Bearing in mind that some of this content was about emotional wellbeing and development. So the point was perhaps not necessarily to learn to read and write. It was recognising children in a vulnerable situation and wanting to achieve some particular program objectives there. The second thing we did was recognise, okay, there's a lot of children in a classroom. And these little boxes have limitations to how many can connect serious limitations. And of course, no project can fund unlimited resources. So the team came up with a model where they would share tablets, digital tablets. So children worked in groups. The third thing that we really focused on was capacity building of teachers and trainers. And in that way, we have people working with the children who speak their language and understand them and know them. And I think are more likely to provide positive learning experiences. And then finally, all of the video content from Sesame Street was re-voiced. Now, voiced over. Okay, so that's some of the things that were designed. And then obviously and probably the thing I didn't put on the list was we used the Moodlebox project to deliver all of this through an offline box. So for those of you who are interested in more of the technology side of things. So the box is a server. We made some changes to it because we were aware that there were some limitations to the Raspberry Pi boxes. So we beefed up the storage significantly. We're working with video. There was a lot of content to fit on this box. And by the way, you can imagine how expensive it would be for someone to consume all of that video over the internet. So this is also a great benefit of working offline. So the box broadcasts its own Wi-Fi network. So most of you, I'll be interested to know how many actually should be able to see it from the box. And learners access the content through a tablet running the Moodle mobile app. So we just use Moodle. And the videos were developed in a range of formats and there's some PDS and some games. But one of the great things about the Moodle app is fairly resilient to internet dropouts. In fact, there's a lot of content on the app that will work without internet. So if you can imagine this, a child or a teacher might bring the tablet close to the ILP box and sync, but then go away with the tablet. Because now it's on there and the Moodle app will remember, you know, case the course. And then other people can come to the box, you know, almost like coming to the well to get water or something like that, digital well. So that's the way that the project used the box as a broadcast resource. But we didn't intend for everybody to be connected to it all the time. It's a really fantastic approach. And if you haven't considered that in your projects, worth testing and trialling because the Moodle mobile app is a brilliant bit of kit. Okay, now the bit that I have helped habitations about and you all enjoy the live demo. So we're going to, is that okay? You do it. I don't want to break your setup. Okay. And how are we going to do this? Thank you. Is everyone feeling confident? You shouldn't be. Okay. So if you want to follow along, you can. But I'll get specific now. I will warn you that this little Raspberry Pi box can only support a certain number of concurrent users. And it does kind of depend on what you're doing to it, how much traffic you're trying to put through it. But if you would like to try following along and you can see the network ILP box one, go ahead and try and connect to it. Maxwell am I making a terrible mistake here?  Okay. Not more than five or six. Yeah. And it does depend what we're doing. So if you would just like to connect to the box to see it, well, that will be interesting. Maybe we can crash it and we will have learned something as a group. But these things do have limitations. And it's one of the reasons why we made made a change to the hardware that we're working with. Okay. So you will want a password. That's right. So the password is capital I, capital L, capital P, ILP, inclusive learning platform, little letters, B, O, X, box, zero, zero, one. And it does take a little while to resolve the network connection. How many people have got in the room? More than 10. What I'm not going to tell you is the login for the moodle sites. I'm hoping Maxwell that that will allow the server to perform okay. But you can by all means hit the home page. Can we have a few hands up if that password worked for you? Yes, work for at least one person. And it's interesting. So the Wi-Fi network is reaching right around the back. Work for Mike. Is that Mike? I'm wearing my computer glasses. And the URL you want to hit is http colon slash slash moodle box dot H-O-M-E home. And in terms of internet, the whole galaxy of the internet on this box is restricted to that one URL and the moodle site. Yes, I think you have to do the H-T-T-P colon slash slash though moodle box dot H-O-M-E. And it may take a little while to resolve. Yeah, too many. Who has connected? One, two, three, four, maybe. Five. Yeah. So there you go. And you've got a 404. Six. Okay, stop, seven.  Okay, so the good thing is the antenna that we installed is working well if it's hitting down the back. So that's a win. So you can imagine from an instructional design point of view, we're already starting to think, okay, if we have 80 children or we have 40 teachers, we have four classrooms, how are we going to manage access here? So very quickly, we get to thinking about groups and staging so that there's a successful experience. Okay, so I'm going to log in. Perhaps when I'm done showing you around, I'll invite a couple of you to have a go as well. No, thanks. Okay. So from a design point of view, you'll notice that we kept it real simple and there's lots of visuals in this Moodle course. In fact, it doesn't look a heck of a lot like Moodle. But in here, we've got the teacher training courses that we used with the train the trainer. So now we're looking at a pretty typical looking looking course. So the kind of topics you'll see here, you know, intro to using a tablet to using tablets for digital learning, collaborative learning with tablets, you know, the real nuts and bolts. And what we've learned is on the ground, face to face support in the way that Agitab provided is an essential ingredient. Don't attempt to do this stuff remotely. Make sure that you either have project resources on the ground or an implementation partner that can represent you in a culturally appropriate language appropriate way makes all the difference in the world. Most of you won't know me. Some of you might. I used to work for a Moodle partner called NetSpot in Australia years ago. I've been working with Moodle for a long time and I can remember in the university sector, working with grumpy lecturers, I presume they're still grumpy for those of you that work in industry. Usually had sort of one or two minutes of patience with them to try something new with technology before they go, this just doesn't work, I give up. And then, you know, then you have to convince them to come back. So that immediate face to face support is crucial. OK, so there's no need really for me to walk you through the courses other than to say we used the Moodle box for teacher training and this course content there. Slightly more interestingly, if we go to the social and emotional learning videos. Bad news, Cookie Monster is frustrated and you don't have audio, but that's OK because I don't know where that sound came from, but I could hear it. I can actually spot an issue here, I don't know if you've spotted it. That's definitely not English. Let's try it in Somali. OK, you get the idea. So we, there are heaps of videos that are voiced and loaded up. And the box did a pretty good job at streaming them out, but we found the best practice first was to sync your course with the Moodle mobile app on a tablet and take it away so that you're not hitting the box. And that's a really viable approach for you to take. OK, so far so good. There's a couple of people in the room who are here as my safety net to catch me if it all went horribly wrong, but so far seems to be going pretty much right. Would anyone like to have a go? Maybe we take a hands up and I can give you a username and password. We can have two or three people connect. Thank you. Yeah, so if you type in the username student2 and password student2, would anyone else like to have a go? And you might identify a theme here. Yes. OK, so if you use student3, student3 and student4, student4 and we'll stop there, you should be able to log in and maybe just show other people on your on your table. So again, just to confirm you are not on the Internet, you're on a closed box. Well, that's happening. Would anyone like to suggest some other reasons why development actors might like this approach when it comes to children's learning? Or is that too obvious a question? I don't think it is. So apart from dealing with digital inclusion and offline, why else might this be appealing as a pedagogical approach one wants to talk? OK, some of you are thinking but not saying I'm certain. So in terms of child safeguarding, this is great because they're not on the open Internet. And I can remember a project four years ago that we ran with a telco who was part of their deal. They wanted to see lots of data going over the Internet. So we ran a live connection with apps and the Internet filtering was a nightmare. We spent the whole project trying to blacklist or whitelist and get it all sorted out. So working offline can be a really positive thing when it comes to programming use of digital with children. 435. OK. Everyone logged in? OK. Yeah, cool. OK. All right, I'm going to go back to the slides and then we'll have some discussion. Thank you. I did just put a screen protector on it before I left. I actually would like this to break. I've had it about four years. All right, thank you. I wouldn't really like it to break. All right, so there was some coding that the team undertook for this project and another project that dealt with another requirement for our project team, which was, OK, well done. The box is going to support learners who have no Internet. The box is going to be offline. Give us data from the box. So there's commonly two or three ways that we solve this together. One way is you can do a system where you go around with a memory stick and manually pull data. We chose the approach where if you can bring the box into an Internet network, even for a brief period of time, then we can pull data off. So we wrote there's meant to be an animation there. Why isn't it playing? It's not playing in the browser. Imagine a really beautiful arrow that I spent like three minutes animating going up and another one going down. So on the Raspberry Pi box an administrator can push a button that activates a plug-in that we wrote that will push content, the mouse is at least working, low high-tech, up to a Moodle site on the cloud. Why do that? Because now we're pushing all the user data up under the cloud and now you can remote into the cloud from anywhere in the world and start to pull that data down. Or even if you're really clever and start pulling it into a reporting visualization or if you're really, really clever, start to integrate it with other meal-reported data which is being captured from a project to share in near real-time. Really powerful stuff. The other plug-in that we've written is on the server side where we can do the reverse so we can pull data from the box but we can also push content down. And I don't think I've been in a project yet where we've been brought in late. Contract's been signed weeks after the project actually kicked off and everything needs to be done immediately but then people changed their mind. We've had boxes ship to the field and then we get the request, okay, we need to put some more content on the box. And we're like, they're over there now. So we write this tool that you can push content down. And so this becomes really powerful. It's definitely a first generation. We found some limitations. It worked in some context then with boxes that were configured or had lots of content on them. It stopped working. So I don't want to overpromise that this is a ship ready product that certainly worked well in contexts that were relatively lightweight. So some reflections on this project. What worked well? Well, the offline piece definitely worked well in a context where there wasn't internet for everybody. This worked. We were able to distribute video. The capacity building with teachers worked really well. They developed digital competencies and were able to support learners. And the learners reported that they found the tech easy to use. And there's evidence based on the number of times that videos had been opened and Moodle sites were hit. Little glitch though. The tablets were being shared between learners and the team chose not to do a individual username password because of the likelihood that that just creates disruption. So we had this kind of bulk data for the project that we're able to report but not on an individual level, which was a source of frustration for the project team. So challenges and lessons that we learned. One was when you have 40 digital devices all playing a video from Cookie Monster. That's a lot of Cookie Monsters and it gets noisy. So next time either deploy headphones as well or what the team ended up doing was more of a rotation, rotational use of the data. One of the boxes broke. Technology breaks. Fortunately, we had the edge of a team on site and they were able to replace the box but that happens. Expect it. So I would design with some redundancy I would suggest. And there were really high expectations from the project team around the data that we would pull. And in retrospect, you know, probably, no, I don't know how to put it other than we knew upfront what the issues were and I think by the end of it, everybody else did too. And we may have been able to do things differently next time but, you know, data is really important when you're working in international development. So this is a piece that requires, I think, further attention and investment from a few of us. So there's some of the lessons that we learned. And I guess the other thing, honestly, was that we were a little disappointed that although we beefed up a number of components in the Raspberry Pi devices, that practically really, you know, only you could comfortably say five to maybe 10 users at a time connect. We were kind of hoping for more like 30 and I've certainly seen devices with beefier components. Then you get a trade-off. They need more power. They're more expensive. So I think as an industry, we're still yet to kind of find that sweet spot, you know, on price, power consumption. We used power banks to power the devices, which was a fairly sustainable way to go. Okay. Let's go back to Menti and we'll do some more kind of workshop components here. That was another question I could have asked earlier. We'll skip that one. So what I'd like to invite you to do at your tables and if you're not at a table with other people, join one. Have a quick chat. What you think Moodlebox is great for from your perspective. And then at least one of you or two of you scribe and enter into Menti and we can look at those results together. So yeah, we've got a few minutes. So take two or three minutes to chat amongst yourselves at your table if you dare or at least a partner, someone next to you. Be friendly. We learn from each other. This is the open source community. And then at least one of you scribe if you've not yet got access to Menti, just go to menti.com and use the code at the top of the screen. I'll give you a couple of minutes. So this is great. And I'm seeing some of the themes that I've touched on like the need for local support included here. We've talked about low cost, security, which is good to acknowledge, I think. And yeah, it is great for schools with no internet access. It's pretty exciting to be in a community where the school may have no windows, might have a dirt floor. The only technology is a blackboard, but we can bring kind of sustainable technology and it's powered by the sun, for example. And we can bring a rich set of learning resources, particularly where there's no library. You know, it's just heartbreaking when you see context where there's just no books. We can bring all these rich resources, which is just wonderful. Okay. Refugee camps, yes, that's a good context, no cable infrastructure. Isn't it brilliant that oftentimes in international development, we can just leapfrog a bunch of stuff that in, I guess, high income countries we relied on, like electricity lines or electricity or ethernet cables for internet. We don't need that stuff. Wonderful. Next question. So based on what you've heard today or in your own experience, what do you see as some of the limitations of Moodlebox? What have you learned not to expect from a Raspberry Pi device? Thank you for the responses. Yes, maintaining the hardware is an interesting one. I would suggest over-order. Raspberry Pi's during COVID, and I suspect still, were really hard to get a hold of. So order a few more than you need. You wanna have one for your tech support team to have on hand, so they can test and debug. You probably wanna have a couple of spares in the field as well. You probably need one for teacher training. So there's a range of reasons why you'd wanna do that. So yeah, the no data on individual progress, you can, it's just people need to log in. So you'd need to solve that problem for your project. And just with the number of children that we were working with, the team decided not to issue every child a username and a password. We could have, and then we would have had that data. I've seen some projects where actually what we're interested in is gender or by age, in which case you can have tablets for boys or girls, or you just have a simple thing. We select I'm a boy or a girl. So some identifying information. So that is possible. It's solvable. It's really down to the project design. So you need to weigh up the digital capability that the people you're working with have to log in and log out. Yeah, so space. So in this case, we really beefed up the hard drive. Maxwell, how big's the hard drive in this box? 500 gigabytes. That's huge. Yes, yeah, like a laptop. Thank you. Yeah, so that's configurable. I can remember when I first started out, we're charged by the megabyte for hosting. Yeah, update of resources is limited. Yeah, so out of the box, the Moodlebox project is one where you will put something on there and ship it. People can build courses locally, but you wouldn't be able to remotely update that box without some enhancement or support like we built. And yes, the loading times can be slow. I was talking to someone earlier who said, yes, but still slow is better than no internet. So we can live with that. But it's a factor. I'm pushing buttons to advance the slide. Oh, there we go. Okay, so what ideas do you have? We've shared some of the things that we've done to make Moodlebox more functional. What are your thoughts, and again, you might wanna chat amongst other people, that would make this approach, this offline learning approach, better. How could we improve this? What are your ideas? And just for amusement, I don't know why, but I decided to put an animation of an alpaca reminding me of home. That actually looks more like a llama, and there is a difference. Really? Well, they look different in Australia, but yes, and the llamas have the bigger, yeah, like this, yeah. I mean, it's hard to tell, it's an illustration. Yeah. No ideas yet. Maybe I need to give you some prompters. So if we wanted to have more people connected to it, that's one problem to solve, how you might do that. If you wanted to pull more data on an individual, how you might design for that. The issue is Mentimeter, it's not open. Thank you. Just mark the time, we're 51 minutes into the session and something finally has gone wrong. That's not too bad. I'm pretty happy with that. All I can really think to do is rerun it or check the settings, so. Well, no, I've never seen this before. I thought I'd pay for this, but maybe I don't. Maybe I've run out of free questions.  Well, this is good, we have to talk to each other now. Who has an idea of how this could be improved? Thank you. We have a microphone? Sorry, just a minute, I can't hear you. So perhaps others can't as well. We'll run a microphone out to you. Not an improvement, but just another use case scenario. As you said, most of these settings don't have books and we used one of the Raspberry Pi's way back and an earlier version of the Pi and converted it into a library server and hosted a whole bunch of 5,000, 6,000 EPUB books using Libre Caliber, which is our open source library management software, and hosted it at one place in the school. That school had digital devices so children could read any kind of book at any point of time or magazines or whatever it is that we hosted. So that was one use and it worked brilliantly because books are not a huge budget burden and that was one. Another scenario I'd just like to present that we've used, these are in hybrid locations where there is some amount of internet. So we customized Debian and branded it, the organization's called Tamron Tree so we branded it as Treebian. We put a suit of open source resources like JCompre, Tuxmat, TuxPent, JFractions, KGeography from the KDE environment and we installed this in a substance abuse center so they had a set, so when they would log in to the Raspberry Pi, they had a set of offline ready to use OERs and they also had internet so at particular times of the day they could use the Moodle LMS. The people running the show were given the micro SD card reader so in case something goes wrong with the OS and you don't know what to do, you just take it out and you know, throw it, send it back to us and you just install it again. So my couple of points is I think there are a lot of technological solutions. The main challenges in the uptake of either an SBC in a rural setting or Moodle in a box is the mindset of the people running the show, that's one. And second is the consistent use of the program. So if implementing partners like them, we draw, then the teachers or the set up, they're stops using that set up. So there's a lot more cultural training and that kind of thing. Technological solutions have existed even 10 years ago. But the uptake and then the perseverance that if something doesn't work, what do we do, how do we do that? If there is no motivated implementing partner or no motivated audience, that's one. The second thing we found is that if you are delivering directly to children through the SBC or through Moodle in a box, the results are far higher than when you're putting a lot of effort training teachers. Whereas if you have content, the child will say I want to access that content tomorrow morning. I need to see that video again. I want to do that quiz again. So working with the beneficiary directly over the intermediary, which is a teacher who's more hesitant, very inhibited, doesn't want to make the effort, has worked more successfully than going top down. Then children demand it. And then the institution has to provide it. And it becomes a resource. So we're really happy to hear. And I would like to share some of our experiences later on. But we've been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pi here. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for your contribution.  Because we are a community and one of the things I wanted to say is for those of you who have tried working with Raspberry Pi or you're working in the development sector, I'd love to meet you. So that we can learn from each other or commiserate when things go wrong. I live and work out of Australia, which feels like a long way from here sometimes. And so these connections are particularly valuable from my perspective. So there's a few familiar faces in the room that I've met already. And I'm glad to have met you. Would anyone else like to share your thoughts about how this approach could be improved? Or I'll open it up if there are questions about what we've done. If there's technical questions, we have technical people in the room. And otherwise, I might be able to help. Yeah, so glad to take questions or suggestions. Thank you. Hi, all right, question. So the problem with Raspberry Pi is not if the SD card or whatever storage you put in there going to bring, but when? How do you make a backup plan on when the SD card or the SSD is corrupted? Yes. Hey, Maxwell. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think if I understand the question is, what happens if you're using the Pi and mid-project something fails like the SD card or the drive? So I guess the question is how could we mitigate that risk? So we chose to write the code that would allow the course sync function. So we had a copy of that data online once it was synced. So it was like taking us back 20 years, right? Remember we used to backup servers and we used to do monthly backups and weekly backups and it's like that. You're just encoding that in your project. So that's one approach you can take. So another thing we did was build it so that we could clone the Pi's. So we could clone a new Pi and send it out. We wouldn't have the user data, but we would have all the course content information set up without the expense of having to have all those devices sitting on the shelf. So that is another approach you can take. Oh, we've got two minutes. All right, last quick question. And when we can chat more afterwards, I'd encourage you to seek out Maxwell, who has experience with SD cards and corrupting and I think that's why we went with the solid state. Yep. Any other questions? Okay. Then I'm going to wrap up. I just wanted to let you know what else we're working on. So it's been really exciting and terrifying and humbling to have the opportunity to work on actually two projects. We've also worked in Cambodia and I didn't talk about that project today, where we've been using the RAZ reply. Meanwhile, our team has been working on ways to make Moodle more digitally inclusive from a SAS point of view. So we've written a way to register with a mobile phone number, knowing that a lot of our projects have users that don't have an email address. We're also supporting EPUB files so that the Moodle mobile, sorry, so that Moodle can be used as an e-reader. So that's in the browser and that opens up more possibilities. And we've integrated the Twilio text messaging system with Moodle forums. And so now we're giving some of our instructional designers like Lauren the challenge of, hey, how would you design for learners, some of whom have a smartphone and others might be in the community with a handphone and receive SMSs? Can you be more digitally inclusive that way? And finally, with simplifying Moodle, by basically turning stuff off, which we're excited about as well. So thank you for participating. And I look forward to meeting some of you after and this evening and hanging out. I hope it was a session that met the expectations that we set at the start to learn some basics about Moodle and see what worked and what didn't. And hopefully you met someone interesting or you're about to in a session as well. Wish you a great conference and look forward to parting on tonight. Thanks everyone.


Hey, everybody. Welcome to the LaDoc Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be our homeschool plans for the fall semester. Now I recently shared our homeschool plans for the school year, which I will link up here for you guys, but I try to come back a seasonally and share a more specific plan for what that semester is going to look at. Because normally once I get into the semester or closer to it, I have a better idea of what I actually want to do in our homeschool. And that's what I love about homeschooling is that it gives me the freedom to be able to change with Emily's interest or with life or our plans or whatever. So for us, the fall is the months of, or are sorry, the months of September, October and November. So what I'm going to share is pretty much what I'm hoping that we will get done September through November. Now I'm just going to get started here. But before I do, I want to preface this by saying that this is the plan, not that this is what's actually going to happen, because best laid plans, they are what they are. So for math, our main thing that we'll be using for math will be teaching textbooks. It is the one very curriculum-y thing that we do for the most part. Emily just does the next lesson. She is using math six as of right now and I have no clue about lessons she's on. We stopped at the end of the school year. We took the summer off from teaching textbooks for the most part. And then we're going to start back in September wherever she was. In addition to teaching textbooks, Kevin does some math with her more like real-world math when they do their steam lessons. And what he has chosen to do with her for the fall semester is this life skills bargain kind of workbook that we found. I got this from Rainbow Resources. It is practical activities to teach how to shop bargains. So when I was looking through this, what I loved is it kind of teaches you like how to use coupons, how to get the best price on everything. Not just coupons, but like if it's buy one, get one free. Or like here's one talking about round trips and how to get the best price on plane tickets. So it really is that great real-world math that we were looking for. So he's going to be doing this and the Mathological Liars because Emily absolutely loves those and we've been using those for years and that's what he'll be doing with her on their steam days for math. For language arts, we do a little bit of everything. Emily absolutely loves taking book clubs on out school with Mary Hannah Wilson. I will link them in the description. As of right now, I'm pretty sure that all of them are full already, but if you are interested, get on the wait list because people will drop out and the opportunity will present itself hopefully for you to be able to get in. So for the fall, which would be again, September, October, November, she will be doing book clubs for the mouse and the motorcycle, Mr. Limoncello's very first games and the girl who stole an elephant. Now those will be for the eight to 10 year old book clubs. She is 11, but she loved this book title so she is taking that class as well as the 11 to 13 year old class. So the books for that class will be the insignificant events in the life of the cactus, framed and sweep the story of a girl and her monster. So those will be the books that she is doing book clubs with Mary with. Some of them she will read independently. Some we will read aloud. I'm pretty sure that we are reading and literally what distinguishes that is whether I want to read it or not. I'm pretty sure that I want to read all of the 11 to 13 year old books. These have all been on my personal to be read list. We'll see whether or not we get through them as read aloud. She may have to read on without me and then I'll read them after the fact if that's the way that plays out. In addition to book clubs, we will also continue doing things like journaling. This is something that we really enjoy doing in our homeschool. We do it about every other week and we just kind of randomly we'll journal about. Okay, like for example, here's a recent Disney trip that we took. We use our sprocket printer. We print pictures, we stick them on there and we will just write whatever. Sometimes it can be simple things. For example, here I'll show you. It's not always big events. This is a mixture of a big event trip as well as just some of our 5Ks and the fact that my mom was teaching her how to sew. So there's that. It doesn't always have to be anything big. Sometimes it's just simple things that are going on in our lives. We just sit down every one to two weeks and we journal about whatever speaks to us and I love that number one, she's learning how to do some personal writing and that number two, we're gonna have these really awesome memories to keep because we do it together. So we both have one of those. We will also still be doing mail time. It's mail time Monday, but it typically alternates with journaling. We don't do it every week. It's about every other week and I'm really excited because these letters that I pulled, we are specifically going to read in the month of September because they coincide with a trip that we're gonna be taking. So we have some like Big Ben, which is a national park we're gonna go to, USS Alabama, the Alamo, things that we're hoping to see on our trip. So I'm hoping that this will get us excited. And then Emily will be doing editor in chief. This is not what the cover actually looks like. I have all of our covers made like that. What it actually is is just her editing. I can find one that she's done because she's already started. She really liked the idea of being able to edit and use a red pen, mark things off. And so it is just them teaching different lessons. So this was a lesson about content and then she went through and edited for content errors. So that is what she's using just because she likes the idea, like I said, of editing and I wanted to capitalize on it. It happens to teach a little bit of everything. The lessons are grammar, punctuation, spelling. So it's kind of a little of everything run on sentences and sentence fragments. You're essentially editing for all of those mistakes. So I feel like it teaches it in a different, more fun kind of way than just, you know, this is how you spell this. And then we will be doing like some creative writing and some of the things that I have pulled to show you guys are the My52List projects. She's been working on this for, I don't know. Let's see, I guess about 17 weeks. And it just has a bunch of different lists to like list your funniest moments. List where you would go and what you would do if you could drive a car. List the ways you can take care of yourself. List your favorite things about each season. So again, just kind of a simple creative writing prompt. I pull this when I don't have anything else for her to do and she's not doing anything actively. Right now she is creating some of her own books. So we may pull this weekly. We may not pull this at all. We will see. It's one of the creative things that we do. As well as this free writing poetry notebook by Kwame Alexander, I bought this for her because she read the crossover by him and absolutely loved it. And I thought this was kind of cool because he literally walks you through all these different free writing based off of like different poetry rules. Let's see if I can find one. That's, so, Filthy's poem had three features you can try after he's read a poem. He used alliteration. He uses a lot of stellar rhyming. There's a distinct rhythm. And then he teaches you about each of those things.  So the whole thing is like that. And she's just really enjoyed, like here's one poem based off of Book Spines. She's just really enjoyed being taught by an author that she enjoyed reading. So I think she's probably about halfway through it. But again, this is just something that she pulls and she's interested or if she hasn't done any kind of language arts and I'm maybe busy, I'll pull it out for her, shrew it, see if she's interested in doing it. And that kind of wraps up our language arts other than what we'll be doing in our morning basket, which I will post about that really soon for you guys. Four unit studies. This year, I am going to attempt at taking each term, if you will, which is approximately 12 weeks and splitting it into two six week chunks because of the amount of things that Emily wants to learn this year and because of some of the things we have going on field trip wise and trip wise, that is my plan. I will let you guys know how it works. So for this semester, we're gonna split the first six weeks, which would be September and part of October into basically what is going to be learning for our trip. So that is going to be using traveling the parks. We will do all of the national parks that we are planning to go to, and then we may end up doing some on our trip as well because what I know for sure that we're gonna do is Big Bend, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains and White Sands. Hands down for sure, we're hitting those four. We may hit more. We are literally winging it. We are going on a trip. We are going to do whatever we can do and go as far as we can go. So we will take traveling the parks with us and if we are deciding to extend our trip, we will just school on the go with whatever's left. On our way out, we are going to be stopping in San Antonio to do the Alamo and because of that, we will be doing the Who Was Davy Crockett and What Was the Alamo. So that will be the first six weeks. It will be a history that will be a mixture of traveling the parks, Who Was Davy Crockett, What Was the Alamo and that's what we will do for that. Basically preparation for our trip and then obviously our trip will be seeing all of that in real life. The second six weeks of the term when we get back, we will be doing what will be released soon, which will be a Weather and Natural Disaster Unit Study. This was one of Emily's picks for the year. It was something she was very interested and wanted to learn more about and so this should release, I believe tomorrow, if this video goes up when I think it's going up and so it will be in the shop and it will be 30% off at the time of release and it's gonna be so much fun. I'm so excited. Weather is a topic that her and Kevin are both really, really interested in and so I think it's gonna be really fun and then to go along with that, I am doing three What Was books to get some history in. So we will be doing What Was the Great Chicago Fire? What Was Hurricane Katrina? And What Was the San Francisco earthquake? And so that is what our unit study will look like for the second six weeks, which will be half of October and hopefully all of November. In addition to all of that, the classes that she will continue to take for the fall will be a zoo class in person. It's a homeschool zoo class that she did last year in love. She's gonna do that again this year. Obviously we already talked about the book club that she'll be taking on out school. She will also be taking her Lego class, which is Interactive Bricks with Miss Bethany. I will link that in the description as well. She loves that and she's very excited to be doing that and Bethany is actually gonna be doing some of the Who Was books' inspiration and then some of the Science Comics' inspiration. So it's kind of this like when, when Emily will be doing history, science and Lego all at the same time. I don't think it gets better than that. And then she will be doing 4-H archery as well. That is kind of her thing with my dad and Kevin. I just go and observe, but she's really going to have a great time with it and that means every other week. The last thing that we have are subscriptions. Now we are going to stay subscribed to a lot of things that might be done in the fall, but the ones that I know for sure are gonna be done is what I pulled to show you guys and it's what Kevin will be doing on his steam days with her because that's the only things that gets planned. We still will be getting Universal Yums. We may or may not have time to do them because of the trip. They may be basically waiting on us when we get back. She will still be getting her Zoo Box. Again, they may just be waiting on us when we get back. But the things I know for sure that are going to get done because Kevin has them planned for their steam lessons are the Crunch Labs. They absolutely love these, like absolutely love them. And this one happens to be, I can't show you the top because our dress is up there. This one happens to be a drawing machine. The Generation Genius, they've really, really been liking these, the amount of science that's happening with them is amazing. This is kit three. Let's see if it tells me. I don't think it's gonna quickly tell me. It looks like we have an unwetable sand, a glowing slime, and a blueprint paper experiment in this box. The Kiwi Eureka Crate is another one that they really like. I will say that this is a little old for Emily to do by herself. I think the Eureka Crates are, I think the sticker is over it. I think they're like 12 to 14 plus. She definitely has to have Kevin's help with this, but the two of them together love it. And this one that they will be doing is a mechanical globe. And then the last thing that they will be doing during steam, which is probably gonna take up a good portion of the first six weeks is this Wise Elk Alamo that they will be building. So it is 510 pieces. It says five plus. It is a mini brick constructor set. I found it on Amazon and I was like, you guys are going to the Alamo, would you like to do this? They both said yes. And so this is probably what they'll be doing essentially before we leave for our trip. And then the other ones will be what they're doing once we get back. That is everything that I have planned for our fall semester. Like I said, we will also still be doing morning basket at some point during our day. It probably will not be in the morning. And I will be sharing with you the details of that soon. So if you're interested in what is in that, make sure you're subscribed and that you are turned on for notifications. That little bell will do that for you. But before I go, I would love it if you would tell me down in the comments what your plans are for homeschooling this fall.