Why I chose Apple Notes instead of Notion

This article could have been named “Notion vs Apple Notes vs Onenote vs Redmine” but it is no thorough comparison: this are very capable applications, each of them living in a different ecosystem, each with impressive strengths and some weaknesses. […]

Owncloud Full Text Search with Elasticsearch

Using Elasticsearch for Mahara was a very fine experience. After reviving my Owncloud installation (it somehow went away after dist-upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04) I stumbled across this subject. Knowing myself and knowing how useful such an option would be I […]

BigBlueButton/GreenLight and Moodle/Mahara for (Distance) Learning — Part 2: Setup

There are three main parts of this — in order of importance in these times of isolation or quarantine: Part 1: Using BBB and Moodle/Mahara for Cloud Learning — how I like to use ist and find it useful Part […]

BigBlueButton/GreenLight and Moodle/Mahara for (Distance) Learning — Part 1

I am using BigBlueButton since two years, more and more confidently and satisfied: the current versions are very elegant, elaborated but easy to use nevertheless, integration with Moodle is perfect — inside a Moodle classroom you can start a video […]

Seducing to program (very fast)

My first draft started with “Seducing girls…” but I assume this would have produced a lot of false hits ;-). Nevertheless, this is one starting point of my journey: teaching computer science I often ask my students (age 14-15) what […]

AppInventor is going iOS

I already wrote about AppInventor being fun even for absolute beginners in programming (perhaps not even knowing the meaning of this word): it’s like using Scratch (from MIT) supercharged — your mobile doing the things you want to (and mobiles […]

Searching for Mahara with Elasticsearch on Ubuntu 16.04: wonderful!

Now and then I do not really remember where some things have been stored in Mahara: the standard search function is not helpful at all, searching only for user names. Lately I got audacious and thought about setting up Elasticsearch […]

Game based learning and BYOD: Kahoot

I admit that game based learning never was central to me — to learn something new requires quite an amount of work, I think. But acquiring knowledge is just one part of learning, strengthen your new skills by repetition and […]

Creation: Demonstrating Understanding (Monica Burns)

The title of this post is from a book from Monica Burns  I am reading at the moment. This is one aspect which is a guiding idea for me since many years: clearly, creating something related to a subject demonstrates […]

If THEY want to get it done – AppInventor is magic

Now and then I have students which not seem to be very interested in programming: this year a group of 14 girls and 5 boys aged 14 did not respond too enthusiastic to my offer to just snoop into some […]