Week of January 4 - 8, 2016

At the start of this new calendar year I've decided to start writing at the beginning of the week about some of my likely activities for the week. Hopefully this will help organize my thoughts, and some of my colleagues may find it interesting. The style will be a little choppy, but hopefully that'll make for a quicker read.

One of the pressing projects is a system for administration of secure exams on Chromebooks using Google Docs. Greg and I have hammered out the basics of it, but it still needs a little polish and documentation, and of course some classroom testing.

Speaking of provincial testing, as soon as we get five year historical results from Alberta Education, I'll be uploading those to Intellimedia's Dossier system for administrators (and/or designated staff) to use for results analysis.

Another project in the works is the creation of some flexible learning modules for CTS courses that are not commonly taught in our high schools. This mostly includes Computing Science and Networking/Hardware courses. I'll be borrowing heavily on materials created by Jen Deyenberg as well as the expertise of teachers such as Gerald Chung. These will likely start as a web page or document, rather than building them in on a specific platform.

On a related note, we need to find a new home for our Moodle server(s) before the end of the month. This will involve setting up a new Moodle 3.0 instance (including OWLL), migrating the data from the old one(s), hopefully automating user (and perhaps course) provisioning. I'm also hopeful that we can collapse everything down to one Moodle instance for all of EIPS, but of course Next Step will always be the primary and heaviest users.

Privacy Impact Assessments for a few online services need to be completed. Hopefully Dennis and I will have some time to work on those.

On the fun side, I'll be flying our new drones to get some example shots, and writing up what is required for schools to borrow a drone.

Something else that is near and dear to my heart is esports and video game clubs. I'll be supporting schools such as Lakeland Ridge that want to set up lunch-hour clubs and/or gaming flex blocks, and planning more competitions, probably something like:

• January: Smash Bros (elementary)
• February: Halo (high school)
• March: Rocket League
• April: League of Legends finals
• May: Multathlon (a word I just made up for a multi-game competition, similar to Omegathon)

In addition to all of this, I'm hoping to continue empowering the HelpDesk staff to take over a lot of the management that I'm involved in, such as Google Apps, iOS, and Moodle.

As always if you have questions, comments, or concerns feel free to get in touch.