One E-Portfolio System - Mahara & Useful Web App - SimplyBox

We've been using Moodle for about four years now and this year we've added Mahara to the mix. Mahara is an opensource applications developed specifically for education but includes many of the social networking components found in many of the most popular web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc. etc. Because it's opensource it can be installed on your own server and used safely with in the confines of your own network...if you so choose...

I created a few introductory video tutorials about how to use Mahara here:

Mahara Part I - Introduction to Mahara
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=259371f8c4da6cd18c7a

Mahara Part II Creating Views and Web Sites
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=89545cb64213bb4b2fad

Mahara Part III Set Viewing Permissions
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=735759ce4226cc4335cb

Mahara Part IV - Creating Groups
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=c56519618d60e87e2ea6

Also, I had the opportunity to explore SimplyBox yesterday, and I create a little VoiceThread tutorial on how you could use this web application in the classroom. This is a pretty nifty web application, and after talking with the developers, they understand how popular the tool is with eduction and are getting ready to release some new features that will make it even better. If you interested, give the tutorial a whirl at:

http://voicethread.com/share/309201/

Tags: Mahara, Moodle, SimplyBox, VoiceThread

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Comment by David Huston on January 28, 2009 at 11:05am: John:

Thanks so much for sharing these. We are just taking our first baby steps with Mahara and your videos will be very helpful.

One question: I know Mahara is designed to give users a great deal of control over who can see their views. Unfortunately, that also means that if we want to use Mahara as a way to enable a large number of teachers to be able to access a student's view, it seems we must ask that student to set up the group herself. Is that right? I foresee too many errors in that process.

I was thinking about setting up a Gmail account that a bunch of teachers had access to (b/c they all knew the log in info), and asking students to designate that "person" as having access to their view.

Do you think that would work? Simplicity for the student is my goal.

Thanks again for your efforts.

David Huston

Comment by Sonia Guilana on February 25, 2009 at 4:48am: Hi, :-)
I am trying Mahara too and next September I would like to implement it in our highschool, inserted in our Moodle server as well. Any basic guidelines, John, to follow?
I am interested to know what happens to mahara, when, for example, you upgrade your moodle. Does it offer any problems?
Do you have any public view of your students to share so I can see the possibilities of this promising tool?
thanks in advance!! :-)
Sònia

Comment by John Patten on February 25, 2009 at 10:01am: Hi Sonia....those are all good questions. Unfortunately, we have not gone down the Moodle upgrade with Mahara, so I don't know how Mahara behaves after an update to Moodle. I would think if your students keep their Moodle accounts from year, provided their usernames do not change, there would not be an issue with Mahara. Up to this point, each year we have been updating our Moodle server to fresh install and then re-importing in bulk the student accounts from our student information system. We ask that teachers backup their courses, and then we do a restore of their course onto the new Moodle site.