SaigonNezumi.com

Finally, it is an end of probably one of my lackluster weeks in Saigon. Lets see, what happened:

• HSBC deactivated my bank account because they could not find me. I forgot to change my address but I was surprised that HSBS never tried to call me or email me. I always get advertisements through SMS and email. I went in to change my address and passport information. Now I can get money transferred to my email account.
• Yesterday I got my favorite shirt muddy and probably stained while I was following two HTV employees to their office in Tan Binh not far from the airport. I thought their office was in District 1 so I did not bring my jacket or wear a mask. Forty minutes later, I regretted that.
• On the note of HTV, they called me and I thought they wanted me to complete a project for my school. I agreed but it turned out, rather lately, that they wanted me for another project for their client. Why they were not clear in the beginning, I am not sure. They recorded me speaking English so fast, I had to skip words. Their transcript was three pages long and I needed to complete it in under 4 and a half minutes. I made it but I feel sorry for the Can Tho Province residents who have to listen to it.
• My Moodle template for my school became corrupted, I do not know why. It only works in wide resolutions greater than 1024×768.
• My Joomla template had problems. This was for my own new website.
• Several of my school projects are behind schedule thanks to the Albanian hacker.
• On the note of open source, I let the guys down again. I am too tired to organize a meeting…
• At home, I cannot sleep. Even worse, I wake up early to fast so I get less and less sleep each night. Yeah, I am a grouch these days.
• My Milestone phone drained it’s battery really fast this week. Wifi is off and most of the apps as well. Bad battery???
• Got into an argument with a significant other. That was a big drainer for me.
• I need sleep…

Anyway, it is Friday. Saturday I work but I may skip it to rest and get caught up on projects.

Can’t wait for a brighter Monday morning in Saigon. Next week has a lot of positives.

Have a good weekend.

There, one of my few negative posts on my blog…

Well, it has been nearly a month and a half since I started as IT Director at Horizon.  For us, it is crunch time in choosing what systems to use at our school.  The Ministry of Training and Education started classes nearly a month early this year.  To add a bit of stress, a hacker took down our website and school information system.  This gave us an opportunity to start from scratch.

Website/Content Management System

Our major need right now was to get our website back up.  The original site was run on Joomla.  Since I never really used Joomla, I want to replace it either with the propriety finalsite CMS or with the open source Drupal or WordPress.  Finalsite, which is used by many well known international schools around the world, was my favorite but since three of us in school are web developers, it did not make sense to pay a license for this software.  We thought about Drupal but the professional themes were not that desirable.  I am a WordPress guy but after spending a day migrating the school website over to it, I gave up.  WordPress did not make a good platform for a school website, it is just for blogs and I finally admitted that this week.

Hence, we decided to stick with Joomla.  We are using a professional theme and the site should go live this week.  It took me a day to get used to the admin interface and now I really like Joomla.  Joomla has many amazing modules and plugins and I am quite surprised to learn that many websites are actually developed with Joomla.

We plan to integrate Joomla with our SIS and LMS in the future.  A big benefit is that since Joomla is popular in Vietnam, it already has Vietnamese language support.

School Information System

Horizon used an in-house SIS for the last 3 years developed from a sister school in Cambodia.  This SIS was a bit crude but it did it’s job.  Right now I must find a good replacement for our SIS within a week.  My favorite, is SchoolOne.  Veracross and PowerSchool are the leading propriety SISs out there but neither really fit the need of Horizon since we are using both the Cambridge (CIE) and Vietnamese curriculum.  Both are no goes most likely for this academic year.  I am even looking at the SIS developed for the American International School which I really liked.

Right now I am testing openSIS on our server which is used by The American School of Vietnam and APU International School.  Hence, we will either choose SchoolOne (my favorite) or openSIS.  If we go with either, I will have to bring in a developer to localize the entire database and integrate it with Joomla (single login).

Learning Management System

The last major project for me at my school is to find a learning management system we can use.  Our favorite is StudyWiz out of Australia.  StudyWiz integrates with SchoolOne.  It has one of the nicest interfaces I have seen with LMSs.  Both SchoolOne and StudyWiz are fully supported by the companies which can make my job easier but since the school year already started, I may have to postpone the two until January.

In the meantime I installed Moodle, a popular open source LMS.  I am not a fan of Moodle being a long time Sakai user but it does meet the needs of my school.  It is already localized in Vietnamese which makes it a nice choice.  Moodle can also be integrated with Joomla via Joomdle or JFusion.

Final Decision

It looks as if in the meantime, we can use Joomla/openSIS/Moodle for our interim needs.  I am looking at a couple developers to help with the integration including a Viet Kieu Drupal guy.  I will post about our final choices in the future.  We still have a lot of work to do…

Well, now I am moving unto Year 6.  I am making some new changes starting this month in regards to my work with international schools here in Saigon.

Last week, I completed my third year as the part-time Computer Science/ICT Teacher at the American International School.  The first two years were interesting but the last year was a bit long.  AIS now has three campuses and will be opening their main campus in Nha Be, past Phu My Hung, in January, 2011.  They did receive their IB so I wish them the best in the future.  There really is no passion for education at AIS that I felt at the Zaman International School in Cambodia and the Horizon International Bilingual School (HIBS) in Vietnam.

One school that will exemplify a true passion of education is the newly formed The American School of Vietnam (TAS).  I will fill in two weeks for their ICT teacher.  The two weeks will be a great transition for me.  I will be moving from an American educational environment at TAS to a British educational environment at HIBS.

I will be fully on board at HIBS, also known as Horizon, starting July 1st.  My first task is to work with the IT Teachers and principal to implement the Moodle learning management system before the start of the 2010-2011 school year.  We will use Moodle system wide between the 5 HIBS campuses located in Saigon and Hanoi. We are pretty much going to implement an entirely new IT network at Horizon that will meet international standards including using interactive wide boards and distance learning.  Expect me to blog a lot about my IT work at Horizon.  Time permitting, I will also teach the Computer Studies course based on the Cambridge system.

Transitioning to HIBS will be great, it will mean I can get to eat Turkish food everyday.  That is a huge benefit in itself and the Turkish management is very supportive of education.  Most people may have never heard of Horizon.  The school is about 5 years old but in the next 5 years, I guarantee you will hear a lot about this school.

Thus, starting this month, I will be lucky enough to work at 2 of the top 5 best international schools in Saigon (The other three are the British International School, International School Ho Chi Minh City, and South Saigon International School).  These five place quality and education over quantity and profit.  If you are a parent, these values should be very important.  The other international schools do not seem to place any value on quality anymore.  To determine whether an international school is focusing on quality or not, just look at the turnover of the teachers and staff.  The higher quality international schools can retain their teachers and staff, the lower quality cannot.

Just my ten cents worth on international schools in Saigon…