Web site re-design

Over the next couple of months, we are going to be looking at parts of our web offerings to re-design them to make them more useful. So I am thinking about the whole process of web site design and how to go about facilitating this re-planning stage.

I am thinking I need a model to follow and adjust as I go along so this is a good topic for a blog series. I started reading a book on this subject and I'll try to document this process. The first meeting is tomorrow with a curriculum group about a project we call "Dashboard". Not sure why it ever got that name, probably due to our grandiose plans for all that it would accomplish someday, but it has never been more than a curriculum mapping tool. The purpose was to map the activities, resources, and assessments that we use to our curriculum (state content standards) in order to show that we cover all of the intended standards and to make sure there are not "gaps" in our coverage. So this seems like a good place to develop my planning model, test it out and modify it.

Here is the jumping off (or in) point. I am going to summarize the process from the above mentioned book and then break down the responsibility for each of these steps:

1. Identify Stakeholders - Users and Roles
   
2. Identify User Stories - Descriptions of what the site should be able to do
   
3. Incremental and Iterative planning - Setting a timeline and expectations
   
4. Determine what success will look like - User Defined Acceptance tests
   
5. Determine best way to accomplish - Iterations carried out from the timeline
   
6. Continuous Build - carry out iterations, run acceptance tests, review issues

So, in an initial planning meeting, I believe that steps 1 through 4 will need to be accomplished. To carry that out for our mapper we will need to answer the following questions :

• Who needs access to this system and what should each role be allowed to do?
• What constitutes a curriculum map?
• How will you use it?
• What should it look like?
• What links need to be a part of the map?
• What special features or characteristics does it need?
• What is most important?
• When do you need it?
• What will success look like?

Looks like a good start. I'll have to report back as to how it goes and any adjustments that I make along the way.

Twitter Blocked, Drupal Project progressing nicely.

Twitter is blocked by our Service Center! Ugh! I am once again challenged to find new ways to stay connected. Why don't we just embrace these tools and teach kids how to use them responsibly. Just another brick in the wall...

Anyway, things have been going really well with drupal development. I picked up an electronic copy or Drupal for Education and E-Learning which is awesome! Easy to follow, great screenshots, if you have a little bit of knowledge of drupal this is a quick read and easy development of a powerful learning tool.

The book shows you how to set up Teacher and Student Blogs with backlinks to blogs that reference each other. So if someone posts to their blog with a link to your blog post, a link magically appears on their post page in a section called "What Links Here".

There is a nice little section on creating bookmarks that can be tagged and shared and I'm working on the Podcasting set-up now.

By far the most powerful features that are covered or the use of Views and Organic Groups. With these two tools you can set-up classes (or any group for that matter) with specific content types and then create custom views based on their group memberships. It has all the power of Moodle and a high-end CMS, but is more flexible. If you are looking for a content management system for a school, this is a must read.

There are several sections I have not completed yet that cover Video, Forums, and Social Networking as well as an entire section on Tracking Student Progress. I'll report more as I progress.

BTW, it is like 9° here today, too cold for me! But my office is about 85° so I'm just pretending its nice outside:-)

PD on Forums in sharePoint

I put together a PD session yesterday that has been scheduled for a couple of months now but had no real definition of what it was supposed to be. It was entitled SharePoint Intermediate and was intended to follow SharePoint Beginner. As I looked at the list of participants, I noticed many had not completed the beginner course, so I knew that I could not plan to build on any of the ideas/concepts developed in the first session.

It really opened the door though and allowed me to try to put a different twist to this whole training and try to shift the focus to the concept of community based learning. Our focus for this year with SP is to build a tool for internal communication and to this point it has mostly just been a place to post documents that are needed throughout the district. We also are trying to determine if SP is the right tool for the job and in this case it was, and it was not.

So the topic I choose to cover was forum use. Short version:

• I sent them an email in the morning asking them to bring along a question that had to do with their job
• I spent about an hour throwing together a 3 minute video on Forums in Plain English Ala The Common Craft Show
• I created a new Staff Forum
  
• Had them post various questions, and then reply to each other
• I knew some teachable moments would arise so I had a video waiting for Cyber-Bullying
• Had some forums that I use regularly available

The session was very successful. They enjoyed my poor video editing/directing skills and once they got going we had a fully functional forum with about thirty posts (22 participants) and a rapid succession of replies. I picked out one that had a good question with several replies that illustrated the various knowledge that we had in the room. We talked about the collective knowledge of a group and how everyone benefited from that knowledge. We uncovered some inconsistencies in policy across the district, but I think it will lead to further discussions that will clear up that situation and I do not think it is intentional.

As anticipated, some posted some things that were just silly, not really harmful, but it did single out one of the participants. The video I had ready was just the answer as they all were appalled as it started to play, and then aha! Message delivered and they returned to a more professional tone.

All in all, very successful. I think I'm going to push for a permanent home for this Forum on our Staff Portal. I think it would be very useful. I destroyed the one we developed in this training as some were nervous at the beginning and I wanted to assure they were playing in a "sandbox" that was safe. But, with the experience of the class I think we would benefit as an organization to have a tool like this available.

The biggest drawback was with SharePoint's lack of a wysiwyg editor for firefox or safari. I know there are some aftermarket editors that can be purchased, but it is such a simple thing that you would think they would include if they seriously want to be considered for use in schools. Aside from that SP was an acceptable tool for the job, but experimenting with Drupal today I found it much more intuitive to use the forum module and I set-up fckeditor with a simple toolbar that was very user-friendly. Definitiely something that will have to be considered going forward.

Opportunities

I am really excited about two opportunities that came up this week for tech integration projects. They are not huge, but it is at least a start.

Our French teacher has been doing an email correspondence with a french class for the past 2 years. She is always to try something new but it takes a while to convince her of the effectiveness. Well on Monday she asked if we could do a skype call with her french counterparts. So we have some time issues to work out and are planning to set this up after Christmas break. If anyone has a nice intro active for a skype call please post.

The second opportunity is intra-district between two grades in two buildings. They are going a face to face launch, but then they are going to use Moodle and iChat to sustain communications between the classes. This won't happen until late January, but it is a nice entry level project for me.

In addition, we are visiting SLA in January and I have approval to keep some of the staff their and attend EduCon 2.1. This should be a valuable trip for our District.

Wordle Meme

So Kim Cofino got me to blog twice in one day with this post. First time I've ever seen a wordle, I added it to the top of my right column and hope to update it every so often to see how it changes.

My Wordle

Reflections:

• surprised the technology is not larger
• you can tell I’m not a fan of 2.0 buzzwords
• I use too many adjectives
• I need to blog more in order to get a better picture of what my thinking is
  
• What a great self-reflective activity

Thanks Kim, for getting me off my duff.

Trying to make sense of it all

At my School (as every other I'm sure), we are using a hodge-podge of various web applications to meet the needs of our students. We use Moodle for posting of notes and assignments and the occasional podcast. There are some blogging and forum efforts, but we have not really bought in at this point. We use SharePoint for internal communications and some line of business apps. We use CMS Made Simple for our public facing web-site. We have some roll your own solutions in php-*sql for curriculum mapping, user information systems, and HomeWork Hotlink for parents to check students assignments.

The problem is, we are maintaining too many systems and our users get confused as to which system to go to for specific tasks. Not to mention the amount of training it takes to get users to an acceptable level of use on each system. I'm not sure it is possible, but it would be nice to pull it all together and stream line our web-strategy to develop a simple and consistent interface for Teachers and more importantly our end-users, Students, and Parents.

Sharepoint could be the solution, but buying into "the Microsoft way" of developing is difficult for me. I am not a programmer, I'm an Educator, and I just find it awkward and hard to follow. Sure setting up lists is easy, and it is even easy to link lists to one another, but lookups on those relationships are not easily accomplished without the use of SharePoint designer and that opens the door to a whloe lot of "unrepairable" damage.

So I've been looking for solutions and I'm encouraged by what I've been able to find and do with Drupal. Drupal seems to have huge community behind it and an endless list of modules and themes that bring function and form to the platform. It is easy to install (<15 mins) and easy to modify. The user interface has a low to moderate level of difficulty, which may pose some problems. But it appears that even this can modified through models and templating to make things even easier for our users.

I think we need to take a serious look at this and I'm going to outline a plan to do so. I'm going to start by collecting information on what we do now, how well we do it, and the features we would need to maintain our current level of service. I can then look at the possibility of porting each of these services to drupal and measure three criteria:

• how much set-up, custom development would be required?
• how easy will it be for our teachers to use?
• how easy will it be to access and use by our students and parents?

I will report my thought process and findings back here as I go along, any insights others can share would be greatly appreciated.

I'm starting a list of services right now.

Dangerously Irrelevant: Comfort foods meme

comfortfoods08

Quoted from http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2008/03/comfort-foods-m.html:

Dangerously Irrelevant: Comfort foods meme

Comfort foods meme

My five comfort foods:

1. Homemade Chili
2. Beans and rice
3. Liver and onions (not so much onions)
4. Pie (just about any)
5. Sausage gravy and biscuits