continue the conversation...

Web site re-design

2009-02-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

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:

Identify Stakeholders - Users and Roles
Identify User Stories - Descriptions of what the site should be able to do
Incremental and Iterative planning - Setting a timeline and expectations
Determine what success will look like - User Defined Acceptance tests
Determine best way to accomplish - Iterations carried out from the timeline
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.

2009-01-15T04:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-16T09:08:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T04:17:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-10T05:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-24T16:41:00.001-07:00

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:

Homemade Chili
Beans and rice
Liver and onions (not so much onions)
Pie (just about any)
Sausage gravy and biscuits

Professional Development

2008-03-24T16:31:00.001-07:00

On Developing Meaningful Professional Development

What are the most important aspects of professional development that will lead to meaningful change in classroooms today?

I think the most important thing we can do is to model the use of technology in our professional development sessions. We can not convince teachers that "networked learning" is important by talking bout it, we have to be able to demonstrate its effectiveness in our own teaching.

In addition, technology should not be the main focus of our professional development, but rather it should be embedded as a part of the learning environment. We have to convince teachers that it is an effective solutiona and we have to convince teachers that it will be available when they need it.

Model it, embed it, make it available.

Web 2.0 Presentation

2007-03-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

I presented to our staff last week about Web 2.0 and School 2.0 and haven't blogged it yet, but I wanted to through it up here to share it and answer some of the questions generated.

First of all, thanks for all of the feedback from the staff, most of it was very flattering. The feedback validates my belief of how important this topic is to public education.

Some of the questions raised by this discussion and some partial answers:

Will subscribing to rss feeds take a space on my computer or user account?

The best thing about rss as we demonstrated it is that it really doesn't store anything to your computer. It is just displaying a collection of other people's web-sites and not actually making a document, it is really just a "view" of their page.

How do we apply this to the classroom?

Jeff (principal) announced the next day that we were starting the "Tech Forum" series to allow some time for hands-on question/answer sessions to help teachers answer this question
In addition, there will be some training available either at the end of the school year or at the beginning of next year to help with some more specific instruction on how to apply tis to the classroom.

Where do we find the time to do all of this?

This is the eternal question! We used to ask where we would find the time to learn how to use email or enter grades into our electronic grade-books. Like anything else, it will become a part of your day as it becomes more widely accepted.
Don't feel overwhelmed, this was intended to be an introduction to these concepts and applications.
Start slowly, take it one step at a time. The goal of this presentation was for you to learn about rss feeds and aggregators (feed collectors). Give bloglines or google reader a try. Subscribe to this blog or to Will Richardson's as a starting point. Expand from there.
It is all about reading and self exploration. Read and comment on blogs as time permits. Try to commit some time to this each week. I think you will find it does not take as long as you would expect and you will probably be drawn in more once you find a blog you enjoy reading.
Look for blogs about one of your hobbies or interests. You can't expect to incorporate any of this into your classroom or professional life without understanding how it can be beneficial to an individual. So play with it for recreational purposes as well as professional. You will be more motivated to contribute your "personal" time to things which are not work related.

Two resources I would like to re-emphasize:
The wiki page from our meeting.
RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators

Continue the conversation...

AP Calc Wiki Launch

2007-03-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

I'm excited, I launched a new wiki today with my AP Calc classes. In the past I've always started the test review with a brainstorming session about the "Big Ideas" of Calculus. We then review by filling in the details of those "Big Ideas". In light of School 2.0, I thought it would be a great idea to do this in a wiki as a collaborative effort. We'll see how it goes.

The kids responded well thus far, but they haven't actually added anything yet. We sent the invitations to the group leaders to join the wiki, group leaders are now responsible for inviting the rest of their team.

We started the Brainstorming session, tomorrow we'll work on the structure of the wiki as a class project.

I feel like this is a good example that I can share with others on our staff. Looks like a good "jumping-in" point.

RSS - The first step in Web 2.0

2007-03-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

What is RSS?

RSS could be the best part of Web 2.0! It is one of those features that is under the hood and is not as noticeable as a blog or a wiki, but nonetheless, it's impact is as great or greater. RSS alows you to select what updates to the web you want to be made aware of, it allows you to select what content should be sent to you. With all of the spam problems of email, RSS gives you a way to be selective about what's in your inbox.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is the format in which feeds can be shared. The significance is that when a find a resource that you like, you don’t have to continuously check back with that site to see what’s new, it will "automagically" appear in your aggregator.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

Source http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

Aggregators

So what is a news aggregator?

A news aggregator is a program that collects all of your feeds, and displays them in a folder. You can choose to show only new messages or to show all messages. For a quick and easy set-up, try using bloglines or Google Reader(great if you have gmail). You can find more detailed information in the pdf book by Terry Freedman, Web 2.0: About "Coming of Age: An introduction to the NEW worldwide web", but the process is simple:

Visit the site and get an account
Find some content you want to get updates from
Start reading

You can also use your email client or your browser as your RSS aggregator. Thunderbird and Firefox both have the capability to handle these feeds. In Firefox , if there is an RSS icon in the title bar, you can click on that and select a location to store the folder of feeds. If you use Thunderbird for email than you already have a news aggregator. To set it up visit the knowledge base.

On the Mac, Safari is set-up to handle RSS by default in “News” in your favorites bar. Simple click on a RSS Link and drag and drop the url on the word “News” in the favorites bar.

Feeds

Feeds come from many sources. Some examples: Blogs, Podcasts, Shared Calendars, and News. The significance is that when you find a resource that you like, you don’t have to continuously check back with that site to see what’s new, it will “automagically” show up in you news aggregator.

If you are reading this blog, you can subscribe to it or take a look at the list blogs I read for some other ideas.

What do I look for?

When you visit a page that interests you (such as this blog), look for an icon or an image that says RSS (or Subscribe) and click it to see the feed*. The feed itself will look like a bunch of jibberrish, but the url is what you need to “subscribe” to that page. It should look something like this: . Once you add this feed to your Aggregator, you will be able to view all updates to that page through your aggregator instead of visiting the site.
*-You can also right click (control-click on a mac) and select copy link location, then paste that url in order to subscribe

Before long, you’ll be collecting feeds from all over the web and from all over the world. Good luck, and many happy RSS’s.

School 2.0: Learning through conversations

2007-03-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

Many of the blogs I'm currently reading are by the leading thinkers in the School 2.0 discussion and they are talking about the parts of Web 2.0 as if they are common place in our schools now. But I do not see this to be the case. I see people locked into the old school model of preparing students solely for the placement tests that will in large part determine their future. To be sure, this is important and necessary. But should this be our primary focus? The purpose of this introductory blog entry is to share a little about what Web 2.0 and School 2.0, provide some resources to learn more about these concepts, and the impact of one on the other.

As a classroom teacher turned techie, I see a huge area of need here. The forward thinkers are pushing the edge of the envelope looking for new ways to use Web 2.0 features to define School 2.0, but the masses still don't have a basic understanding of why Web 2.0 is important at all. I hope to shed some light on Web 2.0, and then engage a discussion of School 2.0.

Web 2.0
So just what is this Web 2.0 thing. Web 2.0 is the read/write web. It is in part:

If you want to understand Web 2.0 as an educator, grab this free pdf book: Web 2.0: About "Coming of Age: An introduction to the NEW worldwide web". This book will help you to understand the different parts of Web 2.0, and guide you through some practical examples of setting each of these up and learning how to implement them in the classrom.

School 2.0
School 2.0 (Manifesto, Description) is the discussion of what education (learning) should look like in light of Web 2.0. "There is is no one path to the School of tomorrow", (School 2.0). The central idea of School 2.0 to me, is to focus on defining learning and then look at how to use that definition to better design the role of the teacher in education.

What is learning?
David Warlick suggests that learning happens through conversations. Those conversations can be a classroom lecture or discussion, or they can be an instant messenger session. Kids learn by hearing ideas, restructuring those ideas in their minds, and then re-communicating them in their own words. That is learning!

With this learning model in mind, my thoughts about the impact of web 2.0 on learning begin to expand. I start to realize that the read/write web will have a large impact on the shape of education in the next few years. This is where the void of implementation begins. The silent masses of educators that do not understand the elements of Web 2.0 need to be guided step-by-step, to learn how to use Web 2.0 themselves, then they can model their learning and implement it in new and innovative ways in the classroom.

Thus another blog begins, with the purpose of filling this void...