Web Tools

BrowserCam

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browsercam.jpgBrowserCam creates screen captures of your site as seen "in any browser, and on any operating system." Vincent Flanders asks: "Which is the most 'correct' version of your front page?", thereby opening a can of wriggling invertebrates. Designing to spec, acknowledging limitations, importance of complete implementations. How zen, how very zen. [Zeldman ]

Zeldman points to an interesting tool called BrowserCam. BrowserCam will test your web page in a number of browsers and then create a page of thumbnail images of your page displayed in that browser. Take a look at how the Buckman School page renders...

Tom Hoffman Presentation: Social Software in School Reform

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Tom Hoffman Presentation at ETech: Successfully implementing progressive school reforms is an infamously difficult task. Traditional American high schools are atomically organized to minimize interdependence between different classes and exchange flexibility for predictability.

Tom Hoffman is giving a great presentation...(download a copy in PDF)
Performance based assessment ...curriculum standards in xml... easy data entry for teachers... RSS... Trackback... This guy is good...

This is a test

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This is where you type... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes...

This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes... This is where more stuff goes...

Responses to Winer on CSS...

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Dave Winer is taking a lot of heat for his comments on CSS: see here, here, here and here (for Dave's response, be sure to read the comments in that last link). In the title attribute of Anil's link, he makes the case that it is in Dave's business interest to use CSS: "if you comply with standards, *every* web page becomes an XML-based outline."

[MovableBLOG]

Recently Dave Winer has been wondering about the use of CSS. As noted above, MovableBlog points to several thoughtful responses. Bryan Bell explains the issue concerning IE 6 and Manila. Read his comments section for Dave Winer’s response.

I found Jeffrey Zeldman's response to be very thoughtful and educational.

Learning Objects, RSS and Trackback...

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MLX Item #278 There has been a lot of discussion of the use of RSS and Trackback in relation to the sharing of "learning objects." A very interesting concept... The sharing of resources becomes a lot easier with the use of this kind of technology.

Speaking of Trackback, The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference is also doing something interesting with Trackback. Each of the session descriptions has a Trackback url. Those at the conference blogging the session can point to the url and those looking for further information can easily see all the posts associated with that session.

.LRN: Open Source ELearning Platform

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What is .LRN?

A fully open source eLearning platform.
A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities.
A scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready eLearning platform that can be deployed readily by small and large organizations.
A modular architecture to permit flexibility and to drive innovation.
A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code.
[by way of...elearnspace blog]

More RSS... Ideal Tool

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IdealTool: Custom RSS Creation: Ryan Eby - Education and Technology Tim also stated that he was looking into using RSS to syndicate book lists and other things on the school homepage, but perhaps he could go one step further and use it to showcase student work (presuming there were classes where students kept weblogs). By having each student's weblog create an RSS feed, it is quite easy for a teacher to showcase a certain student's web work on the teacher's homepage. Perhaps the teacher could change which student's work got showcased every so often. The ability of parents to subscribe to their child's work also lets them stay up to date on what's being done in that class.

Ryan Eby has a great piece about the use of RSS in education. Lots of good ideas to get one thinking of many possible uses. In the excerpt above he refers to the Buckman School page and the list of recommended books from the media specialist. This list is fed to the home page via RSS. He expands the example to include student work. For the most part the students I am working with are younger and do not have individual weblogs, but some of their teachers are starting to document student work and we are using Movable Type to route work to their pages.(example: Lynne Leake's classroom page)

The more I dig into the numerous plug-ins that have been developed for Movable Type the more I am impressed. Am going to be working with the art teacher next week to help him develop a virtual art gallery. By using categories, we can create numerous RSS feeds to deliver content to various sections of the web site. There is one plug-in that allows for the routing of a random entry. If the school district was interested we could even route art work to them for display on their pages. (not that they are interested.. but they could if they were... :-) ) Currently they have a very Byzantine process for submitting art work for publication. Imagine if all they had to do was put a little code in their template and then automatically art work would be routed to them via RSS...

IndyJunior Travel Map...

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Indy Junior IndyJunior is a Flash application which you can download and use without knowing anything about flash. The app is provided ready to include in your web page without ever needing to own or use Flash MX. The download includes a configuration page which will help you get the look you want and then all you have to do is copy/paste the code into your html. The last step is to create an XML file of your travels. Since the data is kept in a seperate file it's easy to update.

Here is my little example...

[by way of...Ben Hammersley.com & Megnut]

Follow the link below to see my map...