Web Tools

Movable Type, Not Just For Blogging

in

A Whole Lotta Features:Beyound the Blog... Matt Haughey writes about using Movable Type as more than just a weblog tool. Lots of good ideas and examples... At Buckman Elementary School we use Movable Type to power the teacher pages and the main school web page. For the most part the teacher pages are just blogs, but a few teachers have tweaked their templates and they have more of a look of a traditional page. The main page is also set up not to look like a blog. I plan to do some more work with this before the school year begins.

Spell Checking in your Browser

in

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer

ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).

Laura Gibbs, of XPLANA points to this Internet Explorer extention for Windows users that adds spell checking cabilities to browser.

For Mac OS X users, Safari 1.0 has the ability to spell check web forms. The tool is off by default and needs to be enabled. To do so, open a web form page, insert the cursor, then go to the Edit menu and choose: Spelling > Check Spelling as you Type... [by way of...Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps] spelling.gif

Mozile: in-browser editor

in

mozdev.org - mozile: index

Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. It can act as the client-side of a content-editing system or as a self-contained "web word processor".

Tom Hoffman pointed to this the other day. For those of you who use Internet Explorer on the PC, this is not a big deal, but for anyone who uses another browser on the PC, or uses a Mac to publish their weblog, Mozile is a great add-on for those looking for a simple html editor.

It is a JavaScript, so it needs to be saved on your server and then called by your page. I'm not sure how to edit the "new entry" templates in Moveable Type so I could take advantage of it. Any ideas?

Student Publising and Privacy...

in

Ten Reasons Why: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two In the past week or so several folks (James Farmer, Will Richardson, Greg Ritter) have been talking about the use of weblogs with students and the publishing of student work. Legal issues revolving around COPPA and FERPA are being discussed along with pedagogical issues.

I have been thinking of this as I work with Barbara Lüscher at Buckman Elementary and plan for the use of weblogs with her and her 5th grade students this coming fall. Am thinking that we will want to have students publish two sites. One public, and one behind a login. The public site could be for final published pieces. Pieces the student chooses to share with the public . The private site can be the site where comments are enabled to facilitate peer review, and places for drafts to be saved. Am trying to figure out how to do this in Movable Type. With the creation of an alternate index template in Movable Type, and the use of category tags, I should be able to create two sites with one blog.

One problem I haven't figured out is how to save the alternate index file into a private directory, or make it only readable behind a login. I believe LiveJournal has a feature like this. Regular posts are published to the public site, but special "friends only" posts can be enabled that only "friends" can view. Something like this in a weblogging tool would be very nice to have. Some way to designate public and private posts. Maybe I'll post something up on the LazyWeb site.

Update: Tom Hoffman adds some more to the discussion. Looks like Plone might be the tool I am looking for... Also just discovered that Movable Type will do what I want it to do. Just did a little experiment. I created two index files, one gets saved in the regular directory, one in the private directory. With a little bit of work using category tags, I should be able to create two templates. One with all of a student's posts (the private area) and one with items in the category that is published to the public site. But I still have to mess with file permissions...

Gallery: Web Site Photo Tool

in

Gallery :: your photos on your website

Gallery is a slick web based photo album written using PHP. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

I have also installed Gallery on my server. It is a very powerful, yet easy to use photo gallery tool that makes it very easy to upload and display images on the web. I plan to install it over at Buckman later today. Several teachers are looking for an easier method of batch uploading images and with its large list of features, Gallery should do everything we would want a web photo tool to do.

Playing around with CSS

in

I spent some time learning a bit about cascading style sheets. I am very impressed with what can be easily accomplished with css and how easy it is to redesign a page layout. Of course I'm sure this page will turn up looking funny on some browser out there. :-)

BrowserCam

in

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

in

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

in

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...

in

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...

in

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

in

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

in

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...

in

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...