School Communities Will Usually Get the Websites They Deserve

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To paraphrase Phil Windley: school communities will usually get the websites they deserve.

[Tuttle SVC]

Tom Hoffman responds to Will's post about his frustration with publishing approval issues that are getting in the way of having more teachers publish at Will's high school.

My district has purchased a content management system that promised this kind of work flow, but in reality doesn't deliver it. (It also doesn't work very well with anything but Internet Explorer 6, but that is another story... ) Their idea was that the principal, or the principal's designee would sit as some sort of managing editor. Not exactly the best way to get people sharing information in a timely manner

I never understood how school districts can trust a teacher with a classroom full of six year olds, but not trust them to use good judgment when posting homework, field trip notices, or hamster birth announcements on a classroom web site.

Portland PT3 Presentation

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The link below is to some notes for a Weblog presentation to local college faculty.....

Background and Perspective

Weblogs: A History and Perspective... by Rebecca Blood

Understanding Weblogs, O'Reilly Net Article

Blogging Goes Corporate, Wired Article

Trent Lott Gets Bloggered, Online Journalism Review:

Weblog Software:

The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup

 

Other Interesting Software... Rendezvous
Subethaedit

RSS:
Rich Site Summary, Resource Description Framework ( RDF ) Site Summary, Real Simple Syndicaton....

What is RSS?

Making an RSS Feed

 

News Aggregators

NetNewsWire

Newscrawler

Newsisfree

Syndic8

 

Sample Weblog Sites

Maricopa Learning Exchange

Lewis Elementary

Dan Mitchell

Liz Lynn Lawley

Alan Levine

Megnut

Zeldman

Vagabonding

Scripting News

Douglas Rushkoff

Dan Gillmor

NY Times News Headlines

Ms. Leake's Classroom

Will Richardson

Joe Luft

 

GarageBand is as Important as Our SIS...

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Jon Udell: Turning consumers into producers

Pay close attention to the pivotal word "experience" -- as in, for example, "the user experience." It's the clue to understanding why Steve Jobs and John Mayer onstage at Macworld, mixing tracks in GarageBand, have more to do with IT's mission than you might think. The quality of experience that we deliver, through software and services, will depend on our ability to negotiate protocols and relationships in a fluid, rapidly-evolving environment. In short: to jam.

If only the folks in my IT department read Jon Udell...

I am constantly amazed at the lack of vision in most school district IT departments, and also in most cases in their curriculum departments. The thing that got me excited about the Internet in schools was not so much the ability to bring resources to the classroom. While that is a worthwhile enterprise, what really excited me was the ability for my students to share their work with others. In the 10 years that I have been publishing this is what has really excited me...

Speaking of user experience... this week coming up is going to be interesting. My teachers will be entering grades in our student information system for the first time. This is a Java based web application... As far as I can tell it was designed by frogs...

Tom Hoffman on "Share Your OPML"

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Tuttle SVCTom Hoffman has an interesting piece about Dave Winer's "Share Your OPML!" campaign.

In comparison, "Share Your OPML!" is simplistic, even by the standards of Dave's earlier work, requiring users to manually export an OPML list from their aggregator and submit it to a central server. Only the subset of geeks who are game to try every blog gadget that come down the pike (which includes me) will ever do this, and that subset is the best understood and most easily studied part of the blogosphere.

Tom Hoffman and Going to Mars

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Tuttle SVC Tom Hoffman comes up with the best line I've heard about the Bush Mars proposal... Of course once we get there, we'll rename the Red Planet

Believe me, I'm as pissed as the next guy that the dream of Space 1999 has been deferred, but the timing on this proposal seems all wrong.

Day 3 of Winter Storm

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We have been out of school for three days now because of snow, ice, and freezing rain. Today everything is covered with a coat of ice. Hopefully the temperature is going to rise later today and start to melt this stuff... I took the bus out to my school last night to check on the building. Found a busted water pipe in one of the classrooms. One of the school district maintenance guys talked me through shutting off the water for that room, but boy what a mess... Plan to head in this afternoon and see how the clean up is going.

Speaking of buses... Portland has a great public transportation system. If not for the buses nothing much would be happening.

Upload a .zip file of photos to Typepad Photo Album

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Everything TypePad!: New Features

Uploading a ZIP File to a Photo Album (Plus/Pro)

You can now upload a zipped folder of images to your TypePad photo album.

Somehow I missed this, but a very nice feature of Typepad. The ability to take a folder of images, apply .zip compression and then upload them directly to a Typepad photo album.

An example can be found here... Hope they put something like this into Moveable Type...

Missing Sync for Hiptop/Sidekick

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Mark/Space: · Missing Sync for hiptop

Missing Sync for hiptop enables synchronization of iCal events and To Do's list and Mac OS X Address Book contacts with the hiptop desktop interface and hiptop handheld (including the Sidekick). Share contacts, calendar events and to do items across multiple devices using iSync.

Markspace already makes a version of Missing Sync for the Sony Clié, now they are working on a version for the Sidekick. Website says coming soon...