Monthly Archives: October 2005

NSBA: Roundtable on accessible Web sites

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I got to facilitate a roundtable discussion on accessible Web design today. The lack of an Internet connection in the room prevented us from showing some live sites, but I promised to post some links here. I showed a bit of my presentation on the topic from last year’s TIES conference. There are a number of useful links on that presentation—which was built using Eric Meyer’s S5 system—including some book recommendations. One that isn’t there is for Eric Meyer on CSS, an excellent project-based book on the subject. Designing With Web Standards by Zeldman is also excellent.

We ended up discussing content management systems a fair bit and their usefullness for building standards-compliant, manageable, and accessible sites. There are a number of education-specific content management systems exhibiting here in the vendor hall, and I recommended some other open source options including Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! (formerly Mambo). My previous post on the topic might be useful too. Readers interested in accessible Web design, and universal design more broadly, might be interested in my recent podcast with Earle Harrison which touched on many Web issues.

We also talked about the challenges associated with using parent or student volunteers as Web site builders and the time crunch that school Webmasters often feel. No magic bullets, unfortunately, but I think most walked away with something new to chew on.

If anyone from the session has any questions or feedback, feel free to post a comment.

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NSBA: Evaluating Digital Products

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Evaluating Digital Products: Raising the Bar For Student Achievement, Bernajean Porter, BJP Consulting

We watched an example of a student-produced film about the bombing of Hiroshima and discussed how we would assess it. It was difficult to say since we weren’t the ones that gave the assignment, but it got the conversation started. Our speaker said that in many cases a scoring guide (i.e., rubric) isn’t even provided, or the scoring guide focuses exclusively on the mechanics of the product (e.g., number of images, number of PowerPoint slides). Too often, she says, the product is simply turned in without the kind of serious assessment that we usually give to more traditional writing assignments. I’ve observed this over the years as well, and have often felt like technological glitz has been substituted for high quality content. This is especially common with teachers who may not be very technosavvy themselves and may be more likely to be overly impressed with the polish that modern ditial tools can impart without any effort on the part of the student.

The speaker is against the idea of teachers creating their own rubrics, preferring instead to have teachers work in teams to develop common rubrics. Consistent standards will help students who have multiple teachers.

Porter’s book, Evaluating Digital Products, has lots of examples of scoring guides for 14 different types of assignments. Her Website, DigiTales, has a series of forms that teachers can use to create custom rubrics to guide the students’ work. She stresses that no technology should be used until the scripts and storyboards are conferenced and the content is solid. She believes that students should be encouraged to connect the content they’re presenting to their own context in a way that answers the “so what?” question.

This was a great session. It validated a lot of things that I’ve observed over the years. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I think we need to get the technology out of the assessment of digital projects. It’s not about the tech, it’s about the learning. I will definitely be starting a conversation about these issues with teachers back home.

Ready to roll at T+L2

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We arrived safely in Denver today and had a chance to look around for a while at the convention center. It looks like there will be around 2,000 attendees at the conference this year with about 250 vendors. Quite a nice size actually. The venue looks really great, and I was surprised to find so many teachers presenting on classroom technology topics. It’s not just administrative topics at this conference.

My colleague (and roommate for the week) are thinking of doing a daily recap podcast. That sounds fun, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get them posted immediately. We’ll see. Stay tuned for session descriptions and other glimpses into this year’s T+L2.

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Spam Karma 2.0 unleashed

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There was a period of relative calm that lasted almost six months, but that ended a few weeks ago when the comment spammers descended on my blog. Almost overnight I was dealing with 30–50 spam comments per day. At least 95% of them were stopped by the common spam words blacklist that I maintain in WordPress, but that just puts them in a moderation queue that I have to check periodically. It was getting to be quite an annoyance.

Enter Spam Karma 2.0. This WordPress plugin has stopped my comment spam cold, and it doesn’t even require me to moderate the comments that it traps. It’s intercepted nearly 1,000 comment spams in a little more than a week and hasn’t had a single false positive. Run, don’t walk, to install Spam Karma if you’re using WordPress.

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Heading to T+L2

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I’m leaving on a plane in a couple hours for Denver, Colorado and this year’s NSBA T+L2 Conference. I’m attending with a colleague of mine and we’re going to be presenting about our district’s 1-to-1 computing project. I’ll also be hosting roundtable discussions on accessible Web design and blogging. I’ll be posting about the sessions here (and hopefully recording some audio for future podcasts), but you can also check out the T+L2 Blog for some other bloggers’ perspectives.

I haven’t heard if they’ve settled on a particular Technorati tag for conference-related posts so I’m just going to use “nsba2005″ unless I hear differently. (I don’t think the “+” in “t+l2″ would work very well, but I haven’t tested it.)

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Another quick podcast publisher

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Fellow ADE Sebastian Dorok put me onto Loudblog a couple days ago. This seems to be a step beyond DirCaster, the other PHP podcast publishing tool I posted about recently. From their site:

Loudblog is a sleek and easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) for publishing audio content on the web. It automatically generates a skinnable website and an RSS-Feed for Podcasting. Just upload your audio files, add some notes and links, and you’re done!

You can see Loudblog in action at the author’s blog. (Looks like it’s skinned to look just like the default WordPress theme.) I like the play controls that are included with each podcast post. This looks like an excellent podcast publishing option for anyone with a Web server that can run PHP.

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First look at Flock

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I posted about Flock a little over a month ago and wondered if it would be the first Web 2.0 browser. I downloaded the first pre-alpha-developer release today after getting an email about it and so far it’s looking pretty interesting. This is definitely not a release for the faint of heart—it crashes early and often—but I see a lot of promise here.

Flock uses the Mozilla codebase, so much of the interface is familiar to anyone who uses Firefox or any of its cousins. What’s different is the way it leverages Web services. The first thing I noticed is that Flock doesn’t use traditional bookmarks, but hooks into your Delicious account (my bookmarks) and displays those instead. I gave up on traditional bookmarks long ago so this is a welcome change.

Flock screenshot showing Delicious bookmarks

Clicking the star next to the browser’s location bar pops up a dialog that allows you to tag and post the current page to your Delicious account. That’s it. Bookmarks stored on a local computer hard drive are officially obsolete.

Flock screenshot showing how to post a bookmark to your Delicious account

It’s also possible to hook Flock to your blog so you can post right from the browser. That doesn’t sound so different from logging in to your blogging site like you do now until you see it integrated with Flickr to make posting a photo as easy as drag and drop.

Flock screenshot showing how to create a blog post and include a Flickr photo

There are versions available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Head over to the developer page to check out some more documentation, a FAQ, and the discussion forums.

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Time to start “Getting Things Done”

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It seems to be an epidemic. There’s too much to do and not enough time to do it. That’s the primary reason that I haven’t been writing much lately. Trying to keep my head above water has left precious little time to reflect on my own practice as a leader or to be out looking for the kind of cool Internet applications that I love so much. Something has to change.

I bought a copy of Life Balance a few months ago and I like it. But I’ve always felt like there was a bigger system missing that I needed to make significant progress on getting and staying organized and working at peak efficiency. Lots of people on the Life Balance forums seem to be devotees of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. I bought the book and plan to spend the next few days going through it and posting my thoughts.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Anyone else using the GTD method? (That’s what the faithful seem to prefer calling it.) To be fair, I’m probably overemphasizing the “system” part of this from what I’ve read. One of the things that attracts me to the GTD method is that it doesn’t require buying a particular planner or using a specific piece of software. It can be molded to fit whatever tools you prefer using. Check out the low-tech Hipster PDA to see what I mean.

This should be an interesting adventure.

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