Category Archives: School Communications

A presentation podcasting solution

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I helped out with an Apple-sponsored podcasting presentation that we hosted at our high school today. Our local Apple system engineer showed a great application that I had never seen. According to the maker’s Web site, ProfCast:

ProfCast is the ideal tool for recording and publishing your live Keynote or PowerPoint presentation. All elements of your presentation, including slide timing and voice narration, are recorded. You can then publish your complete presentation on the Web as a Podcast, complete with RSS support.

I saw the demo, and it worked as advertised. This program could be just the ticket for a classroom teacher who wants to put some of his or her content out on the Web.

profcast

Group presentation: online collaboration

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The first group at the Summer Institute is talking about ways to do online collaboration. Has anyone really tried this in the wild? Our tech department at work has used a wiki with great success for online collaboration. (We’re using MediaWiki, the engine behind Wikipedia.) It’s not real-time, but we’ve found that relatively few collaborations really require synchronous communication.

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FirstClass software for teacher collaboration

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I always learn at least as much in my conference conversations as I do at the sessions themselves. At TNT I spoke with Craig Nansen about some of the things he’s been doing in Minot, ND. I also met Darin King, Tech Coordinator in Grand Forks. Both Craig and Darin have been using FirstClass to promote teacher collaboration in their districts. The software looks pretty interesting and definitely much easier to administer than MS Exchange. I think we’re tending toward an intranet solution based on Plone though and I’m probably going to use Plone as the basis for our curriculum repository.

Utilizing RSS enclosures

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File enclosures have been a part of RSS since version 2.0, but have only recently come to everyone’s attention with the emergence of podcasting. Most people now associate RSS attachments with MP3 files, but there’s no reason to restrict the attachments to audio files. For example, Fraser Speirs recently coined the term “appcasting” to refer to the practice of using RSS enclosures to deliver software updates or release notes for applications.

My favorite RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire, already supports enclosures of any type and automatically downloads them. I’ve been planning to include the free “Lite” version of NetNewsWire on the student laptops in our 1-to-1 project next year, and now I’m thinking that RSS enclosures would make it really easy for teachers to distribute files to their students. A teacher could post lecture notes, multimedia content, or any other kind of electronic document and let each student’s RSS reader take care of the rest. Similarly, school principals could use RSS to distribute newsletters or other materials to parents who are subscribed to a school’s news feed. RSS: it’s not just for text anymore.

Check your accessibility

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I usually recommend that Web designers use lynx to get an idea of how well their site will work for visitors who use screen readers. As a text-only browser, lynx quickly exposes overly complicated markup, images without alt tags, and other basic Web accessibility faux pas. Lynx is installed by default on most Linux distributions and Mac OS X, but Windows users will have to work a little harder to get it installed.

In a perfect world designers would use an actual screen reader to test their pages. Unfortunately, the software is pretty much Windows-only and quite expensive. JAWS for Windows, one of the most popular screen readers, costs almost $1,000 for the standard version. So what’s the budget-conscious Web designer to do? Install Firefox and the Fangs extension. When invoked from the browser’s context menu, Fangs “creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.” (View a screenshot.)

If you build Web pages for your school, add Fangs to your developer tool belt.