Oregon Writing Project...

in

Oregon Writing Project While visiting a school today I saw the flyer for the upcoming Oregon Writing Project summer session at the University of Oregon -- TEACHING WRITING IN THE INTERNET ERA... Love the title... The work of folks like Joe Luft, Pat Delaney, Will Richardson, Al Delgado and others gives one an idea of what can be accomplished with the introduction of technology into the writing process.

Earlier this week Joe Luft pointed to an article in the Washington Post about student use of technology for writing... Click by Click, Teens Polish Writing (washingtonpost.com)

They write more than any generation has since the days when telephone calls were rare and the mailman rounded more than once a day.

While making the obligitory nod to those who fear that we are raising a generation of students who will submit their term papers via their phones... it was for the most part positive.

I watch my daughters IM and email with friends and think, boy it might be a pretty good time to be an English teacher... if it just wasn't such a bad time to be in education... :-)

Blog Space: Public Storage for...

in

Wired 11.06: Mind Share

We've lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a different axis: not pages but minds.

Steven Johnson discusses weblogs and how they are changing how people think of the web. What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not just documents? [by way of...[alterego]]

TypePad screenshots

in

Screenshots available for the upcoming TypePad service from MT folks. Hopefully, we'll see some of the additional features such as the photo albums and template builder in future MT releases or the upcoming MT Pro.... [Brooklyn BloggEd] Joe points to the Six Apart postings about TypePad. From everything I have seen and read, it looks like it could be a promising avenue for teachers who wish to publish classroom weblogs/websites, but who don't have server space,or don't have the technical knowledge to set up Movable Type.

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. :-)

O'Reilly Briefing...

in