Random

Thanks for the Warning...

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Today Sarah Lohnes points to the CTELL project site.

an on-going research effort to develop and study the use of multimedia cases of best practice instruction for pre-service education in early literacy.

I am familiar with the project and have worked with one of the principal investigators, Don Leu. I was surprised though when I visited the site and discovered the pages could only be viewed with a Microsoft browser. (click the screen shot to see what was displayed)

I can't really understand why a project such as this would limit itself to being viewed only by a certain browser, and also only on devices that Microsoft supports. This not only locks out folks who don't run Microsoft browsers (Lynix, Safari, Mozilla...) but also folks who use Palm handhelds and cell phones. More and more I view web content not on a computer but on other devices. My Nokia 3650 does a pretty good job of displaying web content. Can't understand why they would do that...

My Tiger Woods Moment...

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Always wanted to receive one of those big checks you see the winner at a golf tournament receive. Well this past week at the Lewis Open House, the local representative from Washington Mutual ( a savings and loan) presented the school with a donation of $1000. Finally got my Tiger Woods moment... Also have a principal page up on the Lewis site.. http://lewiselementary.org/principal.html I still need to work a bit on the template, but plan to just fix things as I go. For the most part it will be school information and district information. Stuff that doesn't really fit on the school home page.

MT as a CMS

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Lewis Elementary School Spent some time this weekend learning about MTOtherBlog, a Moveable Type plugin that allows for the placement of MT entries from one blog into another. I worked on the Lewis Elementary web site and now incorporate entries from the music teacher's site and a photoblog on the front page of the main Lewis web site.

Weblog Gathering and Weblogs at Lewis

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MT Gathering in New York Ben and Mena Trott will be in New York on Saturday for a gathering of Movable Type and TypePad users. Maybe Joe Luft can hop on the subway and then give us a report... Speaking of MT, I have set up the Lewis Elementary web site using Movable Type and also have moved the staff bulletin from a weekly email that was sent to staff, to a MT weblog. Now as important announcements, and district edicts, come in, they are added to the Staff Bulletin Weblog by myself or the school secretary. The staff is getting comfortable with checking the site several times a day. Several teachers have expressed interest in setting up classroom sites, so hope to have that in place by the beginning of next week.

More Al Delgado...

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Educational Weblogs Al Delgado has been very busy working with TypePad and creating some great sites for folks interested in web publishing/weblogging tools and their use in education. His Edblogger Praxis site has quickly become a great community blog with a wide variety of authors posting there. I have been using TypePad and can see why Al is excited about it. It has a great tool set that can allow a teacher to easily create a site to share information about his or her classroom. It's visual and graphical tools make it very easy to design a site in a matter of minutes. While I am using TypePad's sibling product, Movable Type for the Lewis Elementary site and for an internal Lewis Staff Bulletin site, if I were new to this,( or did not work in a school where the principal knew how to install and configure Movable Type :-) )Typepad would be what I would use. For a teacher wishing to quickly create a site, I can't think of a better tool.

I have also found Typepad to be a very good compliment to Movable Type in that I can use its online template and style tools to easily and very quickly create (and preview!) template files. These template files are usable within Movable Type. I was having trouble with the design of the Lewis Staff Bulletin site, and discovered that I could create a template (a set of files that are used by Movable Type and also Typepad that define the look and feel of the site) in TypePad and export it to Movable Type. This is going to save me a lot of time.