Wes Fryer has a post about a bookmarking tool called PortaPortal. Some folks in my school district have also looked at this tool and I am having a hard time understanding why they find it so interesting. Here you have a tool that does not support RSS, does not even have a bookmarklet for teachers to use to add sites. The process for adding sites is cumbersome, and you can’t add any descriptive information about the sites that you are pointing people to. Finally, the site looks like it is stuck in some 1997 web site time warp. I mean, come on, look at those goofy buttons.

If I’m using a tool for bookmarks to share with my students and staff, I’m going to use something that supports RSS and that I can hook into my browser. For example at Lewis Elementary we use tools such as Furl and del.icio.us (we could very easily use open source bookmarking tools too…) to organize websites that teachers are pointing students to. Because these tools utilize RSS we can easily bake the links/RSS feeds from the various tools into Live Bookmarks in Firefox. We also take advantage of Firefox and GreaseMonkey and have built the del.icio.us tag tool into the browser toolbar to make it easy for teachers to tag the sites they want. Once you have folks using social bookmaking tools that support RSS you have many options in how you share the content. For example we can use the built in aggregator in Drupal (our web site CMS..) to create custom teacher and content specific pages based on RSS feeds of individual tags. Until PortaPortal takes advantage of RSS I can’t see much use for it.

I had the opportunity Saturday to hear a talk by Dr. M.D. Roblyer of the University of Tennessee Chattanooga . She was the keynote speaker at the Oregon Technology in Education Network annual fall conference held at Pacific University. The Network is a collection of 6 Oregon based teacher education programs that are working to improve the integration of technology into university instruction and pre-service teaching. I am again this fall teaching a class at Pacific University and as part of the class, I had the students attend the conference in the morning and we held our first class session in the afternoon.

Dr. Roblyer gave a very topical talk touching on topics such as Wikipedia, virtual schools and virtual worlds, plagiarism, digital natives and the research of Dr. Don Leu and his students at the University of Connecticut. I’ve attended this conference for the past few years and this keynote was the first that I felt actually spoke to me.

I also attend Sean McKay’s session on Wikis. Sean is Systems Administrator and Technology in Education Consultant at George Fox College. He discussed Swiki, a Squeak based wiki that can be run on just about any platform. Swiki is very easy to set up. Swiki would be a good choice for a classroom teacher looking to run a wiki in her classroom. Because it runs on a local desktop a teacher could easily set up the other machines in her classroom to connect to the Swiki server and have her students access the local wiki. We have been doing something like this with Instiki. Swiki might be a good choice for teachers wanting to experiment with a wiki, but also do so within their own classroom network.

At Lewis we are very fortunate to have a great music program. In addition to music classes, students have the opportunity to take part in recorder club, instrumentalbBand and a marimba group we call the Boom’n Beats. Another aspect of our program is the Brummitt-Taylor Music Listening Program.

From the publishers web site…

The program is a daily, non-directed approach to music listening that can be used school-wide or in individual classrooms. One composer is featured each week and one selected work of that composer is repeated each day over the school’s PA system, or on a portable stereo. A prepared script for each day accompanies the musical selection, informing listeners of the name of the composer, the name of the composition, and artistic characteristics of the featured work.

You will note above that the method that they describe for playing to musical pieces to the whole school is a school wide PA/Audio system. At Lewis we don’t have one of those, so we have put the music on our intranet server and have linked to the music pieces from our staff bulletin page. Each week our music teacher, Tony Jamesbarry, writes a short web post for the staff and community with more information about each featured composer. This weekly post has a link to the music file and the teachers play it out over their laptops which are hooked into speakers. The music is only available on our intranet.

Last year we had the teachers read each short introduction to each piece. This year we have started out having Tony record the introductions. (We recently purchased a M-Audio MicroTrack recorder for this and other podcasting work.) We have provided our teachers with the option of reading the intro to their students themselves, or having the students listen to Tony’s recorded intro. (Tony has one of those great radio voices… ) Later this fall, he plans to have some 4th and 5th grade students recording these as well.

We are into our second full week of school at Lewis Elementary and we have our annual Open House this coming Thursday. We have even had a rainy day recess which I hope is our last for a while.

The conversation that started last spring with the possible closure of a school in our area, (Lewis being one under consideration) has resulted in a proposal to have all the schools in question remain open with with boundary adjustments. Last week we held a meeting for our community and I used Google Earth Plus to highlight the boundary adjustments. Using a kmz file I had earlier created to map the homes of Lewis students, we were able to be very specific about how the proposed changes might effect current and future students. The resulting map outlining the changes is available as a kmz file and can also be viewed in Google Maps.

So far our move to Drupal has been pretty smooth. I started off the year with one theme, (newsportal), but wasn’t completely satisfied with it. Over the weekend I found SEO Position and ended up using it for the site. It is based on the Andreas 01 theme by Andreas Viklund.

I have incorporated a random image rotator script that D’arcy Norman uses so well on his site. It was easy to set up and provides some visual variety each time you visit the page.

I have also installed and configured Gallery to run within Durpal to use for images. We plan to set up another install of Gallery for use with our 4th and 5th grade students, similar to what Jeff Utecht is doing with Flickr, but running on our server with comment moderation. While I love Flickr, I know that at some point it will not longer be available within our firewall, and wanted the flexibility to run something that we had a bit of control over. In addition I followed the directions in this article, How to build Flickr in Drupal… and set up Drupal and Gallery to mimic Flickr. It is not a total experience, but it does allow me to utilize tags and comments if I see fit. I’ll definitely do this when we set up the Gallery/Drupal photo site for our 4th and 5th grade students. (Note: I have a few issues with the theme I am using and my Gallery pages are not displaying as I would like. Something to work on next weekend… )

Finally I have taken advantage of Talkr (thanks to a pointer by Stewart Mader) and we now have an audio podcast or our school website. I did this more because it was so easy and not because I believe anyone is actually going to download and listen to the lunch menu announcements. But as Stewart has pointed out, it does give those visiting your site an option in how they interact with the site. What I find interesting is if you could hook something like Talkr in with the on the fly translations available at Google and other web sites. We have incorporated a script from donutey.frihost.net that provides for quick translation of our pages into nine languages via Google. It would be nice to have a version of Talkr that also produced audio files in other languages. Then I would like to see some kind of hook into our phone system so that parents who may not speak english could call up and hear the school announcements in their native language.

Barcelona’s New Uniforms Have a Logo and a Message - New York Times:
Barcelona was wearing its newest finery yesterday as it began defense of its European Champions League title against visiting Levski Sofia of Bulgaria. The jerseys had the familiar blue and red vertical stripes, but a new addition was the name splashed across the front, Unicef.

Kind of a nice switch… The team is paying UNICEF to promote the logo and organization and raise awareness…

Last week Scott McLeod posted a series of FAQ type questions for why a school administrator might want to share information with his or her community through a weblog. He came up with the following…

• Information sharing and progress monitoring
• Marketing and public relations
• Community building and customer relations
• Branding and creating evangelists
• Thought leadership and advocacy

Today he compiled the information into a handy PDF file that can easily be diseminated (i.e: slid under a principal’s door… ) to help spread the word.

• Why Blog As An Administrator.pdf

Technorati Tags: School Administrators, Scott McLeod

The problem with moving to another weblog platform is that anyone who has subscribed to your previous site needs to figure out you have changed platforms and then needs to re-subscribe using the new feed address. While the domain is the same, the RSS files produced by WordPress named differently than those produced by Moveable Type. For example in my old Moveable Type installation, the following RSS files were produced:

…atom.xml
…index.xml
…index.rdf

WordPress produces files dynamically and the following addresses return RSS feeds:

http://tim.lauer.name/wp-rss.php

http://tim.lauer.name/wp-rss2.php

http://tim.lauer.name/wp-rdf.php

http://tim.lauer.name/wp-atom.php

So when I made the move anyone who had subscribed from my old site would not know I had switched platforms. To solve this type of problem Ryan Boren wrote the Feed Director plugin for WordPress. The plugin rewrites rules for common feed filenames used by other blogging platforms. Files such as index.xml, index.rdf, rss.xml, rss2.xml, atom.xml, *.xml are directed to the appropriate WordPress handler so that folks pointing to my
old feed address get the new feed content.

Technorati Tags: Feed Director, Ryan Boren, WordPress