Thank You!

A big "thank you" goes to all greenville county webmasters. Your hard work and diligence designing and maintaining your websites while at the same waging a relentless battle against the ignorance of our youth is quite admirable.
Donna Jones the webmaster of Teen Parent just unveiled her new site today. She's using the new menu system. Great job, Donna. Thanks also to Brannon Carter from Bryson Middle School who developed the fantastic video tutorial on installing the new asp calendar at your site. His step by step tutorial makes it a synch! Take a look at his school site and you'll be impressed!
There are so many more of you that I can mention, but time forbids. I sincerely thank you for the fantastic job that you all do and the time and dedication you put in making a top quality site.
The teacher website tool has been a pain. Two weeks ago a new "upgrade" was pushed out. Shortly thereafter, glitches were discovered - missing hyperlink button, pages requiring logins, and other strange things. The contractors finally had to revert back to the previous version which is the current situation. If you have teachers who still have a login screen coming up on their normal web pages, this is the fix: Go to the RAD editor; for all hyperlinked documents or pictures, "right-click" on each and change the link property from "http://staff.greenville..." to "http://teachers.greenville...". This should fix the page.
For the argument: "it really doesn't matter about file size; most people have broadband anyway", look at this link and take note.
Do you have someone you want to feel special? Use the following url to make your recipient feel like they are greatly appreciated. The following address will send a personalized message Webmaster.YouAreMighty.com. Simply replace "Webmaster" with the name of your special friend.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving break. I'm looking forward to an overdose of tryptophan! Best regards!

Here is a cool video about the development of the Internet. It is a "Youtube", so you probably can only see this from home. Enjoy.

EdTech 2007 Highlights

This year's EdTech was pretty rewarding for me, so I'm going to include a summary of the sessions I attended.
Wednesday 12 noon: I was a volunteer "card swiper" at my first session at the pre-conferenece. This session was conducted by the keynote speaker, Deneen Frazier Bowen. It was entitled "The Power of Story: Digital Style". It was very powerful. As students personalize a story when they create it, it becomes a powerful learning tool.
Wednesday 2:30pm: I was a volunteer swiper here as well. The room was so crowded that I was not able to take in this session, but will follow up on her online handouts whenever they are posted. This session was entitled, "Free Technology Tools: Past, Present, and Future".
Thursday 8-9am: Website Work
Thursday 9:30-10:30am: Building Accessible Websites: This session was conducted by Christine Moore of College of Charleston and had a lot of resources I found useful. I hope to have a future blog/podcast about this topic. Of course the World Wide Web Consortium was an important recource.
Thursday 10:30-1:15 Exhibition Hall Time - I actually won something!! - A cold laminating machine - really cool.
Thursday 1:15-2:15pm: "Classroom Adventures with GPS" - Great presentation, very informative. This is a great tool for the classroom. I missed Kevin's session on a similar topic, but I'm sure his was great as well. I would recommend checking out the online handout when it becomes available in a few weeks.
Thursday 2:30-3:30pm: "Feed the Mind with RSS". Good summary and application of rss with referring to bloglines and googlereader.
Thursday 4-5pm: Website Work.
Friday 8:30-9:30 am: The session I wanted to attend was a "no show", but it worked out nicely as I benefited greatly from the session I attended - "Creating On-line Photo Galleries with Free Web Services (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa). This was a very informative session. The slideshow on my previous post was made during this sesson. I would recommend getting the handouts (I'll give you the link to check to see when these are posted - may take a few weeks).
Friday 9:45-10:45am: Website work.
Friday 11-12noon: "From the Computer Classroom to Online Learning: Learning to Use Technology with Technology". This session was presented by a couple of professors at USC-Aiken as they discussed the transformation from face to fact instruction to online instruction. They use Blackboard, so it was good to see their use of Blackboard for instruction. I got some ideas for the online Blackboard course I teach for the district.
The conference ended at noon. I enjoyed talking to vendors and actually won two items; a cool laminator and a digital photo frame - quite exciting.
During this visit I was able to spend time with relatives I have here at the Beach. We had a great time together. Disappointingly, I did not set one foot on the beach and only saw the beach from a distance through misty rain.
At some point in the future, you may search and download handouts from the edtech sessions here.

EdTech 2007

SC EdTech 07

This week is EdTech at Myrtle Beach and I'm very excited about getting to go and connect with other professionals interested in technology and education. I know that many of the Greenville County Webmasters will be there as well. Please make sure to give me a "yell" if you see me. I plan to attend as many sessions as possible to try to connect with the latest "best practices" in technology. I will be working while at the beach, so email if you have questions.
My goal is to try to put together a podcast summary of my experiences from SC EdTech to share with everyone.
I've updated some things on googledocs, highlighting additions in green and possible deletions in yellow. If you have any ideas about the teacher and school website evaluation tools, please try to give your input on googledocs by mid-November.
A cool site recommendation for this blog is Pageflakes. This is a customizable feed reader that you can set up and get all of your favorite feeds on one single page. My pageflakes page has my hotmail account, gmail account, pictures and events from Greenville, Greenville weather, Fox news, Tech feeds, Daily Dilbert, and much more. Check it out and you may decide to make this your new browser homepage.

New Navigations on the Horizons

There are some new navigations on the horizon for those schools who wish to make changes. Unfortunately, they must currently be created with Dreamweaver. But after being created they can be edited with FrontPage. Below are some examples of how these look:

• business style
• Macromedia Style
• Cubic Style
• Mac Style
• Metallic Style
• Vista Style
• Adobe Style

These button styles are available as a plugin from F-source, which enables these powerful, navigation menus which do not invade the web page real estate. Charlotte at Woodmont Middle was, as far as I know, the first to introduce these to the district and you can see these at her site. Brannon, at Bryson Middle has a similar type of navigation which is web page friendly. Southside (url is currently secretive), our recently scandalous school, will soon unveil their new site which utilizes one of the above menu styles.

Another cool feature for you to consider is the new calendar in use at some schools. Brannon turned me on to this calendar which is a free download from fullrevolution.com. It is a very simple calendar to employ and once you set it up it is ongoing and easy to maintain. You will love it. No more uploading 12 calendars to your site every year. This calendar is ongoing and so easy. One of the files is an "html" file so you have to utilize and iframe for this to work. I'm in hopes that someone energetic (hint, hint, Brannon!) will be able to produce some step-by-step instructions for us, otherwise I'll try to get these done sometime soon for you all.

Keep up the great work!

20 Years of Computer Technology

Twenty years ago I began my first year at Greenville High School (now Greenville High Academy of Academic Excellence). Back then at about this time of the year I was introduced to my first computer experience - the Apple IIe. Prior to this I had computophobia and had no interest in learning. But my colleague, Ron Burris, who still teaches biology at GHS, showed me how to use the Apple IIe for word processing and grades. That's when it all began for me. I remember getting a grant for an lcd panel that could be placed on an overhead projector so that the computer screen could be seen. That was the latest and greatest in technology. We've come a long way with our Smart boards and Prometean boards from those days of old, not to mention the myriad other forms of technology that we use.
Later this month we will have a couple of breeze sessions for those who wish to volunteer to help develop web guidelines for websites and rubrics for evaluating them. This will be used by a commitee that will be formed to select the best teacher and school websites.
I'm working on a redesign of the district website. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we'll have a new look. I'll keep you posted.

Practice Run Breeze Session

We will have a practice run Breeze session on Tuesday afternoon around 3 pm. I'll be in my office and you can click on this link to access Breeze. When the page loads, select "login as a guest". At this point you will then enter the meeting room. This will give those of you who have questions to come and ask them. If you have a mic, you may use it, but you must have ear buds on to do this so that the background delay is not confusing.
When you get a chance, check out Brannon Carter's site at Bryson Middle School. What a fantastic job he has done in designing his site and providing some very interesting tools for web visitors. Brannon definitely has some advanced techniques going on. Way to go, Brannon.
The session on Wednesday will be informal. I plan to introduce myself to those of you I haven't yet met. Then I'll go over some hot topics in the district (Teacher Websites, Net Trekker, etc). Then I'll briefly mention some important "best practices" to keep in mind. At this point I'll open it up for questions. The session will be recorded for those who cannot come. I plan to use Breeze from time to time to meet you individually in this virtual environment. Some of you have pressing issues and we may resort to Breeze to try to resolve them.
Onscreen tutorial are still in the works.

School is Fast Approaching / Web Resources

"August is almost here and I am not ready!!" Do you feel this way? I have felt this same anxiety in the past at this time of the summer anticipating the coming students and the lesson plans that need to be tweeked, and the need to think about the mistakes I made last year and focus on not repeating them again this year. And then there is the website to work on as well. I know that many of you are super stressed and I appreciate your hard work on the websites in the face of all of the other demands of your schedule.
Well, I don't have another podcast ready yet, but I wanted to share a couple of websites with you that I've found helpful.
First This website - has some good basic information for beginners to intermediate. You might find some good code tricks here and there is also a newsletter that comes to your inbox if you wish to subscribe to it. It is usually interesting with useful information.
Another good resource is a British podcast and website run by Paul Boag. His website is boagworld, which also the title of his podcast. He actually has two podcasts which I listen to weekly. His other podcast is with .net magazine with the same podcast name. These podcasts are usually nearly an hour and have a lot of the latest and greatest information. Sometimes you have to overlook a little crudeness, but not much.
Hope to have another podcast up soon. It will involve looking at the dhtml menus and the javascript code that produces them. We will look at onscreen views of the code and how to make changes to your menu by changing the code. Should be helpful.

First Podcast - Episode 1

Today's blog with mark the inauguration of the podcast that will be associated with this blog. In this podcast, there are onscreen captures of the basic webmaster session that I presented last week. We discussed some webmaster "best practices" that I strongly recommend to all webmasters. While I will be fleixible in allowing school webmasters freedom to do much of what you want, I think there are some basic practices that we should all move in a direction toward adopting. These are covered in this podcast. The podcast is either in flash format or M4V Ipod format. In addition it will soon be subscribable through Itunes and Google.
Please feel free to provide feedback. If you disagree with some of my "suggestions", let me know why you disagree. I know that you webmasters are stretched to the limits sometimes and that you job is often a thankless one. But I know that many of you put in long hours trying to enhance and improve your sites. I'm in hopes that these onscreen tutorial podcasts will be found useful and beneficial to you. Keep up the good work!!
Starting Monday and for the next ten school days, I'll be teaching Intel at Northwood Middle School. Feel free to drop by if you would like to chat or have questions.

Busy Times / Steep Learning Curve

These past two weeks have been quite busy as my first two weeks as the "sole" webmaster, now that John is gone. I'm sure he's having a blast traveling the east coast on his bike. I am truly jealous. John bought a new laptop and video camera for his 6-week trip and promised to put up pictures and possibly videos to his site.
Yesterday, I spent quite a lot of time with David Craig from Eastside. He took my place as webmaster at Eastside and will no doubt do a great job. He pointed me to some links of interest that you may want to check out. One website is coffeecup.com and has a free download for teachers at the bottom of the page. You have to fill out a form with your school info. One part of the software is a neat flash calendar that I found impressive. You can see it in action on David's Eastside Athletics page. This little calendar seems powerful and occupies a small amount of real estate.
Next week will be the Webmaster training courses. There are still spots available. We'll hold our class in room 114 at Greenville Middle School - just down the hall from ETS. We will talk about the new teacher websites briefly and then get right in to the content. I'll generally stress the importance of separating content from design. Basic classes will go over site organization and archiving. Intermediate classes will go over the dhtml menus and staff directories. The advanced class will involve communicating with the database through forms to turn over content responsibility to others.
Podcasts with onscreen tutorials are still in the plans.

Welcome to my blog/podcast!!

Welcome to my blog/podcast. This page will soon become a resource for Greenville County school webmasters as there will be onscreen video tutorials available to cover a range of topics from my basic philosophy and vision for the school webpages to tutorials on basic to advanced techniques that you can use to optimize and enhance your website.
Let me first say that my job is to support you and help you. Please don't hesitate to call me if I can ever be of assistance. Having been a school webmaster myself for five years I fully understand your frustrations. In many ways you have a thankless job. Most people have no clue as to the amount of time and effort you put in bringing content to your site, but they are quick to criticize and point out our errors. I understand that many of you spend hours developing your site and adding content. I appreciate all that you do to bring our sites to a level that you, your school, and the district can be proud of.
There are two major points that I want to stress to begin with. These are two areas that I would like for you to seriously keep in mind as you continue to build your sites. These represent commonly accepted "best practices" in web design and development and my major focus on the school and district websites. First, content is king. Before you think about fancy clip-art, animations, widgets, or other special web functions, you should make sure that every page is RICH in content. Many webmasters become guilty of being so self-focused that they spend so much time on all the things that they can do on a web page rather than the content. A web visitor's main objective is to find content at your site and will not be impressed with any "cool effects" if they cannot locate the content they came searching for. In addition the content on your front page should be interesting and non-static - that is, changing with additional "fresh" information. Your front page is your "welcome mat" to your site. If you have the same thing on your front page all the time, some visitors will lose interest. But if you change your content by including announements, news items, pictures, or calendar items, visitors will return to your site to stay informed with the "happenings" at your school.
Secondly and for the sake your survival, we all need to strive to separate content from design. Your navigational menu, top and bottom site information, and basic page formatting (CSS) need to be in separate external files and not on all pages. This will definitely make your job easier down the road. Most of you already do this, but some of you have not yet come on board. Please call me if I can help you move in this direction.
One last comment... Those of you new webmasters -- please do not come in and un-do what was mentioned above in my second point. New webmasters (and you know that I am one as well) often come in with fresh ideas and make radical changes. As long as you maintain a separation of content and design while you make these changes, I can live with that. But if you make radical changes and un-do work that others have done to separate content from design, that will just cause a lot of extra work and headaches for me and whoever takes your place when you move on to bigger and better things.
Well, these are just some things to think about. I will be posting regularly (I hope) and will begin to produce onscreen tutorials by August (hopefully).
Stay tuned.