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.