webmasters

Follow up on Friday's class

Hello Webmasters! Hope you've had a restful weekend. I am sharing the answers to some of our questions and posting reminders for some of the topics we covered. Please let me know if there is other information you need. I'll publish dates for our informal summer sessions soon. Thanks again to Cheryl Woolwine for coming in to help. Your help is greatly appreciated Cheryl!

• The reasons we were having problems publishing to your ftp folder in iWork 09 was one which is embarrassing to admit but further confirms that it's the little things that can foil our best made plans. If you use /Sites for your path directory it will work fine. You must capitalize the word  Sites. Dang case sensitivity. Note that Sites is plural too.
• If you need another ftp folder for playing around with iWeb this summer please let me know. I didn't write down a list of people who needed those.
• A resource we discussed and wanted to share: http://www.publicdomain4u.com/
• This is the favs link from the EETT workshop which contains the downloader helper information, the TED link, and some other goodies http://tech.putnamschools.org/marsha/Favorites.html
• Two other suggested downloads for your new MacBook were Firefox
  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html And the desktop client for First Class http://pcsdmail.putnamschools.org/ The server name has to be entered in the settings menu on the Mac version. If you need that information please call. 
• For  EETT participants who need to turn in their MacBooks which have iWeb 08 on them, please remove your documents and turn those in to your campus administrator as soon as you have completed your projects. I intend to inventory the Gateway laptops which have been used with our Webmaster's project one more time. When they are returned we will complete the paperwork to have those transferred to your school's inventory. If you want to keep them so DreamWeaver will still be available to you that is fine with me. Just let your principal know.

I look forward to seeing you this summer if you can join us. This will be voluntary, informal training for those who are interested in learning more about creating web sites on the Mac platform using iWeb.
Thanks for all you do.
Marsha

New MacBooks

They are here....
Matt is setting up our webmaster's laptops now. I  have a busy week ahead with lots of training scheduled but I promise to get these out to you asap! In the meantime take a look at what i-web 09 will do for you.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#iweb

Arrggghhh

I felt like last week's class was an exercise in frustration. I've done more homework and I've come to the conclusion that using the media converter and sharing videos as flash videos in DreamWeaver will work. That said though, I still like to use  .mov files and the plug in that is available in DreamWeaver.

Here's the link to the wm  converter that Alex shared.

And here is any media converter that will convert other file types. 

Media Conversion

We've talked briefly about video compression. Here's the  information that I've been reading lately in case you would like to learn more.delicious.com/marsha.cruce

However this site may make all other investigations pointless. Check it out. www.media-convert.com. I'm not sure if it's the same one that was used to create the Talking Chins Theater that we all enjoyed so much but it will create a swf ( small web file) in Flash from almost any format that you can upload. It's free, no software download required or account needed. You can email it to yourself or download it or create a snippet from their site and embed it in your web site. And did I mention it is free?Garage Band is also a good tool for compression for our Mac users.

Congrats to our newest member of the webmaster team, Julie Carter. Her new site is looking good! oes.putnamschools.org.  Julie built this site in iWeb. She is using Fetch for her FTP software.  Fetch is free to educators.  I have a district license key if you need it. Thank you Fetch team for making this free to educators.Anyone else interesting in building a site in iWeb on a Mac? I may have good news for you.

Bring your Flip cameras next week and lets play, I mean explore the various methods available.

Discussion topic and linked resources

Hi Webmasters. Welcome to our Thursday night installment.

Here's some food for thought for our first assignment:

Last week I challenged you to conduct this awareness test with your students using this video from Teacher Tube .If you had time to do this please share your results here. Did your students notice what most of us missed?

To continue our discussion ...

Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures. -Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Baylor College of Medicine Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen—all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today’s ―Digital Native students Excerpt from Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently? By Marc Prensky From On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 6, December 2001) © 2001 Marc Prensky

This data is obviously dated. Here's some updated mind numbing numbers about text messaging from Sean Fallon at Gizmoto. "The story of a 13 year old girl sending 14,000 text messages in a single month got a lot of press, but truth be told, that figure is actually fairly low. For example, Sprint has confirmed that a 14-year old Florida girl sent / received around 35,463 text messages in a month on two separate occasions. That works out to 1,182 a day. As sad and depressingly impressive as that is, those numbers don't come anywhere near the Guinness record. Apparently, that "honor" is held by a man...a GROWN man by the name of Deepak Sharma. He managed to send 182,689 messages in a single month—about 6100 messages a day (or 4.2 messages a minute)."

So, you might ask, what does this has to do with my school's web page. Your assignment is to read a little and you tell me. Why is this important to us ? Don't forget to log your time spent reading and reflecting on page two of this form that you must turn in to receive your stipend and MIPS . Our goal is ten hours in class and ten hours out of class, although I know you will spend a lot more than ten hours working on your sites. Here are some places to start but if you have other resources that's fine too. Please share them here.

Growing up digital

Digital natives

Engage me or Enrage Me