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Making More Posh Widgets

July 26, 2008 in RSS, Technology, open source | No comments

Posh, the open source portal page resembling PageFlakes, comes with a few widgets in its default installation. A handful of other widgets can be found on the Portaneo website. In order to make this software as appealing and as functional as PageFlakes for student, class, or school use, it would be great to have more options. As I discovered there are well over 100,000 options. Google Gadgets and Netvibes Widgets can be implemented as widgets using Posh’s Advanced Widget Wizard.

There is a dizzying array of Google Gadgets and Netvibe Widgets: games, music, video, calendars, clocks, and more. Check them out yourself with the links above. Essentially, they provide little snippets of code that can be added to websites to feed the desired content.

The first step in making the widget is getting the code. First we will look at how to get the code for Google Gadgets. Go to Google’s gadget directory.Note that you can search widgets or browse categories.

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Once you have picked a gadget, click on the “Add to your webpage button.” Usually, you are then given options for customization. What needs to be configured depends upon the gadget. The default width for most is 320 px. That is a little too wide for the default 3 column layout, so you probably want to bump that number down a little. Sometimes you need to enter a little information into the code manually, but it is usually clear and simple.

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You many preview your customization or get code.

Simply copy that code onto your clipboard so that you can paste it into the Widget Wizard.

Now Let’s go and get some code for a Netvibes widget.

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Find the widget of your dreams and click on it:

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You may or may not have configuration options. In this case there are none. To get the code. click on the share button. Grab the text of the code and have it ready to paste into the Widget Wizard.

Now that you have your code, log in as admin on your Posh installation. Click on Widgets Management.

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Click Create a new widget.

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The click Add your advanced widget to get this page:

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Simply paste your code to replace the highlighted text on the page above. Click the test button to make sure it works. If you are successful, click add. (Note, there are links to widgets on the page with an alternative procedure which I found confusing). You will be prompted through the next few pages to name and customize the widget somewhat, and you are done. Your new widget will now appear on the list of options. To make things even more interesting, users can do the same, but their submitted widgets must be approved by an administrator.

Posh certainly caught my attention as a slick open source alternative to hosted solutions. I believe it could be very useful as a student or classroom portal. Now that I discovered a nearly unlimited source of widgets. it is more appealing yet and will undergo more exploration. The widget wizard is a nice implementation that may well be suited to other server side applications. Posh appears to be an open source receptacle for open standard APIs.

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Physical Schools, Technology, and Childcare

July 14, 2008 in Technology | 2 comments

“What would happen if there was no public education?” asked Will Richardson of Clay Shirky in a video interview. (Transcripts available here)

Beyond technology, there would a a huge child care crisis.

I spoke with a motivational speaker that came to our school to present to teachers in our part of a sparsely populated county. I mentioned how technology might replace our physical schools in the future–especially the remotely located schools like ours.

He immediately replied that it wouldn’t happen because of the child care aspect–especially in grades K-8. An interesting thought regarding the future of public schools.

If technology took the place of physical schools, who would be with the children?

Can the functions of child care and education be separated? Should they be separated? Could one imagine a school with para-professionals managing the physical children while geographically independent teachers work with learners online? Teachers certainly need to become fluent in the technology to survive as a profession whether they are physically or virtually present.

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Pligg: An overview

July 2, 2008 in Social Networking, Uncategorized, open source | 1 comment

Having installed Pligg, I’ve had an opportunity to give it a trial run as a user. Pligg is an open source social bookmarking application that imitates Digg. Users are able to submit stories or links to share with others with tags and descriptions. Submissions are approved by an admin, then users can vote or comment on the link.

The interface is well designed and doesn’t have a clunky feel that some software can have. There are a number of free and for-pay templates which are installed via ftp. Further customization usually involves editing files with a text editor–adding deleting or commenting out text.

There is some interesting user interactivity built in. As mentioned before, users can vote on a submission. The admin can choose either a “Digg” rating or a 5 star ranking system. It supports tagging.  Ratings impact the order stories are displayed. In addition, an individual item can be commented upon and even discussed. Users can list other users as friends and friends can message each other

I believe this has a number of uses for education. If nothing else, it is an attractive way to manage and display links. The interactivity is easy to grasp and would encourage participation. Users share, discuss, and evaluate links. I could see it used by an individual class, school, or by a larger audience.

To make this work for my district, I would have to make a number of changes. First, registration would need to be disabled. As configured, anyone can create an account. While there is moderation of content, pending stories are displayed in “Upcoming Stories” found in many locations in the interface. We would need to disable the display of content before approved. Since comments couldn’t be moderated, we would need to disable that as well.

Finding help with Pligg is reasonable. There is a good forum, but documentation was uneven and confusing. I wanted to find if I could make the changes outlined above. Using the forum search generally good leads. I have been able to make most of the modifications with educated trial-and-error.

I look forward to experimenting with Pligg at school next year. While the full interactivity would be limited, I believe it will help my students learn to navigate Web 2.0 applications. I will share the modifications when I have double checked them.

Here’s a link to an unmodified installation:

pligg2

And my modified Pligg:

pligg

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MediaWiki for Elementary Students

April 30, 2008 in Technology, Wikis, open source | No comments

I was considering a number of wiki engines for my classroom. Having a strong bias as state in this article, I was looking for a self hosted wiki. I put a call out for suggestions on Classroom20.com. PmWiki and Docuwiki were suggested as well as MediaWiki. Ultimately I chose MediaWiki for a number of reasons.

First off, I am familiar with MediaWiki. I didn’t have to learn another wiki markup syntax. Wikis markup vary considerably. I decided that students were best off learning the same markup as used in the Wikipedia which also uses MediaWiki. In addition, MediaWiki is very extensible. While it barely has an administrative backend, it is easy modified by copying and pasting snippets of code from the MediaWiki site. There is also a large collection of extensions that can be used to customize the look and functionality of the site.

Installation of MediaWiki is straight forward, but it usually isn’t among the programs that can be installed automatically using a Control Panel. You need to download it from MediaWiki then upload it to your server, unpacking it at some point along the way. Alternatively, if you have shell access and a SVN client on your server, you can install it by logging into your account, amaking a directory, navigate to that directory and execute:

svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/REL_12/phase3 .

(Don’t forget the space and period at the end!) In either case you will need to continue by setting up MySQL database, then running the floow the browser installer’s instructions.

MediaWiki is not ready for student use out of the box. Access to the wiki and ability to edit is open to the world as configured. You will need to go to MediaWiki User Rights section and paste in the code Under the “Default Rights” setting and paste it into the body of LocalSettings.php. Simple change the true/false statements to meet your needs. You can customize the configuration in a number of other ways. Look to MediaWiki’s Conguration Settings page. You can also find more customization options in the Extensions Matrix.

I configured the wiki to keep the public out:

// Implicit group for all visitors
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['read'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createpage'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createtalk'] = false;

I had create account configured as “true” until all the students registered themselves, then I changed it to false. Otherwise I left group permissions as default. This way only the students can read and edit the wiki. I also toggled upload to true in $wgEnableUploads in LocalSettings.php so they can upload images. The only thing I have not configured is an extension that helps prevent simultaneous editing called Edit Warning. I’ll give it a try when I need it, but it is fairly complex to install. I’d certainly make sure I had everything backed up before attempting to install it!

Now the students are beginning research on their topics. Soon they will be starting to organize their headings and subheadings, then filling in their content. I’m excited to see how the writing process takes place as the students work on their sections of the Wiki. I’m sure I will be learning as much as they as I observe the process.

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Why Not Run Your Own School Web 2.0 Sites?

February 26, 2008 in Technology, open source | 5 comments

As I have begun to immerse myself in Web 2.0 for education, I have been struck by the prevalence of using “free” hosted services such as Flickr, YouTube, Ning, and other such sites. I don’t have anything against them for individual use, but I do have concerns about using such services with students–particularly elementary grade students. I feel that many Web 2.0 evangelists have overlooked open source alternatives. I prefer to run my own web based open source software on rented server space for a variety of reasons.

First off, it gives a great deal of independence. If you want to try a particular piece of server based open source software, you can. If you find something that looks promising or interesting, you can pretty much install it immediately and give it a run. I heard about Elgg, so I installed it. I ran into an educational distribution for Drupal and had it up and running within the hour. Prologue appears promising as a private Twitter and I have it going in a few minutes.

It also avoids issues with “free” hosted web services. First of all, we can host content without the issues involving other, often inappropriate, content on the same site. I run our sites without advertising. I don’t have to deal with as many concerns about privacy. Students can get accounts on the site without revealing personal information and details. Furthermore, nobody is monitoring the browsing habits and creating demographic data and profiles of individuals using the sites we created.

Using open source web based solutions can be as simple or as complex as one decides to make it. Many programs can be installed by absolute novices using a control panel that performs the process with a few mouse clicks and keyboard strokes–no more difficult than signing up for a free blog. A simple WordPress blog is very easy to administer–not very different from administrating a hosted blog. As one gains skill and confidence, the options and possibilities grow exponentially.

It also has, at our school, removed obstacles and opened opportunities. If an educator at our school wants to try something, it simply has to pass muster with the tech committee. As long as it is technologically feasible, it can be done without running the gauntlet of BOCES hierarchy and technicians. As an example, one local school wanted to host video through their BOCES run website. BOCES told them that they couldn’t possibly do it because it required too much of their servers and pointed them to YouTube! Our school published video directly on our website with no issues.

Another reason for using rented hosting and open source software is cost. The software is free, although plugins and templates can cost money (many are free). Our school started its website on a $10 per month shared hosting plan. We never came close taxing our server resources to limits. BOCES would have charged us thousands of dollars each year.

There is the investment of time learning how to use, configure, customize, and administer the software. As mentioned above–it can range from simple and undemanding to complex and challenging. In addition, you can pay a little more for a webhost that will take care of some of the set and configuration for you.

Using open source software has been an empowering learning experience. I had very few IT skills other than having hacked together a third rate static html webpage and ftp’ed it up. That was several years ago and I had long since forgotten it all. Once I made the plunge with a cheap shared host account, I immediately discovered the ease of setting up websites through the control panel. Within a few days I had several domains registered, and a few sites launched. As time has gone on, I have continued learning and expanding. I like learning and I have found this rewarding.

I believe there are compelling reasons to consider open source web 2.0 software on private servers. It has been a wise investment for our school and has opened many possibilities. It has been a source of growth and development for students, staff, and teachers alike.

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Distance Collaboration

February 19, 2008 in Social Networking, Technology, open source | No comments

I teach in a remote Adirondack school in which elementary classes typically have 10-12 students. While this may seem ideal, there are benefits to having larger groups with which to collaborate. With such small groups relations can become static. The same students have the same classmates year after year. Hopefully on-line interaction will lead to face to face collaboration as well. I hope to broaden students’ community of learners.

I have contacted the fifth grade teacher in a neighboring school district with a similar situation and we plan to explore ways for our students to work together using Web 2.0 tools. I’m considering a variety of tools:

WordPress using the Prologue theme gives a quick, clean, easy-to-use, microblogging format that makes communication spontaneous and fast moving. Students can figure it out immediately and dive right in. I think that it may be particularly useful in quickly creating discussion–especially with small groups as it keeps all discussion in one place. I’m not sure that it has all the functions that one might want for extended collaboration, although the tagging helps. It would be great to find microblogging within more comprehensive packages.

I’ve have tinkered with Moodle for several months. Moodle provides a wide variety of tools: forums, wiki, blogs, quizzes–a wide variety of tools. I think it might be too confusing for beginners. Yet Moodle is a great LMS and has a lot of collaboration tools built in.

I just created a new Elgg installation using version 0.9.1 . I’m experimenting with the user interface. It is more like the traditional social networking software with friends, personal spaces, etc. While the interface may be more complex, I think it may be more familiar to users already familiar to social networking software. I’ll post more about elgg soon.

Wiki represent a degree of collaboration I hope to obtain. It could be free standing, within Mooddle, or Elgg. I am most familiar with MediaWiki.

To begin, I’ll probably stick with Prologue/WordPress. We have relatively few participants, so the microblog might be an easier way to keep a critical mass of comments flowing. Whether we progress to Elgg or Moodle depends much upon my experiments with Elgg in the near term.

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Experimental Prologue Microblog

February 14, 2008 in Blogging, open source | No comments

My students now have a Prologue microblog that they are using actively. I thought that I would also set up a microblog as a companion to this regular blog site for my own use and that of others.

Unlike the student microblog, this one is open for public viewing and comment. In addition, I set it up so that anyonce can register and post as well. I’ll leave it this way unless there are any problems.

Take a minute to view the Prologue counter-part to this site. Feel free to register and post yourself, if you would like to get a feel for microblogging.

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Prologue and WP Hacks for School Microblogging

February 8, 2008 in Blogging, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 2 comments

I remain enthusiastic about using Prologue for school “twittering.” I was disappointed when it came to my attention that a regular self hosted version of WordPress did not have the option to keep the blog private by requiring a login to read. This is an important function for privacy of students in a school setting. I found a way to hack the wp-blog-header to make this possible. I tested it on a WP 2.3.2 installation and it works great. If you go to the blog’s url, you are presented with a login screen. Once a user has logged in, it brings them to their backend. While, I’d rather it bring them to the frontend, all they have to do is click the prominent “View Site” button. I’ll see if I can change that at a later time. Simply download the file wp-blog-header.php.zip, unzip it, and upload it via ftp to the blog’s main directory (public_html/wheveryourblogresides/

I also changed the Prologue user interface a little. The build I downloaded had a number and an “e” next to the title of the post. The Number reflects the number of responses. You have to click on the number to make a comment–not very obvious to my fifth grade users. I modified it so the word comment or comments appears next to the number. The “e” stand for edit. I simply changed the file to say edit instead. Download index.php.zip, unzip, and upload to public_html/wheveryourblogresides/wp-contents/themes/prologue. Make sure don’t put it in the main blog directory because it will overwrite the wrong file.

Another hack to create a more appropriate opening message was mentioned in the previous post.

Here’s a link to the files and the zipped Prologue. Just push the log in as guest button and the next screen will have links to the files.

Please let me know what you think. If there is interest, I’ll package the whole WordPress set of files up. I’ll also to continue to look for more ways to make this great theme work even better for those in a school setting.

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Prologue and Student Twittering

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 2 comments

I got my students to try out the Prologue installation today. They really enjoyed it and took to it instantly. Conversation was wild and somewhat unfocused at first. Before I knew it, there were twenty odd posts. I directed them to feel free to socialize, but I’d want them to avoid totally frivolous posts that would be of little or no interest to the “community.”

As I see it, there are two ways to respond–either by creating a new post, or by creating a reply. They all started by just creating new posts until I pointed out that they could click the comments button to respond. Now that I reflect upon what has been done so far, I’m not sure what is best. By creating a new post, all information is right there on the page–more like twitter itself. By using comments, more “starting posts” are visible and you can click on comments if they interest you.

I look forward to seeing how much it is used after school and on weekends , and how the usage evolves over time. Of course, I will prod it in certain directions.

Here’s the promised zipped file of Prologue. It is the latest update. I will try to keep it reasonable current until it becomes generally available in this form.

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Prologue and Microblogging

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, Technology, open source | No comments

I have been intrigued by Twitter since going to our state Educational Technology conference. I know it has potential and I’ve been eager to give it a try. When Will Richardson blogged about the WordPress theme Prologue, I was excited. First, I am reluctant to use “hosted solutions” especially with elementary students. Secondly, we already have a WordPress MU installed on our server space.

The first obstacle was that the theme was not packed into a zip file as most templates are. I had to learn to use a subversion client to gather the file for the template (Subversion or SVN is very cool as I have discovered and I plan to explore this avenue more). Once I put the files into a folder to ftp up to the server, it is a simple matter of selecting the Prologue template. Next, I wanted to change the opening message. After a brief look through files, I found the text in line 13 of post-form.php in the template folder. I created accounts for my students and I was good to go–or so I thought. To make this work, users had to be set to “author.”

It is all working now and my superintendent has given me the go ahead to try this out with the provision that I keep it out of public view. Only the students and I can view the contents (Using the “More Privacy Options”) extension for WordPress). Students will give it a test run today. I’ll post later along with a link to a folder with all the Prologue files for easy download.

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Blogging: The Haves and Have Nots (and the Do and Do Nots)

January 23, 2008 in Blogging | 2 comments

I have had the blogs set up for my students for a bit over a week. While I posted a question for the students to respond to on my class blog, I have left them to their own devices for a little while.

Some have really taken to it. One student, Blue Butterfly, has made several posts and leads the pack in terms of writing posts. She has made 10 posts since we got started on January 10 (13 days–she has me beat!). She clearly has access to the Internet at home. She has submitted a journal entry based upon literature that she is reading. I noticed that her writing is somewhat different than it is with pencil and paper, and even different from what she does in word processing or on an AlphaSmart. She has reflected upon her experiences in and out of school. She has also discussed her good friend’s motto: “Be happy.”

Purple Monkey, while not as prolific, has three posts all reflecting on life at school. Purple Monkey is a very social individual and has channeled her energy more into comments on other students’ blogs. This included a remark chastising a classmate who still has “Hello World” at the top of his blog. Again, she is one with good access to the Internet.

There have been a few surprises. One student has unfettered access with multiple Internet connected computers in his home has only worked on his blog with the time given at school. I am puzzled because he is extremely enthused about having a web presence. How do I get him going?

There are others with limited access. Some have to compete for computer time with parents and older siblings. They have managed to make a few posts, yet tend to focus on comments. Many of these are the same students that struggle more with writing in general. Can blogging help them get past their reluctance to write? Obviously, it would be helpful if they had more time.

One student, without Internet at home composed a burst of comments when he was visiting his grandparents. He too is a reluctant writer. It was great to see him seize the opportunity to write–even though they were generally one sentence blurbs. You have to start somewhere.

I am trying to provide more access at school, but it is tough to work the time in when more state test loom in the future. I am trying to provide access to the 30% of my class with no Internet access. Perhaps we can create opportunities after school. I am going to offer a few minutes during recess after their lunch.

Overall, I am delighted with this blogging experiment. Students are writing more and are have a greater awareness of audience. On the other hand, it certainly has accented the inequalities in access to technology.

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First Impressions: WordPressMU

December 26, 2007 in Blogging, Technology | No comments

Our school tech committee approved student blogs on a limited basis, so I have installed WordPressMU on our school’s shared server space. WordPressMU is a multi-user blog platform based upon the popular WordPress. Hopefully this will meet our needs for blogging at our school.

Like Elgg, there are no automatic installers for WordPressMU, so it requires a manual install. You need to set up a mySQL database and a database user and password. Next, you must download and unpack the latest WPMU distribution on your computer and upload it to the server. Point your browser to the directory to which it has been uploaded and fill in the the fields. If there are errors, the installer suggests resolutions. You may need to work things out with your web-host (or your server settings), play with your .htaccess files, or perhaps set up php.ini over-rides. A beginner may be lucky and get through this with no issues. It can be frustrating though and it can take perseverance to make it through this stage–nobody is going to take care of your problems for you.

Once it is installed, the interface is very similar to WordPress. In fact, it is identical to WordPress with the exception of the Site Admin Tab. Under Site Admin, one can select Blogs, Users, Themes, Options, and Upgrade. Clearly, most of the day to day administrative work would be tackled in the Blog and User areas. The interface is clear and simple, yet I believe more powerful than it appears. Permissions appear to be set at the blog level. Overall, there is a more robustly developed back-end than is found on Elgg. However, like Elgg, some modifications involve hand editing individual files.

Like Elgg, support is scarce. Documentation is sketchy and the mu.wordpress forum is limited. Be prepared to do some digging if you need help or want to make modifications.

The next task is to work out security and administrative work-flows to determine whether or not WordPressMu is suited to the task of managing blogs at our school.

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