Taste of Tech

When I first saw Scuttle, I wasn’t impressed. It’s essentially a replacement for del.icio.us. It allows you to store and manage bookmarks. You can tag the links, and then sort and filter by those tags. You can grab RSS an feed for any tag or any user. You can share links with other users. You can annotate links, inserting your own notes about the site.

Scuttle is designed to be run on your own server. I could set one up here in the district, and people in my schools could use it. Actually, it could be configured so anyone could use it by registering for an account. But why would I want to do that? Why wouldn’t we just use del.icio.us, which is free, has very little advertising, and has a much larger community?

Alvin made the point back in January that a closed system limits the number of links. If I search del.icio.us for Shakespeare, I get 6,000 links. All of these are hand picked and tagged by del.icio.us users. This isn’t like Google. Most of these links will be relevent. Even a relatively small number like 6,000 can be overwhelming.

On the other hand, if my high school students were using a closed system, they might have 60 links to choose from, all of which were recommended by their teachers and fellow students.

It gets worse if I search for words that have more than one meaning. And sometimes, taken in a different context, an innocent search can turn up some inappropriate results. Add to this the fact that there are quite a few school-inappropriate links on del.icio.us, and it becomes clear that we need to have a few more conversations about this before we can unblock the site.

In the meantime, one option is to create a walled garden. Make a closed system that’s only available to our school community. Require everyone to log in, so there’s accountability. Then, let them use the tools. That brings us back to Scuttle.

The only problem was that I needed a way to allow my users to use their existing network accounts to log in. I’m a big fan of using single accounts whenever possible, and it seems silly to force people to register for an account when they already have one on another system.

We already do this with Moodle. Any person in our district with a network account can log in to Moodle. The system checks a POP mail server with the username and password. If it authenticates successfully against the POP server, it lets them in. If they don’t already have a Moodle account, it creates one on the fly. I wanted the same thing for Scuttle.

So, I “borrowed” the appropriate code from Moodle and bolted it on to Scuttle. With a few code modifications, I ended up with Scuttle+Pop. I currently have it running on our delta server, and if I have a good response to it, I’ll move it into a production environment for next school year.

If you have a need for this, you can certainly download my modifications and use them. If you have a web server with Apache and Mysql, and a mail server to authenticate against, it may work for you, too.

RSS takes three tries before you start to understand it. The first time, it goes completely over your head. The second time, you start to get some kind of idea what they’re talking about. The third time, you start to really understand what’s going on.

It’s a lot like photosynthesis, or trigonometry, or irregular verbs in romance languages, or all of those other things I don’t understand. It just takes time to”get it.”

Maybe this will help. Go to this page. This is part of our portal page system — the pages that automatically load when someone starts a browser in our district. This particular one is the “news” section of our high school portal.

What do you see? In the upper-left corner, there’s the current weather. That’s pulled from the weather channel via RSS. Next to that, you have national news. Those items are collected from the top stories on CNN, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, National Public Radio, and MSNBC. They’re pulled via RSS, collected, and displayed as links.

Next to that is school news. That’s done the same way, except we pull the RSS feeds from our district, high school, middle school, and elementary school web sites. We do the same thing with world news and local news.

I think I last edited this page last June, and it’s always up-to-date. That’s RSS.

The people over at Common Craft have a short video that helps explain this, too:

If you want an easy way to start playing with this stuff, check out Protopage.

Remember Marco Polo? I still have a couple training binders for it on my bookshelf. Back in 2000, the WorldCom Foundation partnered with renowned educational organizations to create a collection of Internet resources for teaching K-12 content in every academic discipline. They did everything right. For the math resources, they partnered with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the professional organization that changed the way mathematics is taught with it Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. For the science sections, they worked with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Geographic Society. Across the board, they worked with the experts in every subject area to pull together the best online resources for K-12 teachers and students.

To promote this resource, they provided free materials for train-the-trainer sessions. They sent us binders, notebooks, curriculum guides, brochures, and mouse pads. We held several inservice programs to introduce teachers to the tool. I even made a little web site to help teachers find the resources quickly.

So what happened? In the wake of the accounting scandals and bankruptcy, Worldcom changed its name to MCI. MCI was purchased by Verizon. Verizon continued the Marco Polo project for a few years, but last summer, it disappeared.

A couple weeks ago, I ran across ThinkFinity. Patrick Gaston, Verizon’s president, proudly introduces the site:

It is with great pleasure that we announce the creation of Thinkfinity, the Verizon Foundation’s signature digital learning platform designed to improve educational and literacy achievement.

ThinkFinity is a collaboration between Verizon and leading educational organziations and content providers. These include NCTM, the National Geographic Society, the AAAS and all of the other organizations that worked on the Marco Polo project. It looks like all the neat stuff is still there. Not everything on the web is new, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

I thought I was finally getting it. After spending the last eighteen months working with Web 2.0 tools, I finally have a good understanding of how technology can change education. I’ve become part of several communities online. I regularly communicate with people all over the world. There are even a few people reading my blog.

Last week, I was catching up on some old podcasts, and listened to the Women of Web 2.0 talking with George Siemens on April 4. About 48 minutes into the conversation, he made this comment:

We can’t make decisions based on these tools the same way we used to. When we started adopting WebCT and learning managment systems — which we should still all repent over — we were thinking 5-10 years. This will help us over the next 5-10 years to move our content online and to deliver our content. Guess what? The world changed overnight, and now we’re seeing personal learning environments as an alternative. We’re not seeing the future in years anymore. We’re seeing the future in months. We are in an environment that makes tenative decisions based on a lot of unknowns.

We still don’t have enough traction in our online learning efforts to say that we’re having an measurable success. Sure, we have a couple people doing some online teaching, and we’re starting to see some excitement about using blogs in collaborative ways, but now every time the goal is within sight, it changes.

I guess this is better than ignoring the changing world. I once worked with someone who was so focused on reaching the goals she had outlined a decade earlier that she couldn’t see that they didn’t matter anymore. At least we’re being a little more proactive than that in our approach. But we’re going to have to get a lot better about reacting to the changing world than we are now. We’re also going to need to start rethinking some of our policies to accommodate this stuff.

During the EdTechWeekly postshow last Sunday, we ended up looking at my blog. A few people commented on the theme, and I explained that I had it custom designed for use in our district. Many of our teachers have expressed an interest in blogging, but were frustrated by the theme choices available. Especially at the elementary level, teachers felt that there weren’t enough kid-friendly themes available. All of the blogs ended up too grownup-looking. They asked for more kid-friendly themes to use with their blogs.

I talked to Darrell McGuire at Pegasys Computer Technologies. They work on a number of network projects with us. I asked them to create some kid-friendly Wordpress themes for use in our district that would work with sidebar widgets. They’ve created several, and over the course of the last few months, I’ve tested most of them on my site.

The intention from the beginning was to make these freely available to anyone who has a use for them. Based on the discussion last Sunday, there seems to be some interest in them, so I’m posting them now. Please remember that we’re just starting to use these, and they may have some display problems, especially with some widgets. They have not all been thoroughly tested. Keep in mind that they’re written for Wordpress 2.1 or later. That doesn’t mean they won’t work with earlier versions, but I haven’t tried them.

All of these are dervied from styles created by Becca Wei and Michael Heilemann. Their work is GPL, so these are too. Feel free to use them if they fit with what you’re trying to do.

If you work for the Brecksville-Broadview Hts. Schools and you have a blog on our server, you may already have access to these themes. If you don’t, contact me and I’ll get them installed. Don’t try to download and install them yourself, because there’s a good chance you’ll need a Wordpress upgrade first.

BBHCSD Simple B

This is the first theme. It’s very simple, with a nice texture in the header. It was more a proof-of-concept than anything.


BBHCSD Terrifying Bee

Bees are our school mascot. In this theme, we were aiming for something Escher-like. I wanted something like the lizards that walk off the page in his work. We ended up with this, which none of our teachers will use because it’s terrifying. It’s only here because Dave Cormier likes it.


BBHCSD Floral

This one is probably my favorite of this group. It’s not necessarily kid-oriented or related to the schools in any way, but the color palette and rounded edges make it appealing to kids (at least, they make it appealing to my kids).

BBHCSD Reading Bee

Back to the bees. This one is a lot less threatening, and also has an academic aspect to it. This one was immediately popular with some of our teachers.


BBHCSD Water Lilly

This theme was somewhat inspired by the work of the impressionists.

We’re going to continue to do more themes for teachers, and have a few in the works right now. When I have another batch that are suitable to share, I’ll post them, too.