Here is the link to my screencast of the Del.icio.us review.
2008-06-23_0911
This review was done using Jing.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Web Page Prospectus
The webpage that I designed was for my mother's new company PartyTenders. PartyTenders is a company based in South Florida that takes care of the party needs of clients. It helps them get catering, service help, and lighting design. I met with my mom and we talked about the design elements that she wanted to use in her website. We settled on three main elements.
1. Black backgrounds
2. Music
3. Framed Pictures
After we had decided on the three elements I did some preliminary mock-ups of each of the pages and we then settled upon the four webpages that I posted.
The home page has a simple picture using the blue in the writing to reflect in the visual. Behind the scenes a violin piece by Itzak Perlman plays and below the simple heading are three buttons that link to the other pages. There are a total of three links per page that navigate the website effectively.
The contact us page has three pictures and a form that I made from Wufoo.com that I linked into the html of the page so that perspective clients can contact PartyTenders for a quote on their next event. Thirdly there is an email link at the top of the page that will open up the users mail program to send a personal email to the partytenders email address.
About us has a different layout and allows the user to learn more about the business and the themes that it provides.
Finally the services page lists the things that the business does as well as providing a vague enough description on price and time so that it can be customized for the individual user.
Throughout the website there are pictures that relate to the idea of partys, service, and decoration done by PartyTenders. Each picture has a refection and a frame that was available in iWeb. These pages were blank and I designed them from scratch using iWeb.
This site was posted on partytendersfl.com as well as my web folder at augsburg to be graded.
1. Black backgrounds
2. Music
3. Framed Pictures
After we had decided on the three elements I did some preliminary mock-ups of each of the pages and we then settled upon the four webpages that I posted.
The home page has a simple picture using the blue in the writing to reflect in the visual. Behind the scenes a violin piece by Itzak Perlman plays and below the simple heading are three buttons that link to the other pages. There are a total of three links per page that navigate the website effectively.
The contact us page has three pictures and a form that I made from Wufoo.com that I linked into the html of the page so that perspective clients can contact PartyTenders for a quote on their next event. Thirdly there is an email link at the top of the page that will open up the users mail program to send a personal email to the partytenders email address.
About us has a different layout and allows the user to learn more about the business and the themes that it provides.
Finally the services page lists the things that the business does as well as providing a vague enough description on price and time so that it can be customized for the individual user.
Throughout the website there are pictures that relate to the idea of partys, service, and decoration done by PartyTenders. Each picture has a refection and a frame that was available in iWeb. These pages were blank and I designed them from scratch using iWeb.
This site was posted on partytendersfl.com as well as my web folder at augsburg to be graded.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Class Notes
I admit that I did not take any class notes that are seperate from what I have written about in the short reviews of the books and movies. I did not feel as if I had to take notes in order to gain a broader understanding of the course.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Postman's Technopoly
I was very engrossed in this book. I had never thought about how we as a society are controlled by not only the visible technology of computers and such but also by the invisible stuff like IQ scores and statistics. Postman believes that the computer and technology intrude into culture and I have to say that I do not see it that way. The computer can integrate culture into technology and visa versa to enhance society. After reading this book I did take a look at my daily routine to see how often I am controlled by a technology decision and found it to be so intermeshed in my life that I couldn't distinguish between the tech part and the non-tech part.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Being Digital
After I read Negroponte's book I was more and more interested in how the digital world developed. I didn't see his book as a prediction of things to come but more of a rehash on all the things that have been done and a history of media and technology. I really liked the section on interfaces and how they developed. He can see how we went from the keyboard to the mouse and now into touch sensitive devices and even into holograms and VR.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Technology Plan - Infinite Campus
New Visions Charter District 4011 is an inner-city school district in Northeast Minneapolis, surrounded by factories, stores, and low income housing. The population of the school is 230 students from various backgrounds including a majority of immigrant Somali students and over ninety percent of the population is living below the poverty line. The teachers and administrators of NVS are people who are out to do the best for the students while they do the best for the school- this includes appropriate data integrity in order to increase student performance in order to make more money on each student- this is where I come into the picture.
Infinite Campus is a student information system that is the largest in the US right now. It is based in Minnesota and is on the web so teachers and administrators can access information from anywhere in the world. Each system is encrypted so that you can be sitting in a coffee house accessing information without having to worry about data privacy. The system is updated on a weekly basis with patches and twice a year with new editions. Each edition is only supported for one calendar year and then it is up to individual districts to support the product if they choose not to update on schedule. In this way Infinite Campus can control the editions that are in use on its systems.
Districts can be hosted (have their servers at IC headquarters) or they can host their own servers. As a small district we are hosted at Campus but have many opportunities to access our data via SQL scripting or Access. Infinite Campus is a push in, pull out system that allows database managers to manipulate tables in real time. Data is updated constantly and pings in at 100 cycles per second. This split second recall is very important as the data is being accessed all over the district all at the same time. This system also has the ability to not only collect and organize data but to also analyze it using a variety of variables that are inputted separately.
There are downfalls to the system though. Unlike a system that would be hosted locally, this system is vulnerable to the weaknesses of the Internet. If the hosted site goes down, our internet server is not working, or if our provider is down then we cannot access any information at all from Campus. This happens as least once a month but the system has always gone back up within an hour.
Infinite Campus is a student information system that is only as good as the information that is inputted into it. As the DM, or Database Manager for the district I am responsible for the system maintenance and data integrity of the system. The current usage of the system is minimum at best as we do not have staff that are vested in the program.
Right now IC is responsible for the fiscal and educational progress of each student in the district. This includes grades, health, special education, personal lesson plans, and state data such as the ethnicity, gender, and age of each student. This information is vital as it is how we get paid to keep the school in operation. An example of this is with ELL (English Language Learners) students. Each student is counted as well as their number of years in a school in the US, Minnesota, and even Minneapolis. These figures are important for the students as we can tell how much service they have received as well as comparing the test scores to the time they have been in the system. Infinite Campus does all of the calculations with help form the data input devices. From this information we can go back and look at family structure, parent education, school activities, testing centers, and lay out a school plan that will look at individual student needs.
As stated previously this system is only as good as the information that is in it. Right now this technology is being under utilized because of lack of staff engagement. Each staff person who has access to Campus is trained to enter grades, update personal information and to analyze data in the program. This training is done on a yearly basis, or with more frequency if we are updated.
Infinite Campus has the ability to do infinite things with the data that we collect and collate. Some of the things that I would like seen done are data warehousing, and district-to-district communication for student transfers. In creating this technology plan Infinite Campus could be improved in many different directions. For our district’s purposes the user interface is what needs to be improved or changed on at least three different modules; special education, lesson planner, and food service.
The first thing I would like to see is a rewrite of the special education module for the users. Right now the user interface for special education is not very logical. The way that the user interface is loaded allows teachers to add IEPs and PLPs in numerical order and not in alphabetical order. This causes goals and objectives to be loaded out of order or in the order that they are entered as opposed to the order that the service provider wants to see them. A rewrite of this module would allow users to see the whole screen as opposed to modules, as well as the ability to choose the order that the goals and objectives appear in. This would allow teachers a more friendly way of seeing how they are entering the documentation as well as being easier to move within. WYSIWYG operability within this module would allow teachers to insert tables for certain sections and to know that it will come out as it looks on the screen.
The lesson planner module is set up in a table format that does not allow teachers to see and rearrange the lessons in any sort of order. This module is also not WYSIWYG so the way that the lesson is laid out does not translate to what the teacher and parent see on the Internet. I would like to see a module that allows teachers to create lessons in an open screen as opposed to the table set. This would allow individual teachers to create lessons in individual ways and have their own way of communicating the lesson with the kids and parents. The module would have color-coded sections that would tell the teacher where to put each of the parts of the lesson. This allows teachers to know what parts of the table to fill out but also what sorts of information will fit best in the section.
After inputting each of the lessons teachers should be able to drag and drop the lessons into the lesson planner calendar on the day that they want to teach the lesson. If a teacher wanted to change the day they could drag and drop it somewhere else and then the lesson would automatically pull in the date that the lesson was assigned. Another way to make the lesson planner calendar work better is to have the teachers be able to link each lesson to a standard that is linked to a state test. If it could work the way that Access does where you could connect the table to another by keys then the lesson would be able to be linked into the standards and be manipulated so that teachers can see the number and type of lessons that are linked to certain standards. By making the lesson planner a graphic interface and using GUI and JAVA the teachers would have it easier and the lessons would make more sense in the order that they appear.
The food service program that we use is linked into Infinite Campus and helps us keep track of who eats what on a daily basis. This also keeps track of the allergies, the money, and the prices of the food. The system needs a way to report what is being stored in it in a way that allows the administrators to manipulate the data that they are pulling in. This would be a report program that would show what the kids ate and how much money the school was making on each meal. By having an adhoc program that allows administrators to pull daily reports out of the system the food service program would be more user friendly as well as more up to date on the things that we want to get out of it. Right now it takes 30 minutes to process through the days meals. If there were an up to the minute solution that would allow administrators to see the days’ meals and prices then it would solve our problems of feeding kids that owe money or ordering too much food for the next day. The ability to analyze each day and see the patterns of who eats what on a given day would allow us to save money and food. Infinite Campus should program a new utility into their database that allows patron graphs so that administrators could see the trends for each student, class, or age range. This could be done using a simple Tableau or even a more complicated cube program.
In conclusion the issues that are being faced today with Infinite Campus are not few but they are also not deal breakers. We like the system we just have issues with how the system operates from the end user point of view. If Campus were to update their user interfaces on the special education, lesson planner, and food service modules then the system would be worth investing in for another ten years. As the database administrator for the district I face training issues when it comes to staff because they are not vested in a product that makes it harder to do their jobs. In order to grow the system needs to change with us. By changing the way that Campus interfaces with the local teacher or administrator we would be able to pull more information out of the product and be more confident in the information that the same end user is pushing into the system.
Infinite Campus is a student information system that is the largest in the US right now. It is based in Minnesota and is on the web so teachers and administrators can access information from anywhere in the world. Each system is encrypted so that you can be sitting in a coffee house accessing information without having to worry about data privacy. The system is updated on a weekly basis with patches and twice a year with new editions. Each edition is only supported for one calendar year and then it is up to individual districts to support the product if they choose not to update on schedule. In this way Infinite Campus can control the editions that are in use on its systems.
Districts can be hosted (have their servers at IC headquarters) or they can host their own servers. As a small district we are hosted at Campus but have many opportunities to access our data via SQL scripting or Access. Infinite Campus is a push in, pull out system that allows database managers to manipulate tables in real time. Data is updated constantly and pings in at 100 cycles per second. This split second recall is very important as the data is being accessed all over the district all at the same time. This system also has the ability to not only collect and organize data but to also analyze it using a variety of variables that are inputted separately.
There are downfalls to the system though. Unlike a system that would be hosted locally, this system is vulnerable to the weaknesses of the Internet. If the hosted site goes down, our internet server is not working, or if our provider is down then we cannot access any information at all from Campus. This happens as least once a month but the system has always gone back up within an hour.
Infinite Campus is a student information system that is only as good as the information that is inputted into it. As the DM, or Database Manager for the district I am responsible for the system maintenance and data integrity of the system. The current usage of the system is minimum at best as we do not have staff that are vested in the program.
Right now IC is responsible for the fiscal and educational progress of each student in the district. This includes grades, health, special education, personal lesson plans, and state data such as the ethnicity, gender, and age of each student. This information is vital as it is how we get paid to keep the school in operation. An example of this is with ELL (English Language Learners) students. Each student is counted as well as their number of years in a school in the US, Minnesota, and even Minneapolis. These figures are important for the students as we can tell how much service they have received as well as comparing the test scores to the time they have been in the system. Infinite Campus does all of the calculations with help form the data input devices. From this information we can go back and look at family structure, parent education, school activities, testing centers, and lay out a school plan that will look at individual student needs.
As stated previously this system is only as good as the information that is in it. Right now this technology is being under utilized because of lack of staff engagement. Each staff person who has access to Campus is trained to enter grades, update personal information and to analyze data in the program. This training is done on a yearly basis, or with more frequency if we are updated.
Infinite Campus has the ability to do infinite things with the data that we collect and collate. Some of the things that I would like seen done are data warehousing, and district-to-district communication for student transfers. In creating this technology plan Infinite Campus could be improved in many different directions. For our district’s purposes the user interface is what needs to be improved or changed on at least three different modules; special education, lesson planner, and food service.
The first thing I would like to see is a rewrite of the special education module for the users. Right now the user interface for special education is not very logical. The way that the user interface is loaded allows teachers to add IEPs and PLPs in numerical order and not in alphabetical order. This causes goals and objectives to be loaded out of order or in the order that they are entered as opposed to the order that the service provider wants to see them. A rewrite of this module would allow users to see the whole screen as opposed to modules, as well as the ability to choose the order that the goals and objectives appear in. This would allow teachers a more friendly way of seeing how they are entering the documentation as well as being easier to move within. WYSIWYG operability within this module would allow teachers to insert tables for certain sections and to know that it will come out as it looks on the screen.
The lesson planner module is set up in a table format that does not allow teachers to see and rearrange the lessons in any sort of order. This module is also not WYSIWYG so the way that the lesson is laid out does not translate to what the teacher and parent see on the Internet. I would like to see a module that allows teachers to create lessons in an open screen as opposed to the table set. This would allow individual teachers to create lessons in individual ways and have their own way of communicating the lesson with the kids and parents. The module would have color-coded sections that would tell the teacher where to put each of the parts of the lesson. This allows teachers to know what parts of the table to fill out but also what sorts of information will fit best in the section.
After inputting each of the lessons teachers should be able to drag and drop the lessons into the lesson planner calendar on the day that they want to teach the lesson. If a teacher wanted to change the day they could drag and drop it somewhere else and then the lesson would automatically pull in the date that the lesson was assigned. Another way to make the lesson planner calendar work better is to have the teachers be able to link each lesson to a standard that is linked to a state test. If it could work the way that Access does where you could connect the table to another by keys then the lesson would be able to be linked into the standards and be manipulated so that teachers can see the number and type of lessons that are linked to certain standards. By making the lesson planner a graphic interface and using GUI and JAVA the teachers would have it easier and the lessons would make more sense in the order that they appear.
The food service program that we use is linked into Infinite Campus and helps us keep track of who eats what on a daily basis. This also keeps track of the allergies, the money, and the prices of the food. The system needs a way to report what is being stored in it in a way that allows the administrators to manipulate the data that they are pulling in. This would be a report program that would show what the kids ate and how much money the school was making on each meal. By having an adhoc program that allows administrators to pull daily reports out of the system the food service program would be more user friendly as well as more up to date on the things that we want to get out of it. Right now it takes 30 minutes to process through the days meals. If there were an up to the minute solution that would allow administrators to see the days’ meals and prices then it would solve our problems of feeding kids that owe money or ordering too much food for the next day. The ability to analyze each day and see the patterns of who eats what on a given day would allow us to save money and food. Infinite Campus should program a new utility into their database that allows patron graphs so that administrators could see the trends for each student, class, or age range. This could be done using a simple Tableau or even a more complicated cube program.
In conclusion the issues that are being faced today with Infinite Campus are not few but they are also not deal breakers. We like the system we just have issues with how the system operates from the end user point of view. If Campus were to update their user interfaces on the special education, lesson planner, and food service modules then the system would be worth investing in for another ten years. As the database administrator for the district I face training issues when it comes to staff because they are not vested in a product that makes it harder to do their jobs. In order to grow the system needs to change with us. By changing the way that Campus interfaces with the local teacher or administrator we would be able to pull more information out of the product and be more confident in the information that the same end user is pushing into the system.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Nerds 2.0.1
In this three hour show Cringley documents the history of the internet from ARPA through the mid 1990s. This show was broadcast before the dot.com bubble burst in the late 1990s so I am curious to see what the majority of these people are doing now. There were a ton of interviews in this show including Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented HTML and Leonard Kleinrock who never gives such long interviews with anyone. There are also interviews with Bill Gates adn Steve Jobs, but I liked getting to see Vinod Khosia, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and Ted Nelson who is very much for friendly user interfaces in the face of all of the technology.
All in all this three part series was interesting to watch but as more of a review on what I had already known.
All in all this three part series was interesting to watch but as more of a review on what I had already known.
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