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.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Internet Lesson 13
I read the article in MacLife about the iPhone, this article was published in the August edition of the magazine. The article discussed all of the new gadgets that are available with the iPhone. This article is written for the lay person as it discusses first the things that are included in the iPhone and then the technology behind the iPhone that makes it so very appealing and the way that it is protected against people adding or subtracting things from its programming.
At first the article goes over how the iPhone works. A general overview goes over how each of the parts is integrated into the Apple family. The iPhone is creating new ways for people to communicate and exchange ideas. This idea of a new exchange is put forward in the advertisements and commercials that Apple produces.
From starting out as a niche the Apple products are now mainstreamed and everyone is excited about having an iPhone. The technology behind the iPhone is taken apart so that you can see inside of it- low and behold there is a mini hard drive!
Finally the article goes on to discuss how a person in China has now broken the coding and people can add programs to the iPhone.
I evaluated this program based on the readibility of the article and the informativeness that was gained from it. Even though we all want an iPhone it was necessary to see how the inner workings came together.
I subsribed to Scientific American. This magazine is a journal written for the educated man or woman who wants to know about scientific innovations. They cover computer systems as well as other physical and chemical sciences.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Internet Lesson 12
I downloaded iSquint which transfers movies from one format to another. This program works very well with any of the 40 file formats that movies are saved in. I like that there is a way to chnage formats so that you can send a file from a MAC to a PC with no issues. Downloading the program was easy, it was on CNET and I simply clicked and it was then a dmg on my desktop.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Triumph of the Nerds
This show chronicles the rise of the personal computers starting with the Altair 8800 and using Macinstosh and PC computing as standards. It also covered IBM and Microsoft. This series looked like it went from the 1970s to the 1990s and it had interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Cringley takes the viewer through the history of computing but also interjects personal stories into the show about how these ideas formed and what the outcomes were for the personal computing machine age.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Internet Lesson 9
The two internet searches that I used were dogpile and yahoo kids. I chose these because I knew that they would give different search profiles. Yahoo kids is a site that does not allow advertisements and as seen above it gave me sites that are all about Alaska for kids. The sites however are not listed in any particular order, you could search this again and again and get different answers each time. Most of these sites are sites that are made by kids or schools or foundations and are not necessarily factual. Yahoo kids does search its own site first for information and then the web for kid friendly sites. Dogpile on the other hand searched and found one million sites in 1.3 seconds. The first two pages of searches are advertisements for cruises or vacations in Alaska and the next three were for condos in Hawaii, even though I searched just 'Alaska'. This is due to keywords and linking certain words together in searches so that your website will come up no matter what is searhced. These tags are useful for people that use them the right way but advertisers use them for everthing so in the end they pop up an ad for a Hawaii vacation when a person searches for information on Alaska. One search engine is not better or worse then the other. If you can get a look at their protocols and search standards you will see that the majority of search engines search keywords and not actual content of the pages, this is what pops up the adverts and errors. By utilizing boolean symbols you can decrease the number of errors that you receive.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Internet Lesson 7
I reviewed Net Nanny and The Internet Filter. I did not like either of them becuase of their limitations when it comes to learning and evaluating sites based on actual content and not the names of the pictures or the description of the site. As a technology teacher I am more for a proxy server that allows sites to be visited that are approved as opposed to randomly blocking sites that may or may not have appropriate content based on a program that searches out keywords, you might as well be using google images to put together a photography portfolio if you are going to be limited by Net Nanny. Net Nanny is also a Windows program that is compatible with IE 7 but says nothing about backwards compatibility. The Internet Filter keeps track of sites but does not evaluate them based on the user that is logged on the computer. I think that in the future computer companies will move more towards having controls built into the system that allows blocking and monitoring for children. People above the age of 14 should be able to self-monitor or face losing priveleges as we have implemented in our district as a precaution. We also lock the history up so that the student can go anywhere but then the history is analyzed against a series of filters that I have set up. These are checked nightly and students who are breaking the rules are simply not allowed to go on the interent anymore- it is very affective. For home use the best system I have seen is the MAC Childsafe program where you set allowed sites and it doesn't let kids use the links within the site to get to other sites. If appropriate boundaries are set then it is up to the teacher or parent to teach kids what to go on and how to appropriately use the internet, not a net nanny.
Internet Lesson 6
I liked the open forums on the internet better then Moodle becuase it allows you to choose what topics you are interested in hearing about. The only thing that I did not like is joining groups that are not moderated because then you get a lot of junk mail. Groups that require you to join them are better for topics that are always moving and changing, that way you know that the stuff you are getting is topical. I belong to a book group that uses this approach and it works very well. I like that you can always see the main topic in the discussion and that is what you are in essence responding too- not someone elses comments. The Moodle site is good for classes but it can get confusing if someone posts to the wrong question or replies to someone else's reply- the tree can get very messy that way.
The Machine That Changed the World
I watched all five episodes of 'the machine that changed the world' originally produced in 1991. The first three episodes are like a history lesson taking you through the history of computing from Charles Babbage, through Difference Engines and COLOSSUS all in episode one which is then followed up by what was occuring in the 1940s and 50s with computers being used for the 1952 elections and the creation of the movie 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. I was also unaware of the contributions of Atanasoff and how he was credited with the invention of the modern computer. I was interested in seeing more about computers and space that did not get alot of air time on episode two. In episode three, the paperback computer I got to see how the mouse was devised and was very interested in how they covered Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Later there was a segment on Sesame Street and how they covered computing, very interesting. I did not understand a lot about the chained computer theories or the illusions portion of the show. In episode 4 the show kind of went backward to the 50s-70s to discuss AI and how scientists and computer engineers have been working for decades to make a 'smart' computer that can think and learn for itself based off of mistakes and not preprogrammed responses. ELIZA was a project by Weizembaum and SHRDLU by Windograd that looked at AI. The self-driven vehicle seems like a possibility now with the pilotless airplanes that are being developed by the Navy. In the final episode the rapid development of computers was discussed as well as how print material was now being put on CDs - 450 books on one CD. The digital world is being substituted in for the analog one and global communications are more broad and well defined.
I felt that this series was interesting and informative but not that topical as in the past twenty years the advent of the internet has superceded many of these topics and it is not even forseen in this movie series. I also think that a series about computing and the digital age should be easier to find and download for educational purposes.
I felt that this series was interesting and informative but not that topical as in the past twenty years the advent of the internet has superceded many of these topics and it is not even forseen in this movie series. I also think that a series about computing and the digital age should be easier to find and download for educational purposes.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
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