Monthly Archives: September 2011

Sep 20 2011

When will we need this stuff?

It’s the question that teachers dread.  And it deserves an answer.

One legitimate opportunity to question comes when teaching HTML programming.  If you are fortunate enough to have a copy of Dreamweaver (Ministry of Education licensed in Ontario) or FrontPage or KompoZer or any of the other popular choices, it’s a really good question.  After all, you can work in a WYSIWYG environment and post directly to the web.  None of this

stuff.  Of course, the real answer lies in the ability to fine-tune edit when you’re out a pixel here or there or some other serious tweaking is necessary.  How about a nice chance for a little visual experimentation?

As I’m writing this, I’m trying to avoid that dancing show – but more importantly, I’ve always wanted to try and find some sort of educational activity with the Mozilla created Hackasaurus website.  Hackasaurus comes with a powerful set of “Web X-Ray Goggles” that lets you look behind the code on your favourite website and remix the content.  And, of course, in order to do it  you need to know your HTML!

So, you fire up Mozilla Firefox and head to the Hackasaurus website.  There’s a bookmark to be dragged to your Bookmarks toolbar.  Clicking on it activates the tool for the current page.  As you move your mouse over the page, an element is highlighted.  Pressing “R” on the keyboard gives you the opportunity to “remix” the page by editing that element.

Now to try it out.  I’m sure that designers at the Bing project put a lot of time and effort into their design.  But, now that I have this tool, I can remix and make it mine!

Isn’t this better?

How did I do it?

I activated the bookmark as described above and started to mouse over things.  “Web” becomes “Internets”; “Images” becomes “Pics” and so on.  Pressing the “R” key pops up the element on the webpage and you do your editing.  It’s the same thing for the image element.

When I press the “R” key over the original image, I’m presented with the current code…

We can see exactly how this element was created but more importantly, we can substitute the code for any changes that we’d like to see such as…

Hackasaurus calls this the “Pretty” look.  To see how it would look if you were editing the webpage in Notepad or some other text editor, we can switch to a not-so-pretty representation.

Not only can we change the source of the image, but we can edit some of the other style attributes.  To the right, a preview of the final results is always available.

The “I” key links to the web so that you can read more about the element that you’re working with and the “T” lets you copy and paste a piece of code into your own webpage.  That’s a way to incorporate the best of the web into your own offerings.  Of course, credit needs to be given.

The more that I play with this, the more that I like it for what it’s worth.  Sure, you can (and certainly I have done this) do a view source and look at the code on a page or save it and then bring it into your webpage editor and play around with it there.  There’s just something motivating about remixing the real live web as it happens.

While you’re at it, the value of the HTML that lies behind the page becomes so apparent.  Hopefully, it will cut back on the question “When will we need this stuff?”

Powered by Qumana

Sep 20 2011

links for 2011-09-20

Sep 19 2011

Googlios – pulling it together

One of the things that many people spend a great deal of time and effort in the classroom is the development of an appropriate digital footprint for students.  In this footprint, there may be a little of this and a little of that and by themselves, you end up with a collection of individual artifacts.  The litmus test, as you’ll see when you go to listen to a speaker who is big on this is to “Google Yourself” and see what you find.

The results that you get from this “Googling” may be good or may be not so good depending upon your name, the quality of the search, and the quality of what you’ve created and shared on line.  In essence, this digital footprint should be a portfolio of the work that you’ve created.  However, in terms of portfolio management, it does fall short.  When we’re working with students and portfolio development, we should be encouraging them to review it periodically.  During that review, they comment on their efforts, mark artifacts for rework, discard old content, and add the latest and greatest content.  When you assemble a portfolio through “Googling”, that just isn’t possible since Google wants to manage everything.

So, the next logical step would be for you to manage it yourself.  The concept of a Googlio is intriguing to me.  Touted as a marriage of Google and other social sources,

Goog•lio  noun (1) a hybrid next generation e-portfolio that utilizes emerging open, social, web2.0, and Google applications such as blogs, wikis, social networks and software to create a student created and controlled personal learning environment and lifelong content management system that can be shared and viewed from different perspectives, within various contexts, and for multiple purposes. noun (2)  a free and easy to use portfolio web site for individuals to design as a space, story, and system that functions as a workspace and showcase for learners to collect, select, reflect, publish, link, archive, and demonstrate knowledge, skills, reflections, through multimedia artifacts.   verb (3)  ”googlio it” to publish and connect a digital artifact to your webfolio. origin: rooted in the word folio (as in DaVinci) + Google (as in all the free Google Apps & Tools) and evolved from portfolio –> electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) –> webfolio

         (from the Googlio definition page)


the definition is interesting in its creation of both noun and verb!

Dr. Helen Barrett and Alex Ambrose offer their own personal examples of what the concept might look like.  They’ve used Google Sites as a platform for pulling this together.  It makes sense to use sites if you’re creating a Googlio by not only name but with the ease with which you can edit your Google Site after starting from scratch or using any of the freely available Google Sites templates.


The key to all of this doesn’t lie in the technology – although it can be very powerful – but in the development, collection, analysis, and review of the artifacts that lie in the portfolio.  Think of all the good things that are possible with the critical analysis and thinking that goes into this as an evaluation tool.  Think of how powerful portfolio review is in the arts and then begin the process of moving the concept to activities online.  In my Computer Science classes, each of my students had their own portfolio of their best projects.  It allowed them to review success and to pay some of their logic forward for future projects.

It’s got great potential and time devoted for students to regularly update their electronic portfolio after any classroom activity leads to a very content rich creatiion and it won’t allow that inspirational activity done in September to become lost in April.  It’s still early in the school year – why not experiment with the concept and build upon it with each electronic activity that you do this year?

Powered by Qumana

Sep 19 2011

links for 2011-09-19

Sep 18 2011

Zombies!

Just a fun little post today. 

The only thing better than a good Zombie movie is a good Zombie computer game.  My latest, most favourite is Zombie Drop.  I got my copy from the Chrome Web Store and it just runs itself in the browser.  You have three worlds and each world is filled with physics based puzzles.

Your task is to eliminate the Zombie by electrocuting it.  You do this by somehow getting him on top of the electronic device while clearing every other object from the screen.  There are balloons, crates, boxes, and bundles of TNT that all have their own playing attributes.

Click on each and they disappear from the screen and gravity or flotation or explosions kick in.  By carefully, choosing which object to eliminate, you’re well on your way to eliminating the Zombie.  If you like the concept of Angry Birds, you’ll really like Zombie Drop.  Download it from the Chrome Web Store from here.  Not using Chrome browser?  Do a search here and download or play the game online.

Once you learn how each of the objects work, you’ll be interacting and throwing some body language at your computer as you work your way through the levels.

Powered by Qumana

Sep 18 2011

OTR links for 2011-09-18

Sep 17 2011

Don’t do Stupid Things, Part XXIV

I’m always happy when the advice that I give to others is confirmed by an authoritative voice.

In this case, it’s an article from Sophos, an internet security company.

How to avoid having naked photos stolen by hackers

It’s solid advice but difficult to believe that it is an article that needs to be written.

The article is available here.

Sep 17 2011

Pure Gold

As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I really like to read news.  I like to read it from a wide variety of sources and there’s nothing better first thing in the morning than to have a coffee or two and some nice reading.

Generally, I have two modes of reading.  One is standard RSS reading like we’ve done for years.  I’ve got my favourite RSS feeds brought into a number of different readers and you’ve seen most of them mentioned in this blog in the past.  Currently, I’m using Flipboard, Pulse News, ICARS, and Feedly.  Sure, the content could be brought into just about any one reader but I find it interesting to sort of bookmark my own reading by switching from reader to reader.

Then, I’ll switch over to a read of my serendipitous readers.  I have @quoteflections to thank for introducing me to that word!  I had never used it until I learned how to use it from my English teacher friend!  So, it’s off to Zite, Thoora, BracketSlash, and recently Trap!t which will be the target of a future blog post in itself.  The joy of these readers is that you never know where the next story will come from, unlike reading from an RSS feed.

Except for one classic form of news that I’ve had around for years.  It’s the Net-Gold News Group.  This has been such a powerful research source for me.  It definitely falls into the category of Serendipity since you never know what’s coming but you know that it’s good as the content is curated by real librarians.  By far and away, the content is generated by David P. Dillard from Temple University.  A huge shoutout has to go to him.  If you want the news of the day along with snippets and authorative sources for further digging, this is well worth investigating.

As I write this, the current index of all that’s available looks like this.

Just look at that random content from gardening to sports medicine to secrecy to astronomy to …

You just have no idea what is coming next.  However, the format for the content is very strictly defined so that you know exactly how to read each of the summaries.  The content has been so valued to me over the years.  I do remember dropping Mr. Dillard a message of appreciation a few years ago.  In response, he created an entry for the works that I had assembled in the course of my job.

As you can see, I just pull the RSS feed to do my regular reading.  I have it actually in the Pulse newsreader for the iPad and I can just view the content by reading the newsgroup directly from Yahoo!  The nice thing about news groups is that the content is always there so you can research backwards in time until your heart’s content.

So, if you’re looking for sources for good research content from a wide variety of resources, give Net-Gold a look.  You can read the content online without registration here.

Powered by Qumana

Sep 17 2011

links for 2011-09-17

Sep 17 2011

OTR Links for 09/17/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.