Dearborn Public Schools
This past friday, I launched the latest version of our District Website. It is interactive, easier to navigate, and has the “WOW” factor with java and ajax technology. After several months of planning and taking suggestions, we have launched a new District website layout. The new website has a better navigation based on three main … Read more
Here are my goals for a district eLearning platform to be in place within 2 years: To have a complete ecosystem that allows for learning (moodle), community building/blogging/resume building/personal learning artifacts for students (mahara), and web communications and presentation archiving (dimdim). This is also a great toolset for web 2.0 technologies. The web 2.0 classroom … Read more
What would be an ideal online learning portal for students? Is there one program out there that can handle ePortfolios, tests and quizzes, online learning, web publishing, social interactions, and group forming? We have some tools in place already which include Moodle and iBlog. These tools are for teacher use and not necessarily for students … Read more
I will be providing training for web technologies this friday. Hope to see you there. I am thinking we will be exploring some of the new web technologies, working on blogging, and talking about iLearn. Depending on what you want to learn, the main focus will either be iLearn or iBlog.
Now in it’s 2nd year, iBlog has outgrown it’s server. I was getting complaints about how slow pages would load. We re purposed another server which was more powerful and installed Linux on it. I have been very happy with the new server and installing Apache, PHP, and Mysql could not have been easier. Moving … Read more
I have replaced the scrolling news items on the homepage. These were annoying and didn’t help get people the news they wanted to read. The news items are generated via an RSS feed on the School Matters News portal website. The RSS feed is then parsed and displayed in the homepage. It’s great because I … Read more
Let’s take a look at the various tools for teachers and students in the Dearborn Schools: Moodle/iLearn – iLearn is a tool for creating online classrooms. From quizzes to personal journals and discussions, iLearn helps students and teachers keep in touch and extend learning from the classroom into the home. There are many uses outside … Read more
I am pretty close to getting the video sharing website up and running. I am in contact with a student from WDHS and it looks like they will be interested in using the new website to host their student video projects. I can also see teachers uploading student projects, schools creating videos, embedding videos into … Read more
We have a lot of students and teachers who produce multimedia projects. From powerpoints to videos to audio files, they are creating digital media. Currently there is no easy way to share these on a district level. Over the next few months I will be working on a video sharing website much like “YouTube” where … Read more
I am working on a social learning website for DPS. This will involve students being able to create digital portfolios, learning communities, share files/transfer files to home, store website bookmarks, create a blog, and much more. The software is called ELGG (https://elgg.org). It is kinda like myspace with a focus on education. It has all … Read more