Book Wesley Fryer for a presentation or workshop (either face-to-face or over video) by visiting his contact page on www.wesfryer.com/contact. Presentation / workshop handout links are available on wiki.wesfryer.com.
5th February 2010

Getting started video tutorials with Wordpress

posted in blogs, literacy | 0 Comments

I’ve set up three different websites with Wordpress in the past year for local nonprofits, and I need to help the leaders of each organization begin using their sites to post updated information. I’m utilizing screencast tutorials from Wordpress.tv in this post to create training materials for these individuals as they start using Wordpress. I’m sharing this information and these videos here since this also might be of interest if you’re getting started with Wordpress!

To use and apply these tutorials, you’ll need the login credentials to your Wordpress website. Generally that is the public address of your site, followed by the directory name “/wp-admin” (without quotation marks.) This should direct you to the login page for your site. Then use the username and password for your account. Depending on the “rights” assigned to your account, you’ll have different authoring and configuration abilities within the Wordpress administrative area. If you don’t have a Wordpress account but would like to try one out for free, setup an account on Wordpress.com. If you’re an educator, I recommend you setup a free Wordpress account with EduBlogs because of their great support and the very active educational bloggging community (with students as well as teachers) already there.

Let’s get started with a few basic Wordpress user tutorials. Click the direct link for each one if you’d like to view a larger version.

1. Start off with an overview / introduction to the Wordpress dashboard.

2. Second, learn how to write and publish a post on Wordpress.

3. You won’t always finish a post at one sitting, so next learn how to write draft posts which you can return to at a later date with Wordpress.

4. Organization of Wordpress sites is accomplished mainly through the use of different categories for posts as well as “tags.” Learn how to add categories and tags to your Wordpress posts.

5. Last of all, learn how to add photos, video, and other media to your Wordpress posts.

Many of the screencast tutorials on Wordpress.tv apply to Wordpress developers, rather than users, so don’t be overwhelmed by the options. As a new user, I recommend starting with the tutorials available in the Writing with Wordpress category after you view and practice with the five tutorials I’ve highlighted in this post.

In addition to these tutorials also utilize the free “how to” articles on the Wordpress Codex.

Good luck with your Wordpress writing and publishing! Blog on!

Hawaii Blog License Plate

Cross-posted to the Powerful Ingredients Workshop Mini-Lessons wiki.

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4th February 2010

A case study on why team blog MODERATION is essential in schools

posted in blogs, leadership, socialnetworking | 1 Comment

Yesterday in a full-day workshop I facilitated for CASTLE with Minnesota K-12 principals in Rochester, one of the participants told me about a very negative situation which took place in November 2009 involving a class blog in Owatonna, Minnesota.

According to Curt Brown’s November 20, 2009 article for the Minneapolis / St Paul Star Tribune, “Racial tension running high after fight at Owatonna High School:”

Principal Don Johnson said the problems began when two white students wrote papers in recent weeks that were “inflammatory and very disrespectful.” One student handed out copies of his paper to friends, while the other posted his on a class blog. Both were suspended from the school of 1,600 students — about 100 of whom are Somali.

Johnson said that before the second student returned to school Monday, the student sent text messages over the weekend to white and Somali students that were “unapologetic and in your face.” He then walked into a common area Monday where more than 20 Somali students were gathered and sat down. An altercation erupted that sent one of the white students to the hospital for observation.

There are currently over 100 comments on Melissa Kaelin’s November 19, 2009 article for the Owatonna People’s Press, “School works to quell tensions.” I am not intimately familiar with the details of this situation, but based on what I heard today from a workshop participant and have read online, it sounds like blogging and social media were NOT “the problem” in this situation. Several commenters state racial tensions have been a problem at Owatonna High School for years. In this case, it sounds like students utilized social media tools at their fingertips (not limited to a class blog, but also including SMS text messaging) to share messages of hate and disrespect. The actions students took based on their apparently racist attitudes were and are “the problem” in Owatonna. We must reject hate in all its forms. When hate manifests itself, we need to address it, as I’m hopeful the community leaders in Owatonna are doing right now. It’s important not to blame social media when an incident like this takes place. Guns don’t murder. People do, however, and when they do those actions must be addressed.

As I wrote in my January 28th post, “Latest Facebook Situation in Nashville Highlights Need for Social Media Guidelines in Schools,” we need to catalyze conversations in our communities about social media guidelines.

Students or anyone else can use any tool for good or evil. We can use a shovel to plant a garden or kill a snake.

gardening tools

Drunk driving is a problem, but we don’t ban driving as a result of these poor choices some people unfortunately make. We tried banning alcohol in the United States, and it didn’t work out too well. We cannot and should not ban social media use in our societies, or in our schools. This happens in quasi-closed societies like modern China, but should not and must not happen in the United States.

This situation in Owatonna, Minnesota, would make an appropriate case study on why team blog MODERATION is essential in schools. See my blog post, “Blog comment moderation: How and Why?” for more on this topic.

Do you know of other situations in schools, besides this one in Owatonna, which highlight the importance of teachers turning ON blog post moderation, as well as comment moderation, on “official” class blogs?

Issues like these are NOT going to get away, and will (I’ll assert) only grow more common in the months ahead as social media websites gain even more popularity and usage. See my June 2006 post, “Blocking social networking sites is an insufficient response,” for more thoughts along these lines.

H/T to Jamie Fath for sharing the “drunk driving analogy” I used in this post.

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3rd February 2010

Blog comment moderation: How and Why?

posted in blogs, socialnetworking, web 2.0 | 3 Comments

I posted the following as an entry on my “Technology 4 Teachers” Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) blog for Spring 2010.

Question:
How can I turn on comment moderation on my Blogger blog? Why is this recommended?

Answer:
I recommend all educators turn on comment moderation for ALL blog posts and other social media websites they setup for use with K-12 students in the United States. There are several reasons for this:

  1. Prevent cyberbullying: Sometimes people can be mean when they comment online. By turning on moderation, you (as the owner / administrator of your blog) must approve EVERY comment before it shows up “live” for others to see. This can prevent your students from being victims of cyberbullying, including vicious attacks from others. It also can prevent / stave off spam comments. We are using our “Constructive Commenting with Social Media” rubric in Technology 4 Teachers to intentionally encourage an ethic of responsible and respectful blog commenting. Unfortunately not all blog commenters will follow this ethic, but by turning on blog moderation you can PROTECT your students and learning community from those people and/or trolls.
  2. Avoid a public relations nightmare: An unmoderated class blog can potentially cause problems. The situation at Owatonna High School (Minnesota) in November 2009 is a case in point. Given the litigious nature of our US society today, it makes sense to moderate posts before they “go live” on your class blog. The last thing you want in setting up and using a class blog is for a post on it to get parents, other students, or your entire community in an uproar. In cases like the one at Owatonna, the “problem” may not be “the blog,” but often people will blame technology in those situations. They also might blame the teacher who did NOT setup comment moderation. Some situations like this might be avoided by turning on comment moderation. If you are using the blog as a TEAM blog, where students also can post, you might want to consider using a blogging tool/platform which lets you MODERATE contributor posts. Wordpress does this (and is used by educational blog sites/services like EduBlogs) and so does Class Blogmeister. I’m not sure about Kidblog.
  3. Monitor the conversation: If you setup and use a class blog, you have a responsibility and obligation (I would argue) as the teacher to monitor it and “keep the pulse” of the conversations taking place there. By monitoring the comments, you serve as the gatekeeper of conversations there and can more readily monitor what people are saying and WHO is saying them.
By default, blogs in Blogger do not allow ANONYMOUS commenting. This is a very good idea. On whatever blogging platform you use, I recommend you do NOT allow anonymous commenting. While people can (on some platforms) still setup an account with a disposable email address and leave a comment, it takes longer to do that and requiring that people be logged in can prevent some “trolls” from leaving unwanted messages on your site.
Student writing on blogs can and should be a positive and motivational experience for all concerned. Blog monitoring and moderation is not a guarantee that this goal will be achieved, but it certainly is a pre-requisite.
The following graphic shows how you can turn ON blog MODERATION on your Blogger blog:
Turning on Comment Moderation on Blogger

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27th January 2010

Catholic Priests Encouraged to Blog by the Pope

posted in blogs | 4 Comments

The Pope is encouraging priests worldwide to blog. This is a significant announcement from a relatively old international organization that traditionally is very conservative. What about teachers in your school? What about students as they complete assignments for classes? Who is blogging with the formal endorsement and support of school officials? Perhaps school officials in your area share concerns over the transparency which blogging can provide. According to NPR’s report Monday:

“If people live in cyberspace then the Church ought to be in cyberspace” says Father Brian Paulson S.J. a Jesuit priest in Chicago. Paulson will soon head up a community of about 80 priests and seminarians, some of whom blog, and one of his concerns with the Pope’s mandate is quality. He worries that blogs that don’t pay close enough attention to the Church’s teachings or are written poorly will turn people away rather than attract them.

If priests are blogging heresy they are almost certainly preaching it too. I’d offer that sort of transparency is instructive and helpful, rather than undesirable.

Open the windows. Bring forth thy blogs.

25th January 2010

OKC Wordpress Group 25 Jan 2010

posted in blogs, open source | 1 Comment

These are my notes from our Oklahoma City Wordpress User’s Group tonight. The new OC network intrusion detection system prevented everyone at the meeting except one person from accessing the Internet as a guest-user. Ugh! Very painful. We survived not having Internet access, however, thanks to prepared slides and pre-loaded browser tabs by presenters. MY COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS BELOW.

Network Access Control __ Remediation-2

Larry Stone hosted our meeting tonight.

Tim’s company now builds 95% of client websites with Wordpress as a full-blown CMS

There’s a plug-in to integrate a Ning Network into your Wordpress blog
- ANYONE KNOW THIS LINK? ALL I COULD FIND WAS THIS 2007 POST FROM THE NING BLOG, and that plugin just lets your WP commenters use Ning authentication

First presentation: Tim Priebetimjpriebe.com

Wanting to use plug-ins that let people simply and easily modify their own site code, but maintain pleasing graphical look

WP sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

With Google Chrome, you can right click / control click a page element and choose INSPECT ELEMENT

With Google Chrome, select page content and INSPECT ELEMENT

We don’t have the right to upload TrueType fonts directly to the web, so we had to look for other options

Use website sIFR Generator (www.sifrgenerator.com)
- install the plug-in
- create your fonts
- you have options to generate subsets of a font, rather than the entire font set

Javascript replaces text headings with Flash text
- for non-flash devices like iPhones, normal font texts are displayed

WP sIFR creates separate instances of SWF files for each time it’s used
- this slows things down and is a problem with this WP plug-in, the native version of sIFR creates 1 version per application

Now hearing from Bruce Jackson: Pitfalls to avoid in a custom Wordpress site

- I work on the backend of our websites mostly
- we were sent a Wordpress file to install on our servers at one point
- this was a case of the technical guys looking at a Wordpress site from the user perspective

creative.mbopartners.com

Don’t hide dynamic code
- we couldn’t use “Contact Form” plug-in, but they were using a custom code method
- those developers had hidden the code in the page template page.php
- this was very problematic because we spent half a day just looking for this code

Don’t reuse obviously
- example of someone using refer-a-friend.php plugin that left code from the Hello Dolly plugin

Don’t leave test data intact
- pages
- posts
- contact forms
- Lorem ipsum

Because this group left lots of test pages on the site, it was sometimes hard to discern what content to keep and delete (the stuff that had been created just for testing)

This was further complicated when we received new versions of the site AGAIN that needed clean-up

We ran the site through websiteoptimization.com to check the page
- several of the pages were 500K total to load, took 13 sec on a T1 line
- we ran the images through PhotoShop for optimization and that reduced total page size to about 35K

Needed to turn Apache Compression on, because larger javascripts were loading
- that is not on the Wordpress side of things, but can result in HUGE savings for time

Don’t Hard-code page numbers
- use page descriptors instead
- using hard-code page numbers can make it very difficult for others to change the site

Don’t avoid sidebar widgets
- in the case of our site, a webform was hard-coded in
- we wanted that to be a widget, but it wasn’t created that way!

Don’t customize public plug-ins and leave them as the original plug-ins
- otherwise your users will get the “upgrade automatically” and when they do, they will break your site (or at least the functionality of that custom plugin)

Check out “Contact Form 7″ plug-in

THIS MAKES ME THINK IT WOULD BE GOOD TO SEE A LIST OF REQUIREMENTS FOR A WORDPRESS DEVELOPER, THINGS WHICH ARE BEST-PRACTICES THAT YOU’D LIKE A DEVELOPER TO FOLLOW

Google has a new SEO service as a beta
- I COULDN’T FIND THIS WITH GOOGLE – DID FIND THIS PAGE OF GREAT SEO TIPS FROM GOOGLE, HOWEVER.

I NEED TO INSTALL GOOGLE ANALYTICS

only one person here tonight has managed to get online – Ugh!

Now hearing from Larry Stone

impactok.org – Impact Oklahoma
- 500 women, all donate $1000, donate massive grants to groups
- Larry Stone did a rudimentary website for them 5 years ago

I am so proud of this site now, it does not look like Wordpress
- Wordpress is beginning to be so prevalent, many sites look very “templatey”

New York Times, Daily Oklahoman, Time Magazine, all are using Wordpress now
- many of us are looking for sites that don’t look like others, are unique

I worked with “S Design” from here in Oklahoma City
- Jack Buley was who I worked with

Site has irregularly sized photos
- layout looks very feminine, I am very proud of this

Larry is willing to put together a list of plugins to use on the site
- site is built with a tweaked template

THIS BRINGS UP A GREAT POINT: WE NEED TO APPLY FOR AN IMPACT OKLAHOMA GRANT FOR STORYCHASERS AND CELEBRATE OKLAHOMA VOICES!

Larry’s wife is now on the Board of Impact Oklahoma
- he’s handed off several Wordpress websites to users, he shows them how to login and

Larry worked with the group that created the first CD-ROMs, and his group made the first hyperlink

iThemes has good Wordpress 101 tutorial
- other tutorials on Wordpress too

Lynda.com tutorials on Wordpress are really good too

The magic eBook for Wordpress is called the Codex: it tells you everything you need to know about Wordpress

Good rule of thumb: If you can’t find a plug-in that does want you want, then go to the Codex

WP MU Integration is now available with the WP standard release

BuddyPress is like Wordpress but for social networking

Next Meeting will be Monday, Feb 22nd
- if you have anything you want to share, let David know!
- Larry is interested in some rudimentary tutorials

FileZilla is a free ftp client for Windows, Mac, and Linux
- might change theme folder permissions to 777 instead of 755 to fix problem reported by one participant tonight, where theme downloader would not work / said not authorized. Permissions on themes folder may be not set to allow write changes.

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17th January 2010

Get creative when the blogging light is lit

posted in blogs, creativity | 2 Comments

In bygone days of sailing on the open seas, a “smoking lamp” was lit to let sailors know when it was OK to smoke on their wooden ships. Today at ESSDACK in Hutchinson, Kansas, the “blogging light” tells staff members when it’s time to get creative and start blogging.

The ESSDACK Blogging Light

Kevin Honeycutt shared a bit about the ESSDACK blogging light last week when I came up for a visit.

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12th January 2010

Blog posts that hide spoilers

posted in blogs | 1 Comment

This evening before bed, I asked both of my kids to write some new posts on our family learning blog. My 9 year old almost finished hers, but still wants to do some additional editing before publishing her post. My son wrote two, but for the second one he asked me to help him learn to hide some of the text so it wouldn’t immediately reveal a book spoiler he was going to include. (I’m still reading the book, so he’s being thoughtful of me as a member of his blog audience.)

I figured out how to toggle text on and off, wrote a post about how to do it, and Alexander was able to publish his post using that coding method.

This is probably the geekiest “before-bed request for help” I’ve received from one of my kids to date.

I love it. :-)

We Can Blog It!

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12th January 2010

Implications of (almost) free online storage for educators and students

posted in blogs, web 2.0 | 5 Comments

Remember being amazed 1 GB flash media drives existed at all, because your mind was still used to thinking in MEGAbytes instead of GIGAbytes? Have you had the experience yet of seeing vendors at conferences give away 1+ GB flash drives with their free files and marketing content already loaded, because they are so cheap to produce? That was recent history, and it’s a current event.

flash drive

Now it’s time to be amazed Google is giving anyone 1 GB of free online storage. As Mashable author Christina Warren points out, services like Dropbox and Box.net have been doing this for quite awhile. Drop.io continues to be one of my favorite online storage options, not only for its free/cheap cloud-based file access (depending on how much you want) but also its free phonecasting services. What does this abundance of free, online storage mean for teaching and learning today? It’s time again to question some of our assumptions, and one of the big ones to question is the scarcity as well as cost of local as well as web-based storage space.

Just after the new year started, Karl Fisch tweeted me a link to Chris Anderson’s June 2009 article, “Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity.” In the article and his free eBook, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” Anderson contends:

When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world. The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce.

It may seem odd to think this way, but as the author of “The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson is an important voice to consider in our quickly changing infoverse. If we want to act smart (and of course we all do most of the time) we need to change the way we look at online storage. Start thinking of storage space online as abundant rather than scarce. Here are a few implications of this thinking and the behaviors which should follow.

library with free wifi

WIFI CONNECTIVITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER
The concept of cloud-based computing is a big shift for LOTS of people in our society today. Inside and outside our schools, ubiquitous access to our files and data “in the cloud” can be a great thing as long as we have available connectivity. This makes wifi hotspots in our schools, homes, and communities more important than ever. We don’t need every city and town to be blanketed with high speed connectivity (although that would be nice, of course) but we DO need hot spots in each community which are readily accessible and FAST.

flash drives

QUESTION MANDATES TO REQUIRE FLASH MEDIA DRIVES
Tomorrow I’m starting to teach a fifteen week course at the University of Central Oklahoma called, Technology 4 Teachers. In the past, and as far as I know in the other six sections of this course offered this term, students are required to purchase and use a 1 GB flash drive. In my sections, flash drives are optional. The vast majority of the work we’ll do together this term will be “in the cloud.” Why mess with a flash drive and a locally-saved file on a flash drive if you don’t have to?

netbook versus laptop comparison

NETBOOKS LOOK BETTER EVERY DAY
Netbooks are perfect for cloud-based computing work. My comparison last week and weekend creating videos for YouTube using both iMovie ‘09 and Windows Live Moviemaker (for Windows 7 and Vista) confirmed what I’d long suspected: Today’s 3rd generation netbooks can be used to produce creative multimedia videos as well as “work in the cloud.” I think Storychasers’ Mobile Learning Collaborative is right on target recommending that schools opt for netbooks rather than full-size laptops for 1:1 learning initiatives. The speed and power of netbooks are only going to increase in the months ahead, and the creative potential of cloud-based applications for learning is going to keep going the same direction as well.

Zip Drive

ONLINE BACKUPS SHOULD BE A NO-BRAINER

As I mentioned a few days ago in the post, “Recovering lost iTunes Song Purchases (maybe) and iTunes Library Backups,” online backup services are more affordable and user-friendly than ever. The English WikiPedia has a comparative table for different commercial online backup services worth checking out. If you’re not backing up your vital files online yet (like me – I’m not and I need to do this) it’s time to embrace online backups. Let’s all learn from Kevin Honeycutt’s “digital stroke” a few years ago (when his hard drive crashed WITHOUT a recent backup) and take some preventative steps TODAY that can avoid such agony.

The joys of homework (not)

A NEW AGE OF HOMEWORK ACCOUNTABILITY

Students can invent countless reasons for not turning in their homework on time. With web-based tools like wikis, Google Docs, and online learning management systems, course assignments can be not only shared/broadcast by the teacher/instructor for students and parents to access, they can also facilitate an entirely digital assignment submission process. The recent outbreak of the H1N1 virus in Hong Kong pushed some international school administrators to FINALLY require all their teachers to post assignments online. Snow days this winter in North America have raised similar questions in our own household: Why aren’t all the teachers at my son’s school posting assignments and accepting student work online yet? It’s time for a new age of homework accountability to dawn.

Happy National De-Lurking Week

INTERACTIVE PUBLISHING SHOULD BECOME NORMALIZED

Today it is rare to find a school which regularly empowers students to publish their work online for an audience of peers, parents, and other website visitors to review and offer feedback. The shift to cloud-based knowledge work can and should empower visionary school leaders (at all levels) to change this norm. Student motivation is of paramount importance for literacy development. If we don’t help students get excited and intrinsically motivated to regularly engage in the activities of literacy, including reading, writing, and speaking in front of groups, we’re failing as teachers. Rachel Boyd affirmed the power of parents and others responding to student work online in last Saturday’s K12Online09 Week 2 fireside chat.

Want to help your students further develop their reading and writing skills? Find ways to help them become more motivated as readers and writers. Help them define their very identities as authors and publishers, for local as well as global audiences. Help them become storychasers.

What have I missed or do you think should be added to this list?

Cross-posted to the Infinite Thinking Machine.

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10th January 2010

Wordpress Plugins for Database Maintenance and Plugin Listing

posted in blogs | 0 Comments

Thanks to the list of recommended Wordpress plug-ins from Studiopress, I discovered Lester Chan’s WP Database Manager plugin and WP-PluginsUsed plugin today. These are both free and can add valuable functionality to self-hosted Wordpress blogs.

WP Database Manager provides a web-based interface for mySQL backups, repairs, and optimizations. “Removing overhead” from your Wordpress mySQL blog is a good idea, and can become vital in extreme situations when it has not been done. My post from May 2009, “Wordpress commenting restored thanks to phpMyAdmin table repair” gives some additional background. If you opt to use WP Database Manager, you don’t need to use phpMyAdmin to “remove overhead” / repair your database.

WP-PluginsUsed provides a dynamic way to list your Wordpress plugin colophon. After activating this plugin, I added the following code to my blog’s “about page” to display my current active and inactive plugins:

Code for WP-PluginsUsed plugin

Now I no longer need to edit my about page when I install or uninstall a Wordpress plugin to share that fact, it’s done automatically. :-)

Wordpress sign

8th January 2010

Configuring Wordpress for Mobile Theme Compatibility with WP-Super Cache

posted in blogs, mobile | 1 Comment

For at least six months I’ve used the WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in to provide visitors to my Wordpress blog, who use a mobile device like an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Blackberry, with a quick-loading mobile interface. This plug-in is a bit unusual, since it also requires a custom theme which must be uploaded into your wp-content/themes directory. The main problem with the plug-in, however, is that it is not compatible with “caching” plug-ins like wp-cache, which I’ve used now for several years. Caching plug-ins are beneficial for busy Wordpress blogs because they create static versions of webpages and thereby reduce the mySQL server request load for your web host. This can increase the speed / performance of your Wordpress blog for visitors, and in the extreme (a situation which has NOT happened to me, to date) can make your blog “DIGG proof.” This means if a post gets popular on a site like DIGG, Slashdot or reddit (which means your page/site is attracting thousands of hits) the server should be able to handle the load and not fail. When a mobile-theme plug-in is not cache-compatibile, sometimes mobile visitors are shown the “mobile version” of webpages, and sometimes they are not, depending on whether or not the full-browser version of the page has been previously cached. This defeats the purpose of using a mobile-accessible plug-in or theme, so it’s important to work around these issues.

I’m not sure the first time I saw it, but I’ve had “mobile-blog theme envy” ever since I first saw the WPtouch Wordpress plug-in / mobile theme in action on my iPhone. James Deaton runs it on his blog, Wandering Tech, and every time I’ve seen it in mobile form the past few months I’ve wanted to use it too. Like all the plug-ins and themes I use on my Wordpress blog, WPtouch is free… so not running it wasn’t a question of money, it was a question of time. I tried awhile back to activate it on my blog, but it was not compatible with wp-cache either. So, to get it to work I knew I’d have to do some research and tweaking. This evening, I decided to give it a try.

I found the following video tutorial online, which explains how to configure the WP Super Cache plug-in for Wordpress to work with WPtouch.

This process required the following steps: I deleted my old wp-cache cached pages, deactivated the wp-cache plug-in along with Wordpress Mobile Edition, deleted both of them from my hosting account (with Cyberduck), as well as the previously required Carrington Mobile Wordpress theme, and then downloaded WP Super Cache. After uploading and activating it, I followed the instructions in the above video to configure it for WPtouch plug-in compatibility. To add information about Creative Commons licensing at the bottom of the mobile theme, I had to edit the “footer.php” file located in the wptouch / themes / default directory.

Whew! This took awhile, but it was worth it. I’m delighted with the results!

My blog running the WPtouch plug-in

I spent some time customizing the mobile version’s background, colors and fonts, as well as the Wordpress “pages” which are displayed in the mobile menu. I like how WPtouch permits custom icon configuration for Wordpress pages as well.

My blog menu running the WPtouch plug-in

I was interested to see the WPtouch categories menu button displays post categories in descending order by the number of posts in each.

My blog categories running the WPtouch plug-in

By clicking on the “podcasts” category, my month of “podfading” (a term I heard from Dan Schmidt back in 2006) in December is revealed! I hope to post podcasts at least once every two weeks in 2010, so hopefully lapses like this won’t be common. K-12 Online took a lot of my time in December, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

My blog's "podcast" category running the WPtouch plug-in

Mobile web access is going to continue growing by leaps and bounds in the years ahead. Are your organizational and personal websites mobile-friendly? If you’re running Wordpress, WPtouch provides a clean, effective and free way to provide mobile accessibility.

I updated my Wordpress plug-in colophon on my about page, reflecting the changes to plug-ins I made tonight.

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6th January 2010

I Need My Teachers To Learn 2.0

posted in blogs, digitalstorytelling, leadership, schoolreform, socialnetworking, web 2.0 | 0 Comments

Kevin Honeycutt has published an updated YouTube version of his wonderful song, “I Need My Teachers To Learn.” Instead of using video for the b-roll footage, his friend Rae helped him use still images synchronized to the music. It’s just over three minutes long, take some time today and check it out:

In many ways I think this video is an improvement over the original version which was posted in August 2009 and now has over 10,000 YouTube views. When I blogged about it originally I noted:

The song was written by Kevin Honeycutt of ESSDACK, and Charlie Mahoney from Turning Point Learning Center (TPLC) helped with percussion as well as some Garageband vocal adjustments to make him sound even more awesome! The video was shot and produced by Shawn Gormley, a friend of Kevin’s.

This latest version is published on Kevin’s own YouTube channel (to which I’d recommend subscribing) instead of the changingworldbyfilm channel. (I have no idea who owns that one.) From a digital footprint standpoint, this is a good thing for Kevin I think.

Static images synchronized to narration and/or music can be just as powerful as moving video. We take this approach as Storychasers in the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices oral history project. From visual literacy and attention economy perspectives, I think it is very important we pay attention to the images with which we synchronize our ideas in digital stories. At several points in the original video, I found myself wanting more variety in the presented images, and more direct relevancy to the lyrics of the song.

In this 2.0 version of the video, Quang Minh (YILKA)’s Flickr image “How many non-Mac are there” is used several times. Several other images are repeated as well. While I think this 2.0 version is an improvement, a 2.1 version could be even better by avoiding repeated images altogether and using other fresh, new images in each verse. Of course this takes time, and we all have a limited amount of it… So I am not offering this as a criticism to Kevin and Rae but rather as a suggestion for future versions as an aspiring digital storyteller myself.

Attribution of image sources is also very important, and this is another area the video could improve on. My 12 year old just completed his first oral history video documentary over the holidays (we burned the DVD version last night, in fact, for him to turn in during class today) and image attribution was something we talked about and worked on together. This can be a pain, it is time consuming, but it is also important. It’s vital we model respect for copyright and intellectual property in published videos like this, and to do that one of the best ideas is to start with copyright-friendly image sources. Joyce Valenza shared some great image source links in her “Getting Started” strand keynote for K12Online09, “The Wizard of Apps.”

If you haven’t seen Joyce’s K12Online09 presentation, set aside 50 minutes in the next few weeks and DO IT. I challenge you to find and share a more creative and helpful online presentation about the practical ways learners can digitally collaborate in constructive and legally respectful ways online!

Kudos to Kevin and Rae for creating and sharing this “2.0 version” of Kevin’s song. I will definitely be sharing this with educator audiences in 2010 at conferences where I have an opportunity to present and share. :-)

30th December 2009

Praise for MobileRSS on the iPhone

posted in apple, blogs, mobile, web 2.0 | 0 Comments

I tweeted about this recently but am so impressed with the iPhone app “MobileRSS – Free Google Reader” I’ve decided it warrants its own post.

iPhone Apps Dec09

I now read at least 95% of my news and blog updates on my iPhone, and most of those updates come through Google Reader. MobileRSS, also available as a $3 paid app without advertising, supports all the functionality of Google Reader and does many of those things even better than the official mobile web application version, like changing categories for different subscribed feeds. If you use Google Reader and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, give MobileRSS a try. I’m loving it.

All our family’s iPhone and iPod Touch applications are listed on my iPhone apps Google sites page / wiki page, updated as of 28 December 2009.

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23rd December 2009

If you like Moving at the Speed of Creativity…

posted in blogs | Comments Off

I added the following text to my Wordpress header file this evening, so these links now show up at the top of my blog each time it’s displayed in a browser. (This does not show up if you’re subscribed to my blog’s feed, however.)

Also check out these blogs:
Learning SignsEyes RightStorychasersPowerful IngredientsBLASTcastGood Oklahoma Eats

I have all these blogs listed on my ClaimID page, and also have most of them listed in my blog’s left sidebar links for “Contributions and Connections,” but figured it might be helpful to highlight these “other spaces” where I’m periodically (and generally less frequently) sharing ideas as blog posts.

All the education-related blogs to which I subscribe continue to be listed (as a Google Reader share) on my Resources – Education Blogs page. I share most blog posts I read via Google Reader, which show up in the right sidebar of my blog as well as directly in my Google Reader Shared Items.

Just for fun, I used Yahoo Pipes and created an aggregated feed for these seven blog sources, sorted by date. This Yahoo Pipe gets the site feed for each blog, truncates the feed to include just the most recent 5 posts, combines all 7 feeds, and then sorts them by publication date so they are shown in descending order (most recent first.)

Yahoo Pipes: 'All wfryer blog feeds'

Yahoo Pipes is so cool!

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19th December 2009

Wordpress 2.9 adds image editing and video embedding via oEmbed

posted in blogs, open source | 1 Comment

I learned this evening the latest version of Wordpress (2.9) has added several exciting features, including built-in image editing (including cropping and image rotation) as well as video embedding from many popular video sharing websites using the oEmbed standard. I’m also enthused Wordpress will now automatically check for plugin-in compatibility when upgrading plug-ins. Plug-in conflicts can be a real headache, and this new feature should be a BIG help to those Wordpress users (like yours truly) who use a large number of plug-ins.

I’m eager to give this version a try… I’ve been a bit slow to update my blogs from 2.8.4. These new features will, I predict, give me more motivation to get those Wordpress blogs upgraded! :-)

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17th December 2009

Translate entire websites on the fly with Google

posted in blogs, edtech, globalvoices | Comments Off

If you are building and/or maintaining a website with Google Sites, your creation just acquired new powers. Google announced today it has integrated language translation functionality directly into Google Sites. When you visit a Google sites website in a different language, you should be presented with an optional translation menu.

If you are not using Google Sites for your web presence, do not despair… Free code can be added to provide the same translation functionality.

We’ve seen an amazing number of innovative announcements from Google in the past few weeks. What could be next? A holodeck, perhaps?!

On our family learning blog, Learning Signs, we use the “Wordpress Global Translator Plugin” to provide optional translations already. That plugin:

Automatically translates a blog in 41 different languages by wrapping four different online translation engines (Google Translation Engine, Babelfish Translation Engine, FreeTranslations.com, Promt).

Google translation services support 51 languages, according to today’s announcement. I haven’t started utilizing theWordpress plug-in here on my main blog, however. I’m interested to know which Wordpress file should be used to insert the Google translation code. If you know please comment here.

H/T Benn Parr at Mashable.

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