For the last few days, I’ve been tweaking my class blog site in response to what my co-teacher and I see as the needs for the site, not just in terms of organization (though that’s important), but also to continue to foster a good online community there. I successfully implemented several cool features that left me feeling literally high (I think my endorphins went into overdrive). I even dubbed myself WordPress Goddess, which my co-teacher was quite amused by. So, I thought I’d continue to share my success with all of you.

First, on the organization front. All the students are posting at least once a week and sometimes much more than that, and that’s all going well. But, Anne and I keep notes and other class-keeping stuff on pages and we are also having our students create pages for their papers, so as not to disrupt the regular flow of posts. I had used the parent-child scheme to organize some things and we’d kind of figured out the ordering process that uses a numbering/weighting system, but it was very clunky and we were concerned about that clunkiness from the standpoint of the student. To solve the ordering situation, I used PageMash, a simple plugin that implements a drag-and-drop interface to allow for complete rearranging of your pages. You can drag things from one parent to another, reorder the parents (the children tag along), hide pages from the menu and even edit them from this interface. It’s really quite useful.

The second organizational problem we needed to solve was the paper submission situation. We set up a parent page and asked students to post their papers as pages and then to create a link to their page on the parent page. Well, this seemed like too many steps, so I went looking for a way to automatically generate those links. It took a lot of digging, but I found the perfect thing, List Subpages. You can see this in action on our notes page. It was the successful implementation of this feature that put me over the edge into WordPress High Mode.

On the community front, we wanted to create more intrablog conversation. We have Recent Comments highlighted at the top of the page, but we had noticed that many people seemed to be posting in a vacuum. I implemented Yet Another Related Posts Plugin to generate related posts at the end of each post (you have to be on an individual post page to see them) in the hopes of showing students what other people had written that might be related and that they might then go comment on it.

All of this work highlights a few things.

• One, the technology needs of any given class are very individual and specific. I’m lucky in that my co-teacher and I are both tech savvy. We’ve both been teaching online for a while, so we know what our goals are. Those goals have shifted a little over the course of the semester, prompting us to make technical changes to the blog. But there are plenty of other teachers who still have those very specific needs, but don’t have the knowledge to know how to meet those needs technologically. A good technologist should be able to help those people find the appropriate tools as well as implement them appropriately.
• Two, it’s really, really important for technology to not be a barrier to teaching and learning. It can’t be difficult or cumbersome for students to post their work or for teachers to present their material and interact with and evaluate their students. As a technologist, you can’t just shrug and say, well this is the way it is. You need to keep searching for the technology that presents the fewest barriers.
• Three, doing all this right takes a lot of time. Even though I’m co-teaching the content for this course and not just serving as the technical guru, I think having a technologist deeply involved in a class would be a good idea. Unfortunately, that’s not very cost effective. My idea would be that a technologist would work closely with maybe three faculty, including working with them during initial class prep and attending class. We kind of sort of tried to do this with students, but it wasn’t entirely successful. But I think it would be really valuable not just for the teacher, but for the technologist, who would get to see things “from the other side” in a really concrete and detailed way.

I’m learning some important lessons, ones that I kind of knew before, but that have hit home more forcefully now.

Yesterday, it was my responsibility to get our first week’s materials digitized. I could have gone in to campus and used the equipment there, but I have a scanner at home and since the originals were in books, a sheet feeder wouldn’t have helped me at all. What I don’t have at home is the Adobe suite of software. I’m used to using Acrobat Professional to create good quality pdfs that are still a small file size. Without that, I was left with just the scanner software itself (Epson). My first document went fine, though it was a bit large at just over 1 mb. The second document, however, checked in at over 1.5 mb and that kept me from being able to upload it to the class blog site. So, I checked all my settings and noticed that the resolution was at 300. I reduced that to 150dpi and voila! a file under 1 mb. I suspect that I could do slightly better with Acrobat. The key is to make sure that you’re scanning as text, not as a photograph and that your resolution is not too high. In theory, I could bump it down to 72 (screen resolution) but since it’s likely that students will print the documents out, I wanted to make sure the printouts were readable. The Epson software allowed me to scan multiple pages and even rotate them all before saving the document, so it may not be the fanciest software in the world, but it works.

A while back, I made a podcast (which seems to have disappeared) about how I thought Google docs weren’t quite ready for the education sphere. For some projects, that’s still true. If you need footnotes or even a lot of endnotes, Google docs won’t make that easy for you. But if, like me, most of what you write is devoid of special formatting, Google docs is great. I’ve written memos, letters of recommendation, resumes, and more. By far, the best thing about Google docs is the collaboration features. I’m able to work with people across the country easily, thanks to Google docs. There’s no waiting for someone do make changes and email them to you. If you want to jump in and add something–even at the same time as someone else–you can. I’ve used this with my student workers as well. I’ll start a help document, point them to the url and have them add to it.

I recently did a presentation in Google docs. It worked really well and I really like the chat feature, which I wish they’d add to the document area. I like the way your presentation quickly becomes a url and an embeddable presentation. With PowerPoint, there are too many steps to get to that point.

I also started using the spreadsheet function for a large data collecting project that I was working on with someone. It just wouldn’t have been practical to pass a spreadsheet back and forth via email or to work on spreadsheets separately. We needed to know who had done what at any given moment. The coolest feature they added to spreadsheets was forms. I’ve used those a lot. I’m having my students fill out information about work they’ve done via a Google form. I’ve used them for workshop sign ups and I’m using one right now to decide when to hold a workshop. It’s much faster than coding up your own web form. All the data is neatly organized into a spreadsheet.

And all the documents can be saved in standard formats–pdf, doc, ppt, xls, txt, html. And I’d recommend doing that every once in a while. Google may claim their motto is “Don’t be evil” but that doesn’t mean that mistakes might not happen (I’ve seen them on the Internets).

I love that Google docs is simple and straightforward. It doesn’t take forever to load and you can just do the basics without too much thought. Also, if I’m unable to get to my computer, I can still get to my documents. Now that I’ve gone to a laptop, this doesn’t happen too often, but I have been in meetings or in a lab where it would be a pain to go get my laptop.

Now, I’ll be fair, not everyone thinks Google docs is the best thing since sliced bread. But instead of shelling out money for Microsoft Office in order to get the advanced features, get OpenOffice. But read the original post and comments. There’s a good debate there.

Several of you had mentioned having trouble viewing my feed when I went to the new blogger. I’ve had a feedburner feed for a long time. Now, I’m officially switching over. It’d be great if everyone could subscribe to that feed by clicking the link in the sidebar or below.

Subscribe in a reader