Category: tools

Review: Moodle for Dummies

Moodle For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech), written by Radana Dvorak is aimed at the institutional user who is required to use Moodle instead of one of the education management systems like Blackboard. It is not meant for the individual user who might want to set up Moodle on his or her own server.

The book consists of screen by screen and menu by menu explanations of Moodle and its capabilities. It covers creating and managing courses, adding modules to courses, administering courses, setting up questions, grading, and more. There are explanations of how to add chat, blogs, and wikis to a course, and of using databases to share material with your students. You can learn how to set up for different languages, set security, and change the appearance of your course. There’s a chapter on getting reports and statistics and viewing your logs.

The last chapter talks about ways to keep your learners involved, but the suggestions are pretty mundane.

There’s nothing very exciting about Moodle for Dummies, but if you need to learn to use Moodle, this book will get you there.

Summary: A utilitarian explanation of absolutely everything you can do with Moodle.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of Moodle for Dummies (rating: 4 stars)

Questions about Flickr, Picasa, iPhoto and Google+ Photos

What are Mac users doing about photos since Google+?

My current status is to use iPhoto and upload what I want to share to Flickr.

Whether Flickr is going to fade away due to neglect on Yahoo’s part, or whether Google+ is going to take over the world – it looks to me like it might be wise to think about an alternative to my current status.

Which brings up the question above. Here are some questions I have.

  1. Google+ Photos only work with Picasa. Are Mac users installing Picasa in addition to iPhoto?
  2. Can Picasa import photo albums, modified photos, and folders from iPhoto?
  3. Is there a way to upload to an online Picasa space from iPhoto?
  4. Does Picasa import photos from Flickr?
Have you seen posts that answer these questions? (Links welcome, but only one per comment will be allowed by the spam filter.) Are you a Mac user? How are you doing it?

BlueGriffon

A new web standards compliant WYSIWYG web editor is now available at bluegriffon.org. Features include that it’s open source and free, plus it does:

  • HTML5 – including forms, video and audio
  • CSS3 – including D Transforms, Transitions, Shadows, Linear/Radial Gradients and Repeating Gradients, Border Images, Columns, Flex Box Model
  • SVG
  • MathML
  • a user interface to work with some important ARIA attributes

It’s based on the Gecko rendering engine and works in Linux, Mac and Windows. Although the software is free, they are selling add ons for a few Euros each. The MathML, for example, is an add on.

You can, of course, toggle between code and design views.

A hat tip to @mollydotcom who tweeted the news.

Proud of @glazou – he made a very sweet WYSIWYG editor. x-platform, HTML5, CSS3, SVG, MathML – very cool! http://t.co/qnoV3CeWed May 11 11:54:36 via Tweet ButtonMolly E. Holzschlag
mollydotcom

Blogger gets a makeover

[Ed.: This article was cross-posted at BlogHer.]

At SXSW Interactive this week, Google announced a refresh of the interface for its popular Blogger blogging platform. The software hasn’t been updated in years, although it remains one of the most popular blogging tools on the Web.

Blogger Product Manager Chang Kim calls the refresh “our next-generation user interface.” The changes will roll out over 2011 in stages, so don’t expect to open up your Blogger blog and find it completely different in one big step. The user interface is the big news, but there are several improvements, among them new mobile themes and something Blogger is calling a ‘content discovery engine’ that “that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading.”

On the geekier side, the new changes will incorporate the Google Web Toolkit. This may not matter much to you if you’re using a blogspot URL, but if you hosting a Blogger blog on your own server, this will mean you have more control over the features you can manipulate.

For everyday use, the interface will change to a sleeker and more up-to-date look. Here you see a new blog post screen showing the familiar older interface at the top, with the new look in front near the bottom.

blogger Interface

The Dashboard will change as well. Here’s the new Dashboard.

Blogger's new dashboard

At Free Technology for Teachers, the comment was made,

The new editor looks a lot like the Google Docs document editor.

Anna Leach at Shiny Shiny said,

They are smartening up the back-end of the site – making it easier to see what you’re doing, and giving users a more intuitive preview of their work.

Google released a promotional video about Blogger.

Sarah Gooding at WPMU very helpfully listed the new features mentioned in the video.

  • The ability to easily customize templates without any CSS knowledge
  • Access to real-time stats
  • Improved spam filtering
  • Continued stability (The Blogger service has had zero downtime, according to Pingdom)
  • Inclusion of web fonts
  • A sleek mobile experience of the platform
  • Smart content discovery
  • Integration of the Google Web Toolkit

In an era when sites we’ve come to depend on (like Flickr) are being neglected or abandoned by their owners, it’s great that Google is stepping up to keep Blogger competitive and on the cutting edge.

HTML/Text editor recommendations

I got this email the other day:

I have a rather odd request to ask. I am trying to learn how to write web pages for fun and maybe more down the road. At present I have several different editors to choose from, and was wondering if you could give me some advice as to which one I should use as my primary editor. I have: Dreamweaver CS4, Notpad++(sic), TopStyle Pro 4.0.0.85 and UEStudio ’10 as my potential editors. The thing is I really want to learn hand coding from the ground up. I have both of your books, Intergraded (sic) HTML and CSS and Mastering Intergraded (sic) HTML and CSS for my learning the basics. I also have PDF books on learning JavaScript and HTML5, more books than I know what to do with.

I haven’t seen anyone talking about editors on a blog for a long time. Because of that, I thought I’d give a rather lengthy answer. And a lengthy answer sounds like a blog post, does it not? Here’s how I answered the email.

Each of those tools has its own pros and cons. If you are serious about hand coding, you might find UEStudio, with its excellent HTML text editor UltraEdit as a good choice. Coupling that with TopStyle Pro for help with writing CSS and you have the basics covered.

UltraEdit beats out Notepad in my book because you have color coding, search and replace, FTP, and much more that isn’t available with Notepad.

Dreamweaver – which can be used as a text editor in Code View – adds another dimension you don’t get from other tools. If you aren’t great at typing or spelling, which your email hints might be the case, using Code View in Dreamweaver to type code is pretty typo-proof. There are many site management tools in Dreamweaver: link management, validation tools, site-wide search and replace, built in JavaScripts, FTP, CSS tools, image editing and more. Plus you have the WYSIWYG view if you want it.

Any one of these tools can get the job done. Which do you feel most comfortable working in? Which one makes the most sense to you? That one is probably the right choice for you.

I have dozens and dozens of web design books at my house, too. I’ve read them all. I’ve given away sacks and sacks of them to Freecycle folks. There are more books to come. In this field, there’s always something new, always something more to learn. Get the basic building blocks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript under control and that gives you the foundation to build on.

Useful links: accessibility, HTML5 forms, gadgets

Web Accessibility – A Look Back and into the Future is a brief interview at WebProfessionals.org.

Fun with HTML5 Forms at Think Vitamin is by Richard Shepherd. Good stuff.

Americans and their gadgets is a new report from Pew Research full of tidbits like “fully 96% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone of some kind.” Makes you wonder if some day educators will use phrases like “phone in your homework” and mean it.

A blog + a feed + a reader = a more efficient you

Pop quiz time. Do you read several blogs each day? If yes, do you navigate to each one separately? If yes, would you like to save time by subscribing to each one and reading it in a feed reader?

If you are not sure what a feed reader is, this article is for you. I use a feed reader, and I foolishly assumed most blog readers do, too. But recently I read a couple of books. One was Professional Blogging for Dummies. The other was Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works. Both of these books mentioned statistics about the number of people who use feed readers (or RSS readers, as they are also called). The percentage was very low – 15 or 20%. The number shocked me a bit, because feed readers save a lot of time for people who like to read blogs.

Read the complete post at BlogHer to learn how to use the Google Reader and subscribe to blog feeds.