November 2019 – Ms. Bell's Book Blog

Here’s Looking At You…

Digital Artifact – Post 3b

The Tech Drawer – Find the Right Tool for the Right Task
www.techdrawer.weebly.com

I believe that the words proceeding great scientific discoveries aren’t “EUREKA!” but “Hmmm… isn’t that interesting.” I feel like that describes by process with this digital artifact. I started out wanting to make tutorial videos and figure out how to sort and embed Twitter posts. In the end I did just that. However, I also ended up making a webpage and opening up several new projects to get onto once this course is done. Isn’t that usually how it goes.

Tutorial Videos
I definitely need to work on wrapping things up more quickly. The two that I made with Screencastify were about 9min long. They cover everything you need to know, but I’d like to aim for 5 min in the future. I supose that 9 min isn’t bad considering they’re from our Tech Ten sessions – 10 min long. Screencastify is easy to work with. I ended up paying for the year long subscription so that I could have more features, but it was a pretty reasonable price. It has a very basic editor, but frankly I really wasn’t looking for anything more sophistocated (or else I would have used my camera, green screen and Premier Pro… maybe next year)

Twitter Feeds
This was what I was really wanting to figure out during this course, and I’m glad I did. I learned a lot about using Twitter lists and collections. In the website for the different courses I have embedded either lists or collections. The lists are nice because they update themselves, but sometimes there is one account that posts more than the others, so it dominates the feed. I think I will probably make all of them just collections, but I’ve created lists for each course and set the list and collection for each subject next to each other in Tweetdeck so that I don’t have to drag them so far. What is really handy with Tweetdeck is that my TL partner and I can both use it, so it won’t be so onerous a task to update. We can also schedule tweets from our SLLC account, so we’re going to give that a shot. Should make it a little easier to get them out regularly and early enough in the morning that people can read them before the school day gets going.

Web Design Choices
I decided that if I was going to do a website, I should do a bit of research and get the design right – or at least attractive and practical. The website I liked the most that had some great tips was 27 Research-backed Web Design Tips… Yes, there really are 27 tips. Honestly, I was impressed with the information that this guy gives away (or maybe doesn’t give away – I think I have to sign up for the blog to get to that blog post any more). I also really appreciate why companies need to hire good website designers – not just to get the code right (I hear a lot about that at home from my partner who does network engineering), but there are many important aspects to visual design.

For instance, I spent 2 hours on a silly picture for my tab called Student Tech Tub. I got the background of the picture to match the other pictures, and then I realized the picture was the wrong colour, so it didn’t balance the weight of the black clock on the left. I was so happy when I got it right and my son said (in the wisdom of a 13 year old) “That looks dumb.” He was right though. I went the literal direction, and not for the visual description of what that tab is about.

Because I was using a Weebly template, a lot of the tips had already been taken care of. Here are the main tips I spent the most time with.
1) Visual Hierarchy,
2) Descriptive Phrase – what site is about,
15) Descriptive navigation – put most important items in the header
20) Write meaningful subheads
10) Use People Pictures – especially your people
11) is to avoid using stock photos of people
14) use colour to guide visitors’ attention
8) avoid carousels and rotating sliders – this drives me nuts with our new school district / school websites; stacking is better
19) avoid putting social media icons in the header – put them in the footer.
22) avoid jargon, use simple words
23) list order – important stuff at the beginning and end
24) answer visitors’ top questions – actually something really important to anticipate with this website so I could design it well

Oddly, #s 2, 15 & 20 were the ones that were the most obvious, and the most obviously missing. I made sure that I added short descriptions at the top of each page so people would know if they were in the right place. Keeping them short kept everything simple. That was another tip – use whitespace and keep things uncluttered. When I compare the new website to the current SLLC website, I can really feel the difference. I find our old site cluttered and too busy.

I also changed the hyperlink text from light grey to dark blue with green hover over – couldn’t see the light grey. Who thought that was a good idea? It goes along with tip #1 – using colour contrast helps to draw the eye to important items. I had added a Feature Article as part of the home page (frankly, it looked too sparse otherwise), and the article had a lot fo great links that were washed out with the original colour scheme. It made the article painful to read.

In the end…
I think I’m happy with the website so far. It has a skeletal feel to it because there is still so much to add for the courses and the student page. However, I think the structure of it works really well. I really also like all of the input I was able to get from my TL partner, teachers for different subjects, and students. In some cases it required more finicky organization for different courses (sometimes Weebly is a royal pain if you want a heading or divider just so), but I think the overall effect was worth the effort. The people using the website had a say in its design, so hopefully that will translate into better usage. It’s an obvious step – getting the input of the users, but one that so often we just don’t do, and one that I know I lament frequently. Only time will tell now how well all of this planning pays off.

Web Design Research

Digital Artifact – post 2a

I thought I would share a little of the research I have done today about what makes a good website. I want to make sure that I don’t just create a website that is cluttered and doesn’t keep my audience (the staff primarily) interested. It wad interesting to consider myself and the library learning commons add a business with a product to sell, but frankly that’s all about what we need to do as advocates for these spaces. Might as well put good market research to use.

Caveat – I really know little about web design, so these may not be the most credible sites. However, what they said made sense, so I’m going to give dine of their ideas a try.

How much of all of this will I use? Probably not a much as I would like, and I can see why big companies hire media designers to build websites. However, I’ve got a template I like and a few solid ideas of how to tweak it.

15 Exceptional Education Websites

This is a list of university and college websites. I thought I’d look at these because they have sombre of the same functions that we may want in a SLLC website. I thought that the author’s commentary was interesting, and made sense. Nice to see some Canadian institutions made the list. One downside is that this is an older article. Websites have definitely changed side then. However, I think that the functionality and examples she’s gives were helpful.

27 Research-backed Web Design Tips: How to Design a Website That Works

This site had great tips and explanations for whay to include in website design. Some of it I was already naturally gravitating towards (like not putting important stuff below the fold – part of number 2). They had great advice about website organization, images, wording and navigation and links. So many things to consider!

Works Cited

Crestodina, Andy. “27 Research-backed Web Design Tips: How to Design a Website That Works.” Orbit Media, www.orbitmedia.com/blog/web-design-tips/

Gaines, Kendra. “15 Exceptional Education Websites.” Web Designer Depot, 15 July, 2013. www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/07/15-exceptional-education-sites/

Who are the people in my neighbourhood?

Digital Artifact – Week 2

Building a website can be complicated. There is a lot going on in the design part of it – what to keep, what to get rid of, what random pictures of cute puppies to use… I mean what deeply interesting, non-click bate will I use to keep my audience interested long enough to use this very useful site. (I realize this is sounding a little sarcastic, but I’m quite sincere. This website is mostly about useful function, and too often it feels like resources created for staff are used and then forgotten, so I want this resource to be continuously useful and used).

Me and my teacher-librarian partner, Darla

Having just alluded to the importance of designing a website to attract, retain and inform the audience is important, I haven’t got any great ideas here other than keeping it clutter free, easy to use, and logical. I need to do some more research here. After some really excellent discussion with my library partner, we’ve decided that our new tech website, “The Tech Drawer,” will be focused on providing information to our staff primarily. Staff may use the videos, links, info etc with their students, and will be able to link to any of the above on their own Google Classrooms, websites, etc. There are two needs we want to meet with The Tech Drawer:
1) create tutorials to remind staff of what we’ve covered in our Tech Ten sessions at Staff Meetings
2) provide links to helpful resources for their courses
When I informally surveyed the staff at the last staff meeting, they were very interersted in being able to access tutorials of the various tools, tips and sites. It is not always easy to remember details about interesting sites, especially if you don’t need to use that site or tool for a few months after it has been presented. It’s also nice for teachers to be able to show the tutorials to their students so they can get the information too (without the memory glitches).

So who is my intended audience? It is the 50 or so teaching colleagues at my school. Everyone is at a different place with their own tech skills or needs, but using video tutorials (I’m going to use Screencastify) will work for everyone. It’s easier for less tech savvy people when they can refer back to what the screen should look like and where to click. We do have some common places we use technology now, such as accessing the chromebook schedule or requesting laminating through our library learnings website, so linking our Tech Drawer to our LLC website will make things fairly congruous. I suspect that most of our tutorials will be useful for teachers wanting their students to do research / inquiry (a number of our Tech Ten presentations have been on our subscribed databases). In the future, we’d like to add more about different presentation platforms so we can find more creative ways to avoid slide shows! Along with building research / inquiry projects, we want to give teachers access to current, interesting articles via Twitter, in a location that makes it easy. This will be ideal for a teacher who isn’t a Twitter user, or doesn’t follow these various magazines / organizations on Twitter.

We also thought that since we were going to have this handy Tech Drawer website, that maybe we could have students make their own tutorials that they post to the website. One of our TA’s came up with a few suggestions that were great, and in a far different direction than what we had thought about. Her suggestions were tutorials on how to do different brush strokes for painting (she and another student just painted our windows for Rememberance Day), programming video games, electronic portfolios for our Careers students, and so on. Frankly, what a great idea! We have many tech savvy students, and so many with great tech devices at hand (couldn’t resist the pun) that we may as well capitalize on their strengths.

And where are we so far?

We’ve got a really rough sketch of what we want the website to do / look like. I’ve also got a short list of tutorial videos that I’ll be making based on our last couple of Tech Ten presentations.

I’ve also started putting together the Tweetdeck (something my TL partner is looking forward to playing with too!) so that I can embed the different collections into the pages for the various subjects. It’s really nice to finally see my vision of how I wanted to use Twitter taking shape! This was the one thing I wanted to figure out when I started the course.

Digital Artifact – Week 1

Twitter Feeds + Tutorial Videos = Tech Webpage

So many things to do, such little time… wait! Is that a new book?

There are a couple of things I wanted to achieve with this final project, things that I’ve had on my list for a while.

The first is now that I’ve started using Twitter and I see all of these great articles that I want to share with my colleagues, how can I take certain tweets and post them in individual subject areas so that they can follow, and retreive them later?

The second item on my list is to create tutorial videos of the Tech Ten and Lunch & Learn sessions that my library partner and I do monthly. The best way to make both of these happen is to create a website to store all of this.

I’m still working on a catchy name for it (suggestions welcome!):
The Tech Drawer
IDtenT Proof (though that’s probably not very nice)
ICYMI (not very original, I know… and I’ll have to explain it, but that’s not to bad)

Clever names aside, I’ve already surveyed the staff at the last staff meeting, and they’re interested in the idea. That’s a good start. Now where to begin? Fortunately, we have a great TL association, and at our last meeting (yesterday, so handy!) I probed the group brain and came up with a few suggestions for how do deal with the Twitter feeds.

One suggestion was to use Tweetdeck. I’ve checked out a couple of tutorial videos on YouTube, “How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts with Tweetdeck” which was pretty handy for helping me to figure out what the heck I might want to do with Tweetdeck, and “Create Twitter Collections” which had some really great specifics on what I might want to use collections for, how to build them and then how to embed them in a website – ultimately what I’m looking for. Another great resource they recommended is a local teacher who has great Twitter accounts: Jeremy Reid @jReidEdu. Nice to have someone to hopefully work with one-on-one.

For the tutorial videos I’ve used Screencastify before and it works well for me. The only problem is really just making the time, and making sure it’s quite. Hmmm… Friday after school sounds about right! Also a good time for setting a scary film in a school.

As for the look of the fancy tech website… um…

Hopefully I’ll have a better idea of what the layout and design of it should be for next week. Thinking that simple is good, cluttered is bad. Beyond that?

Works Cited
McMaster, Wade. “How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts with Tweetdeck.” YouTube.com, https://youtu.be/QEtvwgCO8yw
Maskan & Vero. “Create Twitter Collections.” YouTube.com, https://youtu.be/CILW_uxaBzQ

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks? – Just Add Treats!

The last four weeks of exploration have been down done familiar roads, but as with every journey, there’s always something new to see or learn. I’m pretty comfortable with learning new technology and trying it out, but frankly, that’s had also been in large part thanks to working on the teacher – librarian diploma. Now that I am at the end of it, what, beyond my own curiosity, will keeping me moving forward and learning? I fall into the rut of doing the sane old thing because it is easy and it had worked. Every teacher faces this dilemma at some point – teaching just is busy! However, the world of technology doesn’t stop because I’m busy, and I fear that losing my mental flexibility and my practice of learning that I will find it very difficult to adapt in the not so distant future… much like I know that I really should haul out my yoga mat more than twice a year. I think that one of the best ways to avoid mental atrophy is to consider two important aspects from the last four weeks: help my colleagues with their development, and see what is going on in the world.

Last year I tried having after school sessions on how to build inquiry units. I was quite disappointed when only one person expressed interest. Now, the two of us did come up with a really neat inquiry unit, so it really was a positive venture, but in reflecting on that experience and in thinking about how to help promote / lead / facilitate professional development amongst my staff I realize that I was missing something very important: was that even what anyone was interested in learning?

Often I’ve found that assumptions made by administration, or well meaning pro-d organizers chaf because I already have those skills, or the skills I want developed are beyond that level. Not helpful to do the same. After considering this a while, I think I’ve come up with a few ideas that will be helpful.

survey the staff – I get 10 minutes at every staff meeting for our Tech Ten, so why not make a quick online survey available to find out what people are actually interested in
make the info available on our SLLC website – this is what I’m thinking of for my digital artifact. I can make short videos of the tech, or post articles or websites that will be helpful; this also allows me to post some of the great articles I’ve read over the last couple of years about inquiry, literacy, etc. in a place where people who are interested or curious will read them, and not just let it pile up on the desk or recycle it. This also means that if someone isn’t interested now, but is later, they will know where to come back to.
keep snooping – I always advocate snooping and finding out what teachers are up to so that I can support them in their classrooms. Sometimes it leads to great team teaching!

School Library Journal – always full of great ideas!

The second aspect is to broaden my perspective. Too easily we focus on our class or our school. I had know idea that libraries without boarders even existed, and I bet that no one else at my school does either. Wouldn’t it be cool if we learned more about this and found ways to contribute as a staff? We always want our students to do this, but we don’t always do the same thing just amongst the staff. I think that it is really important to see what is going on, and working, outside of your area because it helps breathe new life, interest, or discussion into your current practice. Our school is focussing on the OECD principles, but sometimes it’s just really helpful to see how other schools, countries, or organizations are tackling similar goals.