Overlooking the Favicon

Many people have never even heard of a favicon. In fact, if you type it ABC spell check will try to convince you that no such thing exists. Even for the few seconds that you see a favicon, it slips through your mind without a thought. The only time it becomes obvious is when one isn’t there. Favicons subconsciously distinguish a professional website from a haphazardly created website. I imagine at this point, those of you who don’t know what a favicon is, are either Googling it or skimming ahead to find out.
A favicon, short for “favorite icon” is the small icon (16×16 pixels) that appears in the tab of your web browser for a website. Ideally, each website has their own identifying favicon. I recently updated mine to go with my new color scheme. I typically keep it simple with my first initial “M”. Maybe one day I’ll get fancy and have an actual logo/icon for my favicon.
Go ahead and open up some new tabs with common websites you go to. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, you get the idea. See how distinctive each tab is? Sure you can read the text, but you can also know by simply looking at the favicon. So here I am going to pick on a couple of websites… hate to do it, but you need some “non-examples” to get the idea of what happens when you don’t take the extra step to add a favicon. Check out ITWales.com, also take a look at BZA.com. I hope they spend more time and effort making your “Website Design” than they did on theirs should you decide to pay for their design services.
Now that you understand the importance of the favicon, how do you include it? WordPress has some fantastic instructions for adding a favicon to your wordpress hosted website. The process is similar for other websites. You simply create your 16×16 .ico image and then place it in the root directory as “favicon.ico”. If you don’t see it appearing in the tab, then you may have to add some code to the <head> section of your website.

<link rel="icon" type="image/ico" href="http://www.mysite.com/favicon.ico"/>

Most default image creation programs don’t save as .ico. I believe Gimp is one of the exceptions. However, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of figuring out how to install a plugin for this, check out these websites that will convert png and other files to ico.

• http://www.favicon.cc/
• http://www.convertico.com/

I hope this helped all of the fledgling WordPress users and Website Designers out there. As always, feel free to send me a message if you run into any problems.

Customizing the Color Scheme of WordPress

There are several ways to customize a WordPress Theme just like there are several ways to slice a pizza. The two easiest ways to change the color scheme if you are hosting a WordPress site is to 1) Create a child theme 2) Use the Edit CSS feature available to those who activate Jetpack.

How Do I Create a Child Theme?

If you are interested in creating a WordPress Child Theme, the information at WordPress.com Codex will help. I created one previously based on the Twenty Twelve theme. After hours pouring over the Codex and multiple blog posts I can up with a fairly decent finished product. I even went so far as to create custom post types for my Portfolio section. The page you will want to focus on for changing the color scheme is the style.css file. You basically will be copying this file into your child theme and manipulating it as you wish. The child theme details will override the details of the parent theme.
Needless to say I found myself spending more time figuring out different details than I spent actually blogging. The Twenty Twelve theme was a little underwhelming for my taste so along with defining a color scheme I also created a personal header. However, the Twenty Thirteen theme is a dynamic base theme that displays across devices nicely and simply needs some color changes to personalize it. You can create a header if you desire, but keep in mind that it will not be as dynamic as the rest of the blog for displaying on mobile devices and smaller screens.
I say all of this not to scare you off from creating your own extensive child theme, but to provide some insight for those who are simply toying with the idea for their personal blog. If you have any questions about creating a child theme, feel free to comment here or send me a message on my Contact page.

What CSS Do I Edit?

Once you have decided if you will be creating a child theme, or simply using the Edit CSS feature, you will need to decide what color scheme you would like your blog to have. I have always been a fan of the color purple… ok maybe it is more of an obsession with the color purple… so my choice was easy. For those who are unsure what color they would like, a few websites might help. Color Scheme Designer 3 is a great way to quickly pick colors using the color wheel. Color Picker.com is fantastic on its own or with others. Not only can you pick your colors and have the hex code provided, but you can select several colors that you would like to use for your CSS.
So now that you can choose you colors and get a hex code, as well as have access to the CSS, you will need to define what colors to change in the CSS code. If you use the Google Chrome browser the Inspect Element feature will be a fantastic help in identifying which codes/colors will need changed. The most difficult and contrary thing to change was the arrow for pagination, which I was looking for in the footer but ended up finding it as .paging-navigation. The code is below. If you would like my full CSS, just send me a message and I will happily share. Good luck to you as you begin customizing your WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme!

.paging-navigation {
background-color: #79718F;
padding: 40px 0;
}
.navigation a {
color: #433E52;
}
.paging-navigation .meta-nav {
background-color: #BFAB9D;
border-radius: 50%;
color: #fff;
}
.paging-navigation a:hover .meta-nav {
background-color: #433E52;
text-decoration: none;
}

Developing Literacies through Digital Stories

Overview

All students must obtain basic literacies in fundamental areas to succeed in college. Students have often found this task tedious, resulting in lack of engagement and motivation. This session takes a look at redefining the way students meet basic literacies through digital stories. This approach increases student engagement while leveraging social negotiation and self-reflection to create a learning community. This approach can be implemented in a wide variety of disciplines and settings. This blog post describes the theories behind the use of Digital Storytelling in Education. For information on tools that can be used for Digital Storytelling, view my previous post Digital Storytelling Toolbox.

What is DST?

Digital storytelling is simply the use of digital tools to tell stories. If you want your students to engage in digital storytelling, you need to have them use digital tools to convey stories. Stories can be fictional or non-fiction and range in subject matter.

The Narrative Arc

A key component to creating quality digital stories is understanding the progression of a story. Students should learn and understand the narrative arc, which is the stories’ journey from beginning to end and how it gets there. Every story should have a character, a challenge, and a resolution.

Pedagogy

Constructivism

Several theories create the basis for the use of DST in courses. Constructivism plays a central role in the pedagogy for DST. Constructivism's ideals of learners constructing their own knowledge through exploration of a chosen topic is a core facet of DST. Students will naturally see connections between what they are learning and why, because the final product is something that they have created.

Multiple Intelligences

The many faces of MI can be reflected through each individual student’s approach to DST. DST allows a student to learn and create a story in a way that enhances their MI.  As Ohler states, “Most of Gardner’s intelligences, from the linguistic and the musical to the kinesthetic and intrapersonal, are important in digital stories if we understand how to teach DST effectively.” A student who is strong in Musical-Rhythmic may choose to create a DST in the form of a song. A Bodily-Kinesthetic student may choose to record their observations and daily movements to create a story about their daily life or activities. Interpersonal intelligence through journalistic and documentary DSTs that required interviewing skills.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

DST naturally draws from Bloom's taxonomy through a character's progression throughout a story. Bloom's (1964) Taxonomy of cognitive processes proposes levels of transformation in regards to how we learn, or how a character learns through a story. Bloom's taxonomy of affective domain proposes levels of transformation in emotions and feelings, which can also be applied to characters within a story. So while you are using Bloom's taxonomy to gauge student progression, you can also use it to prompt discussion of character and story progression.

Resources

Ohler, Jason (2008). Digital storytelling in the classroom: New media pathways to literacy, learning, and creativity. Corwin Press.

Reigeluth, C. M. (1983). Instructional design theories and models: An overview of their current status. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Inc.

KompoZer a Dreamweaver Alternative

As I previously mentioned, I have recently found myself relocated and in a new position. Along with this came all of the expectation that I know my way around HTML and other such things. The downfall is that I have always worked with HTML in Adobe Dreamweaver, which I adore. Due to the completely new position and new computer, the fantastic (and expensive) Dreamweaver was not installed. I was handed a Microsoft Word syllabus and asked to create it in HTML so that it could later be copy/pasted into Blackboard. I found myself with the "What to do?" question repeated in my mind.

Sure, I had the capability to compose the entire thing in Notepad by hand. Or use Microsoft to develop a garbled HTML that I would then have to clean up in Notepad. Lucky for me, I am a master Googler and a proponent of all open-source and free tools! Surely, I could find a Dreamweaver alternative! I found several options, but one in particular seemed to appeal to me, KompoZer.

Perhaps I am a sucker for a well-designed website, but KompoZer had several key features that I was looking for.

1. Free and open-source software
2. FTP site manager
3. Color picker
4. Tabs for multiple HTML documents
5. CSS editor
6. Automated Spellchecker
7. WYSIWYG

The WYSIWYG editor is fairly straight-forward and clean. The only downside is that you either have to be in the "Source" tab or the "Preview" tab, there is no split-screen option. Not too bad of a compromise for a free option though, all things said. Some screenshots of the tab with some HTML I pulled from my website are below.

Preview View

Source View

Since I am using it for some pretty basic functions, it has served me well. I still have Dreamweaver on my personal computer, but it seems that I will be keeping KompoZer around on my work computer for now. It's hard to justify the money that would be spent to buy Dreamweaver when a free and workable solution is currently in use especially after a recent request for Adobe Production Premium CS6. I might put KompoZer through its paces soon in redesigning my personal website, so keep watch for an updated review on this software.

Online Course Delivery: What platform should you use?

I have always been a proponent of the idea of using "technology as a means to an end, rather than the end itself." After a recent job change which prompted an LMS switch from Moodle to Blackboard (yes, I have gone over to the dark side), I found myself asking the question, "What platform should you use for online course delivery?" I began comparing the features and layout of Moodle to Blackboard. Should I have been asking this question at all? Well... let's not get ahead of ourselves too much. First, my musings from the question.

Moodle LMS

As many know, Moodle is a LMS that is open-sourced and created from the student perspective. By keeping this key philosophy in mind, Moodle has stamped out a place in the world of accessibility and ease of use for students. However, this can create a disadvantage for faculty members creating a course (f-2-f, hybrid, or online). Many improvements have been made with the recent release of Moodle 2.x that improves usability. Some notable improvements are: drag&drop, navigation block, activity chooser. The new file structure has thrown many veteran Moodle users for a loop, as it completely changes the way they approach building a course. I must say that I am a fan of the new file structure, as it increases security of files, reliability of course backups, and stays consistent with Moodle's student-centric philosophy. If a file is meant to be part of a course, put it in the course where it should be! The overall layout of a Moodle course is fairly straightforward. Moodle 2.x allows different middle sections (topics/weeks) to be displayed on separate pages is desired. These sections appear as navigation options in the navigation menu. That is the setup I took, which is shown in the screenshot below. Each of these sections or "weeks" as I name them, expand to display that week's work.

In my previous life, I was a Moodle Administrator. I was supported by another Network Administrator (who I swear had a magic wand!) who handled the majority of the back-end technical details such as server issues. My main responsibility was user support and heading off technical problems that arose. It took me at least three months to feel confident in my Moodle capabilities, which is a pretty steep learning curve for a tech person. Now granted, I had never been exposed to Moodle before that AND I was dabbling in learning from an administrator perspective rather than a faculty perspective. I could  probably cut the learning curve time down to one month for a typical faculty member to be well versed if I account for all of that. From the student perspective, I would have to say that it would only take 1 day to understand Moodle due to it's ideals of transparency.

Blackboard LMS

Blackboard... oh how you have already begun to warp my mind. Blackboard Learn is the platform that I have recently switched to. As many of you know, Blackboard is a tried and true LMS that has attempted to create a monopoly of the market. Many buy into the franchise, while many others throw up their hands in dismay. I'm fairly impartial, as I'm not writing the check for the LMS or responsible for the administration. Blackboard was created from a teacher-centric philosophy. The LMS is extremely intuitive for faculty members in the creation of their courses. I had dabbled in it for an internship during my undergrad, and have rarely looked at it since. After an afternoon of training, I feel pretty comfortable with my knowledge of course creation. For a first time user without any LMS background, I would put the learning curve at about 2 weeks for a faculty member. Student learning curve? Now that is a good question... The screenshot below is from coursesites.com where you can create a course using the newest version of Blackboard Learn. This one is fairly easy to navigate, but I don't see any one area that contains all the information needed by students. They are tasked with jumping from chapter material to discussion forums and so on.

There is the ability to have folders inside of folders that sometimes contain folders! The maze of things for students can quickly spiral out of control. Not to mention the navigation between different weeks is often not broken up into separate menu buttons. The one benefit for students is that once they successfully complete one online course (with likely much pain in figuring things out) all others will immediately make sense and be a breeze. I could quickly see how these layers both make sense from a faculty perspective but could cause confusion for students who are unfamiliar with the LMS.

 

Canvas? Google Sites? Blogs?

After musing about the differences between Moodle and Blackboard, I was lucky enough to have a sister who was considering using Google Sites to deliver her Summer online course for University of Southern Indiana (USI). I had previously worked with her on delivering the entire course through her Blog. USI currently uses Blackboard, and she is not a fan of the LMS, so we have continuously pushed the boundaries in thinking about how she could deliver the online course. This made me come full circle in realizing that the platform used to deliver the online course is relatively irrelevant. Whether you use Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, Google Sites, Blog, or any other platform that you can think of, there will always be some type of learning curve for both the faculty member and the students. The important thing to consider is what you are wanting to accomplish.

Once you know how you would like the course to function and progress, then it is easy to figure out which tool will work best for you. I had forgotten my own mantra, "Technology as a means to an end, rather than the end itself." This made me realize how quickly we can get wrapped up in the differences in technology, rather than exploring and pushing boundaries on course delivery and course content. I would encourage you to keep pushing boundaries and exploring new ways of delivering information to your students. As long as you are transparent in how the course is set up and should progress, students will surprise you in how adaptable they are to technology.

I will be posting in the next few days about the way my sister and I went about using Google Sites to deliver her course.

Happy eLearning!