[MACEP] Slumbertech?

[Paul Nelson]

Hello Folks,

Well the response to our suggested SlumberTech was underwhelming.

I am ever hopeful though. Perhaps if you saw some of the cool web 
applications out there and how they might be used in schools... Did I 
mention that these are free?

We're experimenting with blogging software for our school newspaper this 
term. Take a peek at our daily photo section and then head on over to 
read some of the articles.
http://hs.riverdale.k12.or.us/maverick/?q=taxonomy/term/7

Note that these kids are brand new to journalism and we're learning as 
we go. It's interesting to me to see that they expect a story on the 
on-line newspaper to be super short, really more of an announcement. 
We're working on how to pull together enough information for some 
feature stories in the next few weeks.

Our mock trial team used an on-line content management system called 
Mambo [ http://mambo.org ] to work on our scripts with our attorney 
coaches. It's pretty cool and hey, we won state so it must have worked!
I turned on access to some of our questions so you can see what it's like.

http://hs.riverdale.k12.or.us/mambo

Follow the Mock Trial Silver link to see some questions. You won't be 
able to edit any like the kids can because you don't have a password. If 
you did though, you could use the on-line word processor to make changes 
to the document right in your browser.

The Nationals questions and other sites are password restricted. We 
leave next week to compete at Mock Trial Nationals in Charlotte, NC. I 
don't want any of the teams from other states snooping around our site 
and stealing our best questions so you'll have to wait until we come 
back to see those.

http://oregonphotoblog.org is powered by a free web package called 
Gallery. It's very easy to use.  Take a look at photography by Riverdale 
High, Century High, Mark Peterson and Eric Harrison, just a few of the 
galleries you'll find there.

My own web site at http://pnelson.us uses Drupal [http://drupal.org] 
This is actually the same software we're using to run our on-line school 
newspaper but I've configured it with a different "skin".  Don't you 
want to go see what I'm writing about in my blog? ;-^)

All of this software is free. It's easy to setup and non-tech type folks 
can add content. That's probably the best part.

If you're interested in learning how to do this, you won't have to pay 
hundreds of $$$ or buy expensive software. You just have to reply to the 
list and let us know that you want to have a SlumberTech.

SlumberTechs are not events that you simply attend. They are events you 
create with your own interest, contributions and energy. I'm moving my 
suggested date back to June 3-4. So what do you think?

We have some server capacity that we can provide for education related 
projects. You can actually start your own web based project! So far 
though only Allan and Ira have expressed interest. How about the rest of 
you out there in lurker land?

;-) Paul

-- 
======================================================================
Paul Nelson - Make things better.
http://pnelson.us