Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Everyone should blog. Here’s why.

01 Mar

My new student policy is and will be:

“Everybody Blog!”

There is no reason that everyone can not, nor that everyone should not be creating blogs.

They’re easy!
They are free!
They are good indicators of learning!
They are portable!
They can act like an online portfolio!
They can be real fun!

What can you put in a blog? Just about anything. Some ideas can include:

About Me information
Contact information (for older kids and adults)
Resumes
Curriculum Vitae
Favorites and Links
Videos
Music Videos and Music
Photos
Sport information
Favorite Game information
Wedding /Party Info
Selling your house/belongings/shoes/gadgets/toiletries

How can you do it yourself?

Come here to WordPress.com
Sign-up
Remember your passwords (Write them down some place)
Edit
Take Pictures, add them, play!
Have fun

The latest gadgets in 2011. What are they?

23 Feb

It’s Feb 23rd, 2011. How many of these things I will mention below will become a thing of the past or will become the “cool new thing that we don’t know how we did without it”?

Google Wave
QR codes
FourSquare or Places in Facebook for Smartphones
Pano – for iPhone
Ustream.tv
Google Streetview
Microsoft OneNote
Short-throw projectors
Cell Footprints
Geocaching

Also, good to note are the terms memes and cloud computing.

1 Comment

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on February 23, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Cloud Computing, Gadgets, QR Codes, Technology

If you own a computer…you must have | the list

16 Feb

In my last post I was talking about things that are great for neat tricks, great time saving devices, excellent linking and syncing software / applications and also good websites. If I was to get a new computer, I would recommend getting the Microsoft Software and the Adobe Creative Suite put in first, but then I would be tweaking the computer out with the remaining products. All of them are free and easily available online found at the links below. Check them out for yourself and install them today:

I hope contributions will allow me to come back here to add more. Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Weebly vs Joomla vs WordPress

15 Feb

I have been working on a few different versions of the same sites and have been comparing my needs with what is offered with each of these site infrastructures.

I started using Weebly.com.

I enjoyed the back-end interface; a little clunky, but the built in blog was easy to add info to AND it had the Facebook “Like” button and Twitter “Tweet” button built in automatically. The reason I moved away from Weebly was because there was no built in Search. I tried adding Google Search to the site, but to no avail. I am still not sure why. Plus, I didn’t like the idea of showing a “Google” search as advertising that I added this item in.

Next, I moved over to Orgfree.com. This hosting company allows free space and excellent integration of SQL databases to support for Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, simple machines forum, Drupal, and Moodle. Talk about excellent…and EASY.¹

I started with a Joomla.org installation.

The intention was to strip out all the unnecessary pages, categories, menus, sections and then add a plug-in or module for blogging, as this was my primary concern. The easy blog plug-ins were not easy to install. The more simple sounding ones all seemed to cost money. I was not impressed. Joomla has offered an excellent infrastructure for so many other modules. I decided to try to WordPress.org.

WordPress was like an angel sent from heaven. For all my needs it was easy to install, very intuitive to use, had a great blog, minus the “like” and “tweet” buttons, which I will look for later. So far, I am enjoying the interface and may show my students how easy it is to create an online blog for themselves soon enough.

¹Sidenote: I have recently had access problems to the back-end of my WordPress installation with Orgfree. I have emailed them multiple times to try to gain access to my account, but have not heard anything. I have switched to WordPress.com. I still think Orgfree is great to try out different website management interfaces. They just have not given me any support.