Charity Begins at Home
I’ve been using Github for a couple of years now to connect with our developer on the HWDSB Commons. We post a lot of code there, sharing it with the rest of the WordPress and BuddyPress community. For those of you unfamiliar with Github, this is how they describe their platform: GitHub is how people…
Broadcast Posts
We are deploying a new functionality on the Commons called Broadcast. The Broadcast box at the bottom right of the post edit page will allow you to take a post and cross-post/duplicate/broadcast the post to another blog. Historically we have always felt that students should have one main blog, on which the post all of…
Innovation vs Consistency
I wrote a post recently about the different tools we have available in the school board. You can read it here: https://mrjarbenne.ca/2016/03/20/the-complexity-of-choice/ This is a popular conversation in the 21CL team here at HWDSB, and it is happening with renewed vigor as I redesign a landing page for the HUB (the HUB is the name…
Annotating the Web
Annotating the web isn’t a new thing. There have been a variety of tools that have allowed users to annotate text online and make it available to others. Diigo had an early version of this. There was a fantastic tool that Google killed off called Google Notebook that allowed you to grab snippets from the…
The Complexity of Choice
I spoke at a school recently where a teacher indicated that the amount of platforms we have available at the board was paralyzing, and that not knowing where to begin, they choose to do nothing instead. I was troubled by this of course. Our intent is to provide a rich tool kit to attend to…
Templates for Newcomers
I’ve been pulling together a series of posts regarding Explain Everything as a format for creating templates. In that series I’ve attempted to expand on some methods to create templates, and established a space to share those templates with others. You can read those posts here: Let’s take that workflow, and apply it to an…