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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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