Category Archives: Creative Communication

Four Paths to WordPress

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There are many ways1 to get content into WordPress other than writing in the normal WP post editor. I figured I’d sketch out at least four and why you might choose one over another.

Press This

I don’t believe many people notice or use the “Press This” bookmarklet that is located under Settings>Writing or under Tools. There’s a 3 minute video below detailing where to find it and how it works below. Think of it like the bookmarklet you might use with Delicious or Diigo only with more flexibility behind it. The ability to nearly seamlessly add media from the reference page (seen at about 1:27 in the video) is the main thing I find that makes this tool particularly useful. I’m using it instead of Diigo for the Word Games site because I want to embed a mixture of media and all of it will be from external pages. Think of it as having the capabilities of Pinterest but with the additional ability to embed video and text.

Via Email

This used to be a hassle but Automatic’s Jetpack plugin makes it very simple. You will need a WordPress.com account but it’s free and you’ve already given away all your information to Google or Apple anyway. You can see a tutorial on how to do that here but it’s pretty straightforward. One thing that I didn’t realize initially was that you can add categories and tags in the email using bracketed shortcodes which is pretty slick.
For example [category x,y,z] and [tags x,y,z] are done as indicated. I’ve sent html emails this way and it worked out pretty well. The links stayed etc. I was surprised. This is a really fast easy way to aggregate the useful pieces of all that junk email for a group. WordPress makes for a nice centralized repository where people can search and are unable to “lose” that email. I’d suggest adding your secret email to your address book and then naming it something you’ll remember. I chose the name of the blog.

RSS

Anything with an RSS feed can be used to post to a WordPress blog using the FeedWordPress plugin. It works a lot like any RSS aggregator you’ve used (because that’s what it is). I love this plug in.

That opens up a world of posting options and the ability to set up chains of action. For the ITRT “Might Be Of Interest” blog I have a number of RSS feeds that are part of my normal work flow yet still do some extra sharing/archiving work for me.

For instance anything in Diigo tagged “ITRT” automatically posts to that blog. The URL convention looks like this https://www.diigo.com/rss/user/Bionicteaching/itrt. If you search on your page the URL will be generated automatically- just click on the orange RSS icon in the right hand corner of the page. Additionally, I have my “Saved” items in Fever feeding in.2 I could also port stranger things in via IFTTT3 or even Yahoo Pipes4 if I were feeling the need for something fairly complex.

By Form

I left from entries for last because they break the work flows that the other three options are focused on blending into. No one enjoys filling out a form BUT it can provide standardized data and formatting which is so very, very seductive at times. If you’re using forms people need to either want to put the content in (requests, applications, submissions of some type) or are being held responsible for what they put in.

I use Gravity Forms which costs money but is well worth it. There may be others that allow you to go from a form to a post (published or draft- you decide) but that capability is a key differentiator for me. You can see Gravity Forms doing it’s job at the Elementary Principals’ Communication Site. This site allows anyone to post structured messages meant for the ES Principals but they are held in draft mode so that our ES admin team can decide what to approve, alter, or delete. It makes it really easy for them and provides a long term archive of all the content. It was built in response to Chris Corallo’s request that we get a handle on how much email, requests etc. were being sent out to ES principals. This became the way to communicate with ES principals and all posts were approved by Chris so he’d could keep tabs on the amount of work being asked of his people.

There are other ways to template within WordPress and vet the content pre-publishing but the form path allows any user to do so without the need to sign up for an account or have any idea how to write in WordPress. That makes it more attractive in a variety of situations.

1 Look! My title has a number in it! SEO GOLD!!!

2 If I decide to move to Feedly, and risk having my heart broken again, I’ll have to look for another option.

3 You can do an amazing amount of things here and it will encourage you to sign up for even more services and consider buying those plugs that let you control your appliances through the Internet.

4 I once used Pipes to cleanse a malformed RSS feed and blend in some other HCPS feeds so I could pull it all into a hacked together HCPS branded iPhone RSS widget. It worked but clearly not my area of speciality.

Internet Culture as Digital Content: VSTE12 Presentation

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This presentation is essentially a pitch for the idea that we ought to be looking at the world with open eyes and paying attention to the content that is exciting to ourselves and others- the things we read/watch/listen to without being coerced.

The introduction it is a rehash of the RSS aggregator pitch that I’ve given off and on since 2002. I know Twitter is much cooler and RSS is pronounced dead on a regular basis but Twitter fills a very different niche for me and I think the RSS aggregator still has a lot of value. I also stressed the idea that you have to aggregate feeds you actually want to read. That’s very different than feeds you feel you ought to want to read. Make this unpleasant for yourself and you will never, ever, read them. Build feeds that rejuvenate and interest you and then bring that into your instruction.1

My goal was to point out the huge swathe of low hanging fruit waiting for the right teacher to look at it in the right way- essentially the antipode of most of the content we use in education. This is really more of a change in philosophy than anything else. I’m hoping people open their minds to a larger idea of what might qualify as digital content.

I started with a lot of the usual suspects and then wandered into stranger territory. I’ll repeat them here because no matter how common things seem, or how many times I feel they’ve been discussed, they still aren’t for large numbers of people.


cc licensed ( ) flickr photo shared by Smithsonian Institution

Flickr Commons was one stop. I choose the picture above as an example because it was a slight twist on the idea about using images as examples for writing. I liked the idea of having images of actual historical scientific journals to use as an example for students working on their own scientific journals. The image being from the Smithsonian also adds credit to the resource.

Another more targeted potential is the fact that there are many, many podcasts in iTunes that are meant to be informative.2 For instance, I listen to BackStory.

On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today. Together, they drill down to colonial times and earlier, revealing the connections (and disconnections) between past and present. With its passionate, intelligent, and irreverent approach, BackStory is fun and essential listening no matter who you are.

I listened to Love Me Did: A History of Courtship which gave an interesting history of dating and courtship but also highlighted the blog Advertising for Love which is a culling of interesting historical personal ads that offer a unique kind of insight into our culture. This kind of thing being served up on a platter for you to use with students still amazes me. The fact that you can also dip into the LOC archives for historical newspapers to do your own research with students is more than just icing.

An American gentleman, thirty years of age, wishes to form the acquaintance of some American lady (an orphan preferred), not less than 18 nor more than 24 years of age, with a view to matrimony. She must be of the highest respectability, prepossessing and genteel in appearance, of good education, accustomed to good society and of a loving disposition. Any lady answering the above can do so with the utmost confidence, as all communications will be strictly confidential, and letters returned when requested; for this means just what it says, nothing more and nothing less. Address for three days, giving real name and where can be seen (none others will be noticed), Knickerbocker, box 164 Herald office.

From Advertising for Love

I put forward some of these more Internet culture-ish options that I happen to follow while stressing, once again, that I’d read these for my own amusement anyway. Some of these are no doubt well known but others are a bit stranger.

  • Quantified Self – “Are you interested in self-tracking? Do you use a computer, mobile phone, electronic gadget, or pen and paper to record your work, sleep, exercise, diet, mood, or anything else? Would you like to share your methods and learn from what others are doing? If so, you are in the right place. This short intro will help you get you oriented.”
  • Global Guerrillas – “Networked tribes, system disruption and the emerging bazaar of violence. A blog about the future of conflict.”
  • The New Aesthetic – “Since May 2011 I have been collecting material which points towards new ways of seeing the world, an echo of the society, technology, politics and people that co-produce them.

    The New Aesthetic is not a movement, it is not a thing which can be done. It is a series of artefacts of the heterogeneous network, which recognises differences, the gaps in our overlapping but distant realities.”

  • Street Art Utopia – street art/graffiti from all over the world
  • Nothing to do with Arbroath – really strange news and videos from all over the world
  • McSweeny’s – an English teacher’s dream for content and ideas for projects, writing prompts etc.
  • Junk Charts – bad charts and breakdowns of why they’re bad
  • boing boing – an old standby
  • SuperPunch- cartoons, art, and really interesting links
  • archive.org- pretty much an endless supply of media from Grateful Dead bootlegs to drive in movie commercials with dancing cigarettes

1 I will note that if you aren’t interested in your subject or the world in general as it applies to your subject you might consider alternate employment.

2 Think educational and interesting but without the need for a grade to make someone listen/watch.

Amalgamation

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cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by hjhipster

After being inspired by William Berry’s interesting idea around making current event memes I decided to sketch out an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time but never got around to.

Scottish psychologists, after failing to find evidence that humans could see into the future, urged their colleagues “not to venture too far down the rabbit hole,” and Til, a rare earless rabbit born at a small zoo in eastern Germany, was crushed under a cameraman’s shoe shortly before a press conference that had been scheduled in the rabbit’s honor. “We are all shocked,” said the zoo’s director, Uwe Dempewolf. “No one could have foreseen this.”

-Harper’s

I’ve wondered about ways to mesh current events and English/Civics by juxtaposing news events and quotes similar to Harper’s Weekly Review (when it’s done well). I struggle with the high bar for entry but it opens up some interesting ideas about context, quoting, humor, juxtaposition, irony etc. that would be interesting to apply. There’s a lot there but it would also require some real work to make it accessible.

It’s hard to show good examples in our district because the Harper’s stuff tends to be politically charged and fairly sophisticated. To do it right would require widespread reading, memory and the ability to make odd associations between very different content. Cool things to do but difficult. I struggle with ways to make higher entry projects like this attractive.

I think you can scaffold the project in ways that start to make word choice and juxtaposition apparent. If you presented the two source articles from the sample above and simply read them you wouldn’t necessarily see the connection. Asking students to look for connections (maybe with a Venn diagram) gets them thinking about the two articles and connections. Then you can present the Harper’s paragraph for analysis. Then it’s about structuring the analysis of the writer’s word choice and structure. Why this quote? How and what do you condense? How do you present the results in ways that create humor/irony etc.? Can you re-word this so that it isn’t funny/ironic?

I’ve considered doing this myself based on the odd options for a similar weekly review that I see in education/ed tech on a regular basis.

Scrolling Text

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We seem to have a need to take names and create scrolling text for various things (honor roll, Veteran’s Day, etc.). It was making me unhappy to have people spending time adding these names to PowerPoints or doing other manually intensive ways things to make this happen. I figured the Internet would have to have a better way.

Here is one.

After a search or two, I ended up at Max Vergelli’s jquery scroller. Down at the bottom on the examples page, I found the vertical scrolling option I wanted. I downloaded the files.

I took my usual path, which is to open up the file and delete the stuff I didn’t want. I focused mainly on the HTML portion figuring it wouldn’t matter if the javascript loaded if it didn’t display. After a few tries, it turns out that I was wrong and that stuff does matter. So I also deleted all the unnecessary javascript pieces, or at least enough so that things worked.

You can get a fairly clean version of the file that focuses on vertical scrolling by saving this webpage. You could also view the source etc.View source ought to be a good friend in most situations where you’re trying to figure this kind of thing out. Do keep in mind you’ll need the additional files in this download to make this work. Keep in mind you can put this on the web or run it locally on a machine.

Now, I just needed a fast, simple way to create a list from a Google Form submission. In most cases you should have gotten these names in Excel, CSV, or user submitted via a Google Doc. I did something weird which might prove useful but may be frightening so it’s footnoted.  In this case, I used some junk file names I generated from a folder with the following Unix command ls -lT | awk '{print "\""substr($0,index($0,$10))"\""",""\""$6" "$7", "$9"\""",""\""$5"\""}' &gt; YOURFILENAMEOFCHOICE.csv. Once I had the data in Excel, I just added the following formula – =A1&"<br>" and dragged it down to fill all the needed cells. The <br> is just a line break in HTML. I cut and pasted this into my HTML file, tweaked the CSS a bit to increase the size of the text and I was done.

The whole thing took about 10 minutes and hopefully will save some people inordinate amounts of drudgery.

Social Media Talk

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I’ve spoken to the PTA at Tuckahoe Middle School for the last two years about social media. It’s been pretty interesting both times in that I take a closer look at things that I tend to take for granted. I think both conversations have gone pretty well. I’ll document the conversation below (mixed with a few things I did with our principals a while back) for anyone who might have to do the same.

Introduction


I start with a slide that mixes the pictures of as many radically different people with Twitter accounts as I can find. I get the audience to try to identify the people. The one I’m using now has the Dali Lama, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin and a few others. My goal was to have a few easily identifiable people and a few that took a tiny bit more effort.1 I wanted a wide diversity in political views, ages, etc. After we’ve ID’d the people, I ask “What do these people have in common?”2 I mention that you’ve probably heard references to Twitter after shows like Good Morning America, etc. Hopefully this gets people into the mindset that Twitter (and social media in general) is becoming more broadly adopted and is being used by mainstream media.

My next move is to argue against polarizing social media. It’s not black and white. While social media is not responsible for the decay of morals in America, it is also not the magic elixir that will heal all of our ills. I will say that social media is a powerful tool that opens up opportunities to increase the consequences of your energies and actions for good or bad.

What is social media?

I’m defining social media as any platform that allow users to communicate and connect with an audience. That’s a fairly broad definition but intentionally so. If the focus is on both the positive and negative aspect of social media, both come from the ability to communicate and publish for an audience. There are nuances of difference between sites and the ability to “friend,” the types of media you can publish, internal tools, etc. but the unifier is simple two-way communication.

That opens up a lot of terrain and I want to emphasize that. It’s too easy to say “I don’t let my kids go on social media,” or to write off all social media as trivial. This is also an opening to the discussion of how it’s not an on/off decision for schools.

At this point I emphasize different aspects of social media starting with CNN comments (and their high level of offensiveness), hitting Amazon comments (and that whole weird genre of fake product reviews) and then getting into things like Instagram and emphasizing that computers are certainly no longer a necessity. This type of cell-phone-based social media also adds the more immediate and integrated geographical data issue that can be a surprise for parents and kids. It’s not that I believe there are legions of internet kidnappers out there but I do think people ought to understand what data they’re disclosing.

The Social Media Pantheon

This isn’t a bad place to start when talking about the depth and breadth of what can be meant by social media. I also emphasize that social media on the web has been around in different forms for a long time. The Well being a very early example and I talk a little about IRC and Usenet. While not exactly social media as we think of it today, I think they provide some historical context.

I then move on to LinkedIn as something that some parents have used and it provides a touch stone as well as a pretty easily seen career/income relationship.

MySpace is next mainly because I want to stress how transitory these sites can be. Banning one site isn’t going to achieve your desired result. The Internet (and what is cool/hot/hawt) is a moving target. You have to focus on behavior as opposed to URLs.

Facebook takes a little time but is once again a familiar space for many parents. Many have used the site and understand the main capabilities. FB is mainly there so I can talk about its attempts to move into the mobile space3 held more by Twitter, FourSquare, Yelp and the like. Once again, I’m focusing on the mobile component and the importance of geographically aware elements in the popularity of the services.

I highlight a few people who’ve made their names through some bad choices that were documented on social media. I work from Phelps4, to Matthew Stafford and then hit Anthony Weiner. I work up to Weiner as his behavior was especially stupid and it put quite a contrast to the teacher (Ashley Payne) in the right hand corner who was fired for posting that picture. The point being some people document their stupidity and seemingly beg for punishment but there is also some real overreaction to things going on right now. Most people can’t believe the teacher was fired for that picture. I then point out The Facebook Fired, a site entirely dedicated to people fired for their social media actions. I may get into some of the issues that I documented in this post but it depends on the audience mood.

This is playing towards what people expect and I don’t apologize for that. These are the things parents are worried about. I lighten it up a bit at the end with Literally Unbelievable with a focus on the fact that what may be documented may not get you fired but it could convince people you’re an idiot. This also give me a chance to plug media literacy.

The Good

Now I get to focus on the things that are more interesting and fun. These are the things you don’t really hear about on mainstream news shows or on Oprah.5
I have used

From this the move is towards MOOCs/OpenCourseware and the more freeform places where you can join social media communities that are focused on learning. I hit Instructables and Make so I can open up the maker movement discussion and the tie in to use for science, physics etc. in our classrooms.


I take some detours and encourage questions from the audience but that eats up an hour pretty quickly. It’s a fun conversation and I get to talk about interesting things. The fact that raisins have QR codes and ketchup has its own Facebook page is too much to resist.

I ended with this tweet and the challenge that instantaneous access to worldwide communication is something these students will always have to deal with. That’s going to be a wild ride that will require an ever increasing skill set and media savvy.

1 Don’t make people work too hard at this point or everything will stall and you will make enemies.

2 I believe you already know the answer.

3 We talked some about the purchase of Instagram. A few parents brought up Instagram as the major social media element in their kids lives right now.

4 This may be a stretch but I’d argue without social media this would not have blown up nationally the way it did.

5 Is Oprah still on? Apparently not. Geraldo?

6 Yes, part of it is the fact that the video embarrasses me now.

7 I’m also a member.