Monthly Archives: February 2008

More Limited Communication Purity

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Apparently, I really like the idea cutting down communication to it’s purest form. (that’s really pompous sounding)- I like short writing. I like the idea that you have to pack as much as possible in just a few words.

Boing Boing has come through again by finding a book dealing with 6 word memoirs by a variety of writers.

My two favorites are below.

Yes, you can edit my biography. — Jimmy Wales

Must remember: people, gadgets. That order. — Brian Lam

I might simplify the idea for students and make them obituaries- it also avoids any of their work getting sucked into the Oprah memoir furor (nothing worse than having to apologize to Oprah on national TV). Give them bonus points for working in vocabulary words etc.

Here a more academic example that I took a shot at (I listened to this Tesla podcast recently- interesting stuff).

Eccentric Serb electrifies science. Dies poor. — Nikolai Tesla

I guess it all boils down to- well, boiling things down. There’s a lot of processing and thinking that goes into trying to sum up a life or period in just a few words. In the end it’ll help everyone. Have them vote on the best sentence. Post them individually in a blog and install the star rating plugin. Make your life painless while creating a study resource and getting your students excited. If you tag them by people, time period or other relevant category it’ll double your pleasure and fun.

Google Forms to Exhibit Example (POC)

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Log

So, I’ve managed to create two quick websites for work that are driven by Google’s new form option for getting data into spreadsheets. I’ve put a quick example of a log here. Feel free to enter data etc. It’s up there to play around with and hopefully is simple enough to help people figure out how to do it.

One thing I don’t like about the form option. I don’t like that changes I make to the submission form alter my spreadsheet. I might want the form to read “Your name here” while my spreadsheet says {name:text}. I don’t believe there’s any way to do that and it would be much nicer when using this with Exhibit.

Formula

Instead I have to add another sheet and I use a formula to reference the data in. It’s just =sheet1!A2 in case anyone needs it. Then if I get my mouse in just the right place it turns into cross hairs and I can drag that formula dynamically so that it pastes as =sheet1!A3 and A4 etc. then I can drag it across to create =sheet1B2 etc. That is much better than typing all that in.

In a perfect world I’d also be able to apply some css to it but that’s getting a little picky.

So the key steps.

  1. create spreadsheet and form- remember you’ll need two pages and the second one will really just reference the first but with ugly Exhibit headers that are basically {fieldname:text} for this simple version
  2. publish spreadsheet publish.png
  3. go to the published site and click on the ugly Exhibit page and get the URL with the word “basic” in it
  4. replace the feed in the Exhibit source code with the one you just got
  5. change the categories in the Exhibit code to match those in your spreadsheet- if you have more categories then you’ll need to add list definitions for each additional one or they’ll show up blank

    6. After all of that. I think I need to do a video. It’s really easier than this makes it appear.

Just in time tech . . .

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Google spreadsheets now lets you share editing by sending out a custom form. This is a huge deal. No, really. Huge.

It solves so many problems I see happening all the time in schools. This is such a great way to get large amounts of information from all sorts of people of varying technical skill levels so you have it one place to manipulate. No need for the hassle of Adobe PDF and the complications of those forms or the need to create custom web forms of various types. It’s free and dead simple.

I’m going to use it to collect testing information on programs for our upcoming Vista move. Previously, I was going to use cforms ii (awesome WordPress plug in by the way- especially if you need to fully customize the CSS- see an example I did for the NSDC here- it is real so don’t fill out fake info please). But there’s no real easy way to share that information. You could give people the password to the blog but that’s no always a good thing and the information that’s there is really just for looking at or exporting. I wanted something more dynamic. I think you could write some custom php pages and pull the info out but that’s a hassle and it takes time.

I was going to download the data, upload it into a Google spreadsheet and possibly push it out to an Exhibit front end (yes, I’m still in love with them). Major hassle for me in terms of keeping things updated as I’d have to add to the spreadsheet with each new entry to keep things up to date. Blah. I considered trying to write an Applescript to do it for me based on folder update changes but that’s more time and, if you’ve ever messed with Applescript, it’s likely to be a hassle.

Instead, I set up the spreadsheet to feed my data into Exhibit and send out a form. As you can see below it’s got the option to change the field names in the form, add help text etc. I never have to update. Anyone can use it. So very nice. I’ll post my example when I get it finished.

gform.jpg

The bridge between these two platforms has never seemed more interesting to me.

  1. Easy to use, free and friendly data entry.
  2. An easy to set up “database” backend – yes I know it’s not relational blah blah but it’ll do for 99% of things normal human need (and I wonder if you linked a series of spreadsheets in the right ways . . . )
  3. A visual and friendly web front end for user interaction with the data using Exhibit.
  4. You need to know NO programming to do any of this. Some html, css will help but no php, mySQL, no real languages. That’s amazing.

Now start thinking of the cool things you can do with students, how you could save your school and district hours of useless work.