Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Remember the good old days of the web, back when all the GIFs were animated and Comic-Sans text would spread out across your entire 14-inch, 50-pound monitor? The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can take you there. Just tell this virtual time machine which site you’d like to look at, and it will generate a time line through which you can view every incarnation of that site from its inception until the present day. Check out the 1996-era LEARN NC site (pictured) compared with today’s version.

The Wayback Machine has been around for a while, but its revamped interface features faster loading times, and a handy toolbar that makes it easier to visit the different eras of a given site.

You can use the Wayback Machine to show how design has evolved, or for a general discussion on how changes in the web reflect our changing world. It’s also a great nostalgia inducer if you want to relive the 1990s, before Amazon, Facebook, and Google owned the internet. Of course, if you really want to take a trip back to 1995, simply use the Geocities-izer.

Wayback Machine

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BY BILL FERRIS

On January 12, Mozilla is about to open a new semester of its online School of Webcraft. The folks behind the Firefox browser, Mozilla has partnered with Peer 2 Peer University to deliver web-development courses that are free and are open to anyone in the world with an internet connection.

The School of Webcraft is built on a philosophy open-source technology and peer collaboration to build real-world skills. In true open-source style, they’re turning to the online community not only to take the courses, but also to suggest and teach courses, too. If you’ve got some web design experience and would like to share it with the world, this is a great opportunity to help a lot of people.

For more information, read their helpful FAQ. You can sign up for courses beginning tomorrow, January 12. FYI, courses will likely fill up fast.

A lot of schools don’t have the money or expertise to offer web development and design, and getting certifications outside of K-12 schools is pretty expensive. The School of Webcraft may be a good option for students (or teachers) who want to get into web development. Perhaps you could also look into adopting the Mozilla curriculum for your school for future semesters. Or you could put your new skills to work by setting up a classroom website or your online portfolio.

School of Webcraft

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Build your own website with KompoZer

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Everyone has a website these days — even people’s pets have a web presence. The the fact remains, however, that creating a site takes a bit of HTML know-how. Kompozer is trying to change all that. It’s a free, intuitive web-development application that, for the novice, works a lot like any old word processor, and for the savvy web designer, looks and acts much like Adobe Dreamweaver.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

When you decide to make a web page, the first question (assuming you have already settled on the subject matter) is what is the site going to look like? I’m not talking about tweaking the CSS, but rather the overall big picture, the starting point where you paint with broad strokes. Often times you use a whiteboard, or a piece of paper, or a tablet if you’re on the high-tech end of things. But what if you have the drawing or artistic talents equal to a rock? How can you lay out your ideas in a manner that can be understood?

If the previous sentence describes you, then you should consider using Balsamiq’s mockup tools to lay things out visually before you get into the nuts and bolts of coding. (more…)

BY REBECCAH HAINES

No matter how much you want to deny it, cool names and flashy advertising is often what draws you to try out a product. Well, with Weebly.com, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t check it out because I liked the name. Of course, once I got to the site, I found it to be a very simple website maker, and something that teachers might like to use in their classrooms.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

As most of you know very well, the day-to-day (not to mention hour-to-hour) tasks of a teacher can be hectic and time-consuming. In addition to actually teaching the warm little bodies in our classes, we have to grade papers, attend meetings, participate in school leadership committees, create bulletin boards, set up for labs, meet with students, plan future lessons, prepare for and administer tests…the list seems endless. As if that isn’t enough, we’re also faced with the critical task of communicating with parents about their students and the classroom in general. Thankfully, the internet has made this task a little less time-consuming for teachers and parents. This article will discuss the many tools that can help you design a website to keep parents in the loop.

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BY BILL FERRIS

How much does your school spend on software? You’ve probably got Microsoft Office installed in the central office. Maybe the school newspaper uses Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. That’s a few thousand dollars worth of software right there, depending on the size of licenses you need. Open Source Alternative wants you to save that money by suggesting, well, open-source alternative programs that do the same things as their pricey commercial counterparts, but won’t cost you a dollar (let alone several thousand of them).

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BY BILL FERRIS

Aviary, the web-based image-editing suite, used to charge for some premium features like saving private files and allowing access to tutorials. I say “used to” because they’ve stopped charging money for it.

This is a great development for art and design teachers looking for a viable alternative to Adobe Creative Suite. Aviary gives schools the ability to start graphic- and web-design classes without spending a fortune on the software.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Just because you don’t know web design doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice-looking website. Wix lets you create a Flash-based website from one of their many templates, or build a site from scratch. Here’s a sample site I made in about five minutes. Wix templates allow you to create sub-pages, upload photos, and incorporate animations into your design.

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BY BILL FERRIS

In this week’s by-the-numbers edition, read about the things you need to know before going 1:1, find the best free web-design tutorials, and read the heartwarming story about how the 112th element finally became a real boy got a name. More after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Picking a good color scheme is, for me, like calculus — an ordered, complex set of laws that I’ll never, ever understand. Thankfully I can use cheats like referring to the color wheel, or this slick online Color Scheme Designer. Just move your cursor around the color wheel to find your central hue, choose between mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic or accented analogic, whatever those mean, and CSD will present you a selection of colors that will look great on our class blog, bulletin boards, art projects, school newspapers, activity T-shirts, or even your daily wardrobe (if you’re like me, you’ll need a lot of schemes based on khaki).

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The 15 Strangest College Courses In America
“Underwater Basket Weaving” is apparently a real class. So is “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “The Science of Harry Potter,” and “Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows.” These are actual courses that award actual credit, from universities you’d actually want to go to (Georgetown and UC-Berkley, for instance). Show these to your principal, and maybe your proposed syllabus for “A Study of Physics in Warner Bros. Cartoons” won’t sound so bad.

Top 50 Free Open Courseware Classes to Design Better Web Sites
Web design is a useful, highly marketable skill a lot of high schools don’t teach. Fortunately, you can help out some of your more web-savvy students with this guide to free courses that can develop their design skills. Maybe they’ll show their gratitude by redesigning your school’s website.

38 ways to find great edublogs
With so many educators out there who blog, how do you find the good stuff? Blog by Carol presents this list of 38 ways to find great edublogs, such as checking the Edublogs awards, using Technorati authority, and the time-honored method of asking people you already trust which blogs they read. Of course, if you need a place to start, Instructify isn’t too bad.

Top 5 Quiz Generators for Online Educators
Why do the grunt work of putting a quiz together yourself when you can find a handy piece of software to do it for you? Web 2.0 Teaching Tools brings you five time-saving methods for putting quizzes together online. Now you’ll have more time to read some of those great new edublogs you found. -BILL FERRIS

Pixlr is yet another adorably named online photo editor. With it, you can do a lot of the stuff that expensive programs like Photoshop does, except without spending money, or even downloading any software.

Like Splashup and Photoshop Express, Pixlr lets you upload and edit your photos, or enter a URL of an online photo you’d like to edit and save to your hard drive. You can create layers in your image, and manipulate the picture using a full compliment of filters, brushes, and so on. My only complaint, one I’ve noticed about all online photo editors, is that I can’t paste a screen capture (using the ALT plus Print Screen keys) into a new Pixlr file, though perhaps that’s due to user-error on my part.

Pixlr is a great, no-cost tool for art class, the school paper, a web design class, the yearbook staff, or for anyone who’d like to crop a photo or eliminate red-eye. True, it’s a lot like other no-cost tools we’ve mentioned. However, given how finicky some school firewalls can be, it’s best to have some options in case your favorite online tool gets blocked. -BILL FERRIS

Pixlr

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It’s a good thing they didn’t let me design the Instructify site. We probably would’ve ended up with a generic graphic of a chalk board on a background of brown and light blue, one of about three color schemes I know looks good.

If you have art students as inept as I at choosing colors, LaurenMarie at Creative Curio reminds us that picking good color combinations is as easy as looking at your trusty color wheel. I felt pretty foolish when the article reminded me that you can find complimentary colors simply by looking at opposite sides of the color wheel.

This is helpful advice for students in your painting class or who are experimenting with Web design. If you’re not an art teacher, it’s equally handy for choosing which color of paint matches your couch, or just trying to put an outfit together when you get dressed in the morning.

The problem with everybody having access to programs like Photoshop is that it convinces artistically talentless folks like myself that they’re graphic designers. Maybe if more of us n00bs learned the basics of color and design, the Web would be a better looking place. -BILL FERRIS

The Color Wheel and Color Theory via Creative Curio

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Let’s face it, building a Web site from scratch is tough. You need Web space and design software and knowledge about HTML and stuff. And in general, it’s difficult for both students and teachers to get the hang of. However, the Internet is a lot easier than it used to be, and with programs like Webon, you don’t need any of that to, well, get your Web on.

Webon is a free online hosting site that integrates tools for creating, building and maintaining a completely free (and ad-free) Web site. The site offers different “kits” depending on the purpose of your site, including basic, photo album, travelogue and personal kits, which let you set up blogs and other pages for photos, links, maps, anything you want really.

Webon is a great tool to use in the classroom for both middle and high schoolers because its drag-and-drop interface is intuitive, so your students can easily add and remove elements from their personalized pages. You can use it for group projects and let your students build and maintain an informative Web site on a specific topic. Your students can even keep online journals or post their homework assignments to their Web site.

With lots of design templates and options to choose from, your students can express themselves and you can sidestep all of that complicated web development stuff. So go on, get your Web on! – LAUREN FROHNE

Webon

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