Archive for the ‘Educational Technology’ Category

phpBB Officially Releases Gold

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

I’ve been a huge fan of phpBB ever since I was introduced to the system nearly 7 years ago when a best friend of mine was developing an online interest community. phpBB3.0 was officially released the other day after months of community development.

Click HERE to read the press release

The software is free under the GNU General Public License. Prior to this release, phpBB3 was available for use under the release candidates and I’ve been using it for testing and two communities are currently run: Cadre 13, and CorreiaTeachers.com.

I still have two communities I have developed running under phpBB2 including the new online academic community of CorreiaSeminar.com and the first academic community I developed on my old static site.

The greatest component that comes with phpBB is its’ human component! A dedicated community develops endless modifications and features to meet the growing demand of today’s web applications. In education and in other industries, phpBB internet forums will have a last impact in online communities.

With the official stable release, other groups will adapt phpBB’s use in every way. After finally understanding how 2.0 works, I stand back at square one (almost) to see how I can utilize Gold in my web communities.

Developing an Online Teacher Community

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

CorreiaTeachers.com was created after discussions with many teachers over the 2006-2007 school year. I hope the site will be a practical solution to increasing school communication, reduce meetings, and facilitate stronger collaboration while bringing the teaching staff to the 21st century of communication technology.

CorreiaTeachers.com was registered on June 7, 2007 and pointed to my server (though we could potentially move the database at anytime). The software, phpBB3 RC1, was installed on June 9th. phpBB is open source topic forum software that is completely customizable to meet the needs as our community grows.

RC7 (release candidate) is phpBB3’s latest version and though I have upgraded a few times since June, I’ve been waiting for the official stable release to come out.

The greatest challenge in setting up an Online Teacher Community is not technical. In fact, that’s the easiest part. The greatest challenge lies in encouraging teachers to utilize it. Though prior to its development, my discussions with teacher’s showed great enthusiasm for the potential. Even at its release, after a few days of development, teachers and administrators alike were excited about the potential.

For those of you who are teachers or work at a school, you know that it takes more than throwing the world online to encourage teachers and administrators to give the new tool a whirl.

After the first professional development giving the teachers a tutorial of phpBB3, I repeatedly heard, “It’s just one more thing I have to check.” As our administrators and teacher leaders increasingly use the site for communication, I still hear it.

It is not that teachers are resistant to change, they deal with change every minute throughout the school year, I think teachers know technology has a learning curve and they know it takes time. Time is short for teachers whose plate is always overflowing. Unfortunately, the daily stress and overwhelming responsibility that comes with teaching often shades the light of opportunity.

Leadership is necessary in this environment and my administration has recently taken an active role. Actually, I’m proud of them! I know some school administrations are reluctant to require their staff uses email.

More to come on the community!

Topic Forums Support Learning and Educational Experience

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

I asked my 7th grade students in our academic forum, “How does CorreiaSeminar.com support your learning and experience at school?”

At this point, my students having been using the site for about 1 month. Though the front end is Joomla, they have been mostly interacting in the phpBB Topic Forum component. Here are some of the responses I received:

Yes. It most definietly helps my learning. To be able to have an educational discussion with students outside of the classroom at anytime is very helpful. If I have a question after hours, I can ask it online and get a response quickly. You can have a debate or discussion online, and everyone can add in their imput. It’s not like a face to face discussion, an email or a phone call because everyone is invited to be part of the learning experience.

The website in general has provided our classes with many wonderful resources. First of all, the online topic forum has allowed all of us to post questions, answer others, pool our ideas together, and basically share our ideas about any topic imaginable. (and by reading someone else’s ideas, it adds to our percpective on the concept.) Also- gives us one place to share links, pic, info and sources.

I think correiaseminar and the topic forums is an asset to our online community because it is very helpful to students. They use it to turn in assignments, post their warm-ups or journal entries, and ask questions. They also use it to gain information on school functions and vacations. Students can get missed homework assignments if they were absent or just chat with their friends. It also has announcements about school comings and goings, and has the dates of many important events, such as picture day. So all in all, I believe that correiaseminar and the topic forums are good for our online community.

The online community we have established is helpful because it helps us stay connnected and assist students who are having difficulties with the day’s lesson/homework. I’ve also learned some fascinating things through the different forum discussions that have been created, most of which I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Overall, I feel its an awesome program to have access to, with the option to just talk to classmates about random subjects and an alternative way to do classwork (online journal entries). On a side note, its a great way to save paper!

Yes, I definitely think that the topic forums improve our school communities because then we can easily discuss things as a class without the problems of doing it out loud- such as talking over others, yelling, and more. Also, if we are absent one day, and there was a discussion, then we could just add our opinion after school and read what others had to say, instead of just missing out completely. In addition, we don’t have to use paper all of the time for journal entries.

Correia Seminar helps us because if someone forgot their homework than they could look on Correia Seminart and check their homework. This website also gives students that are in the Seminar Classes the opportunity to ask other students or the teacher for some help. Correia Seminar is a fun place to interact with others and a easier way to learn.

Correiaseminar helps us by allowing us to express ourselves in where you learn about school topics but you also learn more about people themselves in the open discussion forum. This has helped our learning experience by posting our homework online and the teacher can talk to students outside of school while they’re on the forum. This website is awesome!

Online topic forums help us to learn about not only the topic that we are studying, but about the opinions of our peers. by being able to communicate and interact with other students online, we are expanding our minds and bringing a tool familiar to many people of our generation, the computer, into education. This makes learning more interesting, as well as making it easier to learn, and being able to feed off of and comment on the opinions and thoughts of others.

I think the online community is good for the classroom and the students because we can talk to everyone from different periods, and ask any questions if a teacher isnt avaliable. We can read other classmate’s responses, and get different ideas.

I think correia seminar helps our school experience because it is easier to do things tha have to do with school and it is fun. And it is cool to see what other people say about what we say on assignments. Also we can respond to each other to see why we gave our respnd and we can have quick disscussionj and it is pretty cool about correia seminar. And it is just coll to do our work on a computer and online with others.

I like this site because it helps us share our thoughts and ideas, and connect with everybody. Plus, technology is becoming very prominent in society, and it’s important that we learn how to use it. Blogs, search engines, topic forums… they’re becoming really common (and easy to use) so utilizing these tools is practically a requirement.

I believe that the website supports our learning experience because of the way the forums work. They allow students to respond to your questions so that you can see what we think, while at the same time, other students in our class can read each other’s responses and get ideas for thier own. Even when sudents are at home, not together, they can still post questions to each other or look up the homework. I think it is a powerful tool that can aid our class.

phpBB Support Community

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

I have talked to several people who have been interested in how I have been using forums in the classroom.  Teachers and such often ask, “How can I get that!?”  As soon as I tell them to get their own server, learn some web basics, and install the thing, they quickly think it must be a technical nightmare.

Actually, with some basic net know-how, there is plenty of support and expertise for phpBB.  Actually, I’ve never experienced a more positive and helpful community.

phpBB’s Support Community runs on phpBB, of course, and is a great way to see how the structure of a topic forum community works.  Much of the discussion right now is about the new version bugs and development.  There are discussions going on between web developers, code junkies, MOD writers,  administrators, and users about anything and everything related to phpBB.  phpBB is in fact a product of the community.

I think the Support Community is an interesting place to see and watch.  It has changed quite a bit over the years with varying degrees of traffic depending on needs and development stages.  Actually, it would be a good case study to see how ideas develop and are implemented in an open source environment.  Dissertation anyone?

Click HERE to visit the phpBB Support Community

Creating an Academic Online Community

Monday, October 29th, 2007

My former website has recently joined the discarded static html virtual dump. Though my trash can be someone else’s treasure, I kicked my old teaching resource to the curb. Having students access the web for content is a thing of the past. It simply is not “cool” anymore. Want to know what’s cool? Ask a group of teenagers. Never ask just one teenager or a number of teenagers individually – you’ll only hear what they think you want to hear. Ask a group of teenagers what they like to do on the internet. Surrounded by peers, they’ll tell you what is in and what is cool on the internet.

Ignoring specifics, my students tell me they engage in four different activities: gaming, downloading media, messaging, and social networking. Static html pages just can’t compete with this!

After experiences with participating in online interest communities over the past many years, I wanted to give it a try in my classroom. 2 years ago, MrG-Online.com got a side-kick: phpBB. Introducing online forums to students is one of the coolest things that can happen to a classroom. phpBB is a world-class internet forum component that is open source and written in php. It was an easy transition for the MySpace users and a surprisingly fun way to interact as a class. Internet forums have been out for a very long time and are very popular with online interest groups. For two years, my static site, though highly utilized for class news, assignments, and document downloads, was becoming an entry point to our developing online academic community in the forums.

Rare things happened in the forums. Students wrote more, gathered after hours to discuss homework, and some students logged in after they left our middle school for high school to help other students and just to say hi!

Moving to a website, I knew a completely interactive site would have potential to do more of the other things teenagers like to do like social networking and sharing media (I squeeze gaming in there but for now, I link them to outside science and math games). phpBB would be the heart of our new community. It is the classroom and the lunch court.

…more to follow

MoBlogging

Friday, August 24th, 2007

I just returned from an awesome vacation. My wife, Michelle, and I first left to Las Vegas to celebrate my friend Gary’s birthday. Next we flew directly to Hawaii for a wedding and relaxing. During the trip, I simply had to MoBlog everywhere!

I learned about MoBlogging about a year ago while learning more about blogging. I was really searching for ways to have my students blog as part of technology integration into my curriculum. A MoBlog is basically blogging from your cellphone. You can send a text or pic message from your cellphone and it goes directly to your blog on the internet. Text messaging was something I did but my phone made it difficult and time consuming (not to mention that it was a piece of junk). Like many, I waited for my contract to end and the “New Every Two” program to give me a deal on a new phone.

Whenever shopping for a new phone, always ask a group of teenagers! They will tell you all about the latest cell phones. From their recommendations, I decided the LG enV would be my new MoBlogging machine:

LG enV

While setting up this site, I was looking for a way to connect my cell phone to WordPress. It was a bit tricky: setup an anonymous email account, establish a cron job to check periodically for email and post to Wordpress. After setting up a blog account at Blogger.com during an assignment with my graduate program at Pepperdine, I found this to be easier and even more convenient. All I have coming to this site is the RSS from the the MoBlog on blogger.com.

Setting up a blog with Blogger was very easy, especially if you have a Google account. Blogger.com has a very easy explanation how to set up your phone. Basically, you give them your phone number and it sends you a text message with a verification code. Enter the code back on the site and voila, your phone is now a MoBlogging machine!

I take images from the enV’s camera just below full resolution and send a pic message to go@blogger.com. Its amazingly easy, fun, and increasingly addicting!

My MoBlog

MoBlogging is more than just archiving adventures in Vegas and Hawaii. As a teacher, I always find “teachable moments” when I’m not in my classroom. An example of a science concept, real world math solutions, or life skills is now a cell phone away to deliver it. Also, MoBlogging is a great way to let friends and family know what you’re up to. My good friend Dave subscribed to my MoBlog and has sent me a text on my phone minutes after I’ve posted to comment.