Melissa Wantz: Notes from West Egg

Working at a technology-friendly high school for the past year has allowed me to embrace the wonders of many free web-based tools and use them in my work.

Starting with the basic Gmail service has led to an exploration of the Google suite of tools, of which I currently use Google Reader (to keep track of dozens of blogs and websites), Google Docs (to store, edit and share documents, build surveys and post pdfs to the web), Google Sites (to run a wiki site for my Journalism class). In the near future, I plan to test out Google Moderator in a class assignment.

My comfort with Google led to experimenting with Ning, the free social network site that allows you to create and maintain a closed-gated community. I have created four nings and trained lots of teachers on how to make and use them. EtherPad is next on my list to try.

The nings led me to blogging, including this blog on Edublog.com. And all of my experience with these programs finally led me, with a push from a colleague, to joomla! when it came time to start my online news site for school. And that is where my high feelings of technology competence came crashing to the floor.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is very sophisticated and built by computer programmers around the world sort of as a service to the world. Most do it for free; some try to sell extensions and templates for profit. Most likely these programmers think that mere mortals such as high school teachers comfortable with Google and Facebook can use such exotic offerings like their joomla! with few problems. Sort of like, in theory, they should be able to come into my 6th period classroom of 36 10th grade world lit students and lead an orderly discussion on the themes in Oedipus Rex. Right.

I’ve met my match in Joomla! I’ve been using it since last April and I told my colleagues at the ASNE institute this summer that the first 20 hours Joomla! kicked my butt, the next 60 hours we were in a tense standoff and the last 20 hours I kicked it’s butt. That was all true, and it still would be true if I were the only user of the site I’ve set up. Now that there are 28 other users, I’m running into issues. For example, today somehow some of the text on the site has mysteriously turned to italics. I have no idea how or why. Not all the text, just some. There’s no logic to it, and I can’t seem to undo it because I don’t know how it got that way.

Other problems: I took the site offline last week so we could prepare it for the opening day, which is now four days away. The kids all had user ids and passwords and I assumed this would let them log in and submit their stories, but apparently not. After several frantic emails (on a Sunday! and trust me I was at my computer all day), I figured out I had to upgrade their status from editor (on the front end) to manager (on the back end) so they could submit their work. Shortly after doing this, the italics appeared. Sigh.

Creative Commons image courtesy of clairity