Archive for the ‘web 2.0 apps’ Category

Last week a new version of WordPress was released – we’ve told you before how much we like it, and this upgrade promises nothing but more goodies, so it goes without saying that we were very curious to find out what all the twitter talk was about.

The procedure is simple: login into your WordPress installation, and hit that “Please update now” link. Well… Hold your horses for just a second. This release is just a bit different, you see…

What’s new?

This release features a lightning fast redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages, an admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages, a streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers (visit Screen Options in the top right to get old panels back), and a refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

Check plugins

Sounds cool, eh? That’s what we thought, too. Before you go for the update, though, listen to our good advice just for a change, and check if your plugins are compatible already. If not, disable the ones that are not compatible with this release yet, and then upgrade. If you don’t, you’ll run into the same problems we had – you’ll get a very nice error thrown your way (Call to undefined function wp()) , which will crash your site completely. We’ve never run into problems before while updating WordPress, but this time we had to revert to the previous version to find out what had gone wrong, exactly. Not nice. Of course those fine people at WordPress can’t be held responsible for the coding of plugin authors – we get that.

A lot of the work put into this release takes place in the background. 820 issues have been fixed, and changes brought about by the new features (admin bar – really cool, the internal linking – finally, the post formats and custom post types, etc) clearly have a more than serious impact on existing plugins.

Solution?

The solution is easy: either you disable whatever is not compatible, and check by enabling them one by one, or you just wait for the authors to update their plugins. We’ll leave it up to you.

Embedit.in is one of those applications you just have to write something about -it’s a web application that provides embed codes for just about any document or site you would like to show on your site: pdf files, Office or WordPerfect documents are now actually shown on your site in a nice and customizable little player, as you can see in the full post, so there’s no software required to view documents. Read the rest of this entry »

The European Commission offers grants for courses listed in their Comenius/Grundtvig course database, covering course fee, travel & subsistence. With the application deadline of 14 January approaching rapidly, we would like to draw your attention to some courses the non-profit organization Let’s Learn IT has to offer.

Course overview

1. Moodle at School: Installing & Deploying a Course Management System for Language Teachers (BE-2010-128-003)
   This one week course, which takes place in Athens, Greece, from 10 – 17 July 2011, will give you everything you need to know in order to not only install but also configure and manage your own Moodle Course Management System. Additionally, you will also learn how to effectively implement all of its features in your daily teaching practice.
2. Tools for teachers: New Media & Web 2.0 Applications (BE-2010-130-003)
   This one week course, which takes place in Ghent, Belgium, from 24 July – 31 July 2011, will give you an overview of many New Media applications (such as Blogs, Wikis, social networks, etc), and show you how you can effectively implement all of their features in your daily teaching practice. Having completed this course, you will be able to create improved learning materials that will appeal to young & IT-savvy students.
3. Training for the Future – Improving Education with Blogs & Wikis (BE-2010-131-003)
   This course takes place in Ghent, Belgium, from 21 – 28 August 2011. As blogs and wikis abound on the web, it is essential teachers as well as students learn how to work with them, and how they can implement them in their daily teaching practice. Creating a blog or wiki can easily happen in a matter of minutes it does take more than that to turn your blog or wiki into a successful learning experience.

If you think these courses might interest any of your colleagues, then please share this information with them. For more specific information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Preregistration & information

People who are interested should preregister for our courses as soon as possible via our Preregistration Form. Full details regarding the courses are also available via the overview of our international courses.

Application Deadline

The application deadline for Comenius – Grundtvig courses comes very early this year (14 January 2011). It is therefore very important that you submit your application for funding before 13 January 2011. For country-specific deadlines, please inquire with your own National Agency.

Everybody who followed our previous advice to upgrade, please upgrade again, especially if you have remote publishing activated.

While others need not worry immediately, it’s always a good idea to install security upgrades. You can download the latest version from their site.

As always, and since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). According to their site, here’s why you should upgrade:

This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts.

These issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.

For many people a blog has become almost synonymous with WordPress. Running your own version, rather than going through WordPress.com, has a couple of advantages. As in: you have full control over everything. Change your theme? Add plugins? Some widgets, perhaps? Tweaking the code to suit your needs? All of it is possible… It’s become so powerful that by now it’s become much more than just a blogging system: you can run a full-fledged website in it, if you want, all of it with the same ease of use that we’ve naturally come to expect from WordPress.

And the good news is that those nice folks at WordPress.org (the organization which offers you the downloadable version of their software) have released a new version.

Here’s what’s new, according to their site:

WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional:

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements. Big thanks to Vladimir Kolesnikov for detailed and responsible disclosure of the security issue!

Since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). If you happen to work for an organization where the system administrator doesn’t know how to manage a server park properly, though, and the upgrades aren’t possible due to server configuration mistakes (and we don’t have any specific organization in mind here, COMU), you can always download 3.0.2 and do the upgrade manually.

Randall Munroe (of xkcd.com fame) has blessed us with a new map of Online Communities. Yes, new, because he already did a first one in 2007. Interesting to see how the situation has evolved (e.g. Facebook vs. Myspace, and who would have thought that Farmville alone is bigger than Youtube?). Since the new map is based on the rate of activity in the various sites and communities, it gives you a pretty good idea of where things are happening at the moment. A word of warning, though:

Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).

In his blog post Social media and trying to drink from a firehose Jason Renshaw comes up with a few interesting observations -seasoned Twitter & facebook users will undoubtedly recognize that sometimes it really can get too much, and that you can indeed spend hours trying to keep up with things. Luckily enough, there are also a couple of applications that allow users to keep all their social accounts manageable. Read the rest of this entry »

Fastcompany has an interesting read about the impact of smartphones and handheld computers on the way we teach (or should teach).

When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: “They loved to push the buttons and see it light up.” The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g.

10 years ago, when I was giving Comenius / Grundtvig trainings and tried to persuade that very “soon everybody would have a digital photo camera”, many of the course participants scoffed at me. By now it’s hard to find a phone without a digital camera, and many of them have built-in functionality to send the videos that have been recorded straight to YouTube!

Tactile technology is making it easier for kids to learn how to use advanced technology, and is going to empower them in a way difficult to imagine for the current generation of teachers. Now does that sound like an interesting challenge to you, or what?

Many people have been trying to get rid of their Facebook accounts, and have found that Facebook is not that keen on letting you go. In fact, most of us will be able to use the “Deactivate account” option under Account > Application settings, but this just makes your account dormant. Log into it again, and it will be automatically activated.

But what if you really want to get rid of Facebook then? Head over to https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account.  You’ll get a page where you can choose to permanently delete the account. Just make sure you don’t log in for 14 days, and then everything will be gone for ever. (And yes, your friends will probably miss you.)

WordPress 3.0 has been released for quite a while now, but you know what we’re really missing out on, over here at Let’s Learn IT? We want *integration* ! Why is there still no plugin (that works) which can connect this site with, say, Facebook or so?

Ping.fm has support for the wordpress.com sites, but not for the wordpress.org sites (which is what we use). They’ve promised us that they’re working on a solution, though. Nice folks, those at Ping.fm.