School Domain Names

For a significant portion of time, school districts in United States lived with crazy domain names. For example, Hamilton City used to have the following domain name: http://hcs.k12.0h.us The reasons for this (I think) were: This domain was free (free is always considered good) In geeky, folder, index engineering minds this naming convention made a […]

The Art of Web Design

There are rules, guidelines at the very least. You can’t just create something the morning of class, pick your favorite colors, throw in some clip art or stolen Google image search results and expect magic. Aesthetics matter. We live in the world of screen. Our students live in the world of interactive, clamoring for attention, screen. Not paper. Paper […]

Rumblings on Future Ideas for the District Portal

Context: The Issue An unexpected problem with BYOD (really!) is access to software tools. It’s all great if you have students bringing their own devices to the class, but you now need them to do something with those devices. You get a mishmash of tools spitting out different products (or, sometimes, no product because there are no […]

Responsive Web Design

The Context & The Problem We’re a “bring your own device” district. What this means is that we’ve the wild west of screen sizes. Smartphones, at their best, are 800 by 600 pixels (ignore Samsung’s odd experiment). Netbooks (which we have at the middle schools) are 1024 in width with some goofy height. And then […]