Hello,
I have finished the concept map of Snow Snakes AL site. We can discuss it tomorrow if we have time for it. See you tomorrow!

Parents

The folks really came through - my dad made a lovely snow snake and I was thinking maybe I could make a few little videos with it to illustrate the steps. I thought that might be a nice little interactive piece. Jim, what format would I need to save them in? Or should I do the You Tube thing? I've also got some pictures that my dad took while in the process and I'll revise the lesson with those stuck in. Jim, will that be complicated to upload? Would it be better to have links to the images in each section or to have them right in the text? My poor little Front Page brain thinks it would be so easy to link them but I'm guessing it doesn't work quite that easily, eh?

So I'll get the two lessons revised before Tuesday (I probably won't make it by 4:15) and let me know if you like the video idea and I can do that, too.

Allison

Today's Work on the Site

I activated the discussion forums today. They seemed to work quite well after some trials and tribulations. This is an essential piece of the site because it enables the registered users to collabarate and upload material.

I also uploaded the video and audio files I received on Tuesday. I'm really not too happy with the time it takes for these items to download for viewing. An alternative would be to submit all of the videos to YouTube and then use the streaming video instead which seems to work much faster. I'm not really sure I want to change anything just yet.

Lastly, there was much ire placed upon the uploading of the 360° image of the U's Mall. I could not upload it to the component we are currently using because it does not recognize the .mov format. The alternate files (.mpg, .avi, etc) could be uploaded, but I could not convert the 360° image to any of these files without losing the features essential to this media. I eventually just uploaded the file to my personal server space and linked it into the menu. I could have changed the component to something that reads .mov files, but the truth is that after we complete this for a grade, Brant will use this site and will not need this class assignment that really has nothing to do with the site, so where it is at now is fine.

Progress?

Anything? I received a packet from my parents, so I'll scan that stuff in and get it all ready to be a slide show of sorts. My dad was going to go out to the cabin and make a snow snake from scratch yesterday, taking pictures after each step so we can include visuals with the directions (good plan, huh?). I'm not sure if it ended up working, but I'll see them today. I'll assume it did since he didn't call to say otherwise. Anyone else have anything to report?

Allison

puzzled

I'm sure it was just a map I created in my imagination, then. Sometimes it gets a little too realistic inside here...

Allison

Tuesday at 4:05 Peik 230

I delved into Joomla today trying to upload a few items. Needless to say I got stuck pretty quick. I would like to spend a little bit of time on Tuesday having Jim show us some Joomla basics. My lesson should be close to final. Did anyone check out the google docs page? Thoughts? We could maybe look at that as well. I have some further lesson ideas and would be happy to look into a climate lesson on snow snakes. I don't recall seeing a map Jim. But I am intrigued. See everyone Tuesday afternoon at my place.

?

I swear I've seen a map of the areas snow snakes were played in some of our research. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? It's entirely possible I imagined it...

I have one pretty long but very rough lesson going. I'll try to get some more done for tomorrow. Can anyone do anything on climate? I was maybe going to incorporate it into my stuff, but I'm not really sure what to do with it. Maybe we can discuss tomorrow. I didn't write anything down...what time did we say?

Innovate: Moving from Theory to Real-World Experiences in an e-Learning Community

Innovate: Moving from Theory to Real-World Experiences in an e-Learning Community

Picking up Steam!

We have two different things rolling at this point. For Aaron's class we had talked about a one month unit during the month of February. This would culminate in a festival of some sort. By having a nice neat month we could build and keep momentum for snow snakes with active collaboration zones, expert chats, etc. This would be done within the school day primarily with after school activities as needed.

For the grant project I am working on, and which is the underlying driving force behind this; a munch lengthier approach is being explored with only after school connotations. For an after school session we are looking at up to two hours a day. And for all practical purposes you could have as many days as you want. I think that approach might get a little bigger and a tad unwieldy for our original AL game plan. So the long answer is lets do it all and then we can cut back and sharpen as needed.

I talked on the phone yesterday to an Ojibwe elder who I was pointed to as someone who knows snow snakes. It was kind of funny because he had to do research much like we are doing to find out about snow snakes. He talked to elders before him and they didn't have much to say about the subject. Anyway, I passed along what we have for our AL project, including pdf articles and book chapters. He will look it over and see what kind of involvement he is interested in. I will be emailing Jim Brickwedde after this post to sit down and put some fresh eyes on our curriculum progress.
I am not much of a cheerleader but a cheer sounds great! Maybe a dance too!

Question

I just hammered out a ton of stuff. It is now past my bedtime and my brain has officially shut down, but I had a question for Brant. How long are these after-school sessions and how frequently do they occur? Of course, I sat down to write a quick little lesson and it blossomed into something kind of huge.

Cool stuff

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you set your mind to it! I called my parents when I got home because they live within the Leech Lake Reservation and they have somewhat all-access to the Cass County Museum, which has a wonderful collection of Ojibwe art. My dad is going to stop by there and hopefully take some pictures and talk to the curator, who is a font of knowledge of all sorts of Native things. After asking about all of that, I thought maybe I should tell them a little about the project and both of them exclaimed, "snow snakes!" like I'd just told them they won a million dollars. Turns out that my dad has made a number of them and conducted tournaments as a Boy Scout leader. So he's going to write up the direction on how to make them (not sure if they kids will be able to do it - depends on whether they're able to use a skill saw and whether they would have access to that...he suggests having them made, but we'll see) and send those to me. It seemed like that would be way better coming from someone who has done it before. My mom is going to talk to the Indian Ed department at Walker-Hackensack-Akeley tomorrow when she subs, so maybe she can get something from them. Once you get my mom going on something, she delivers results. Trust me.

So they're on a mission and I am working on the lessons I decided I'd be responsible for. It is going to be a little history, a little sports, a little art, some shop class and who knows what else.

Allison

Components are a Good Thing

I downloaded a few more components for the site today. I loaded all of my snow snakes photos into a slideshow component, set up a blogging component, and set up the videos that I have of snow snakes into a video component. The media components both work quite well, but I have yet to figure out the Mamblog component, but it should give the site a place where registered members can blog about their experiences. I also reloaded the Xplorer component because the old one never worked for me. I could see using this FTP tool to upload some HTML and make our site even more pleasing to the eye.

Now is the time for my team to start applying their stuff onto the site: Photos, videos, lessons, FAQS, A-Z, links, and whatever goes into the "Snake Zone" should be applied to the site. Most of these can be done from the front end (except the photos which need to be loaded through the Component menu item called "Xtreme"). Things are progressing nicely and I can't wait to see where this is going to go now.

QTVR and Audacity

I have been going back and forth on Panorama Factory trying to save a QTVR image. I can see the image all ready to go on my machine but when I begin to save it (which takes a long time) it comes right to the end and notifies me that I am out of memory and the application closes. I am not sure where to go from here. I went through my machine and cleaned it up as best I could to open up memory. I also attempted to use a USB drive to no avail. I may revisit this a little bit later. I am very interested in the image not only for the class assignment but also for personal. Any thoughts on a solution would be appreciated.

I also downloaded audacity. I thought that for one of our media pieces I could read an Ojibwa legend or two and we could post this on our site.

For a video addition I am working on getting a clip of some snow snakery up at White Earth. The clip is part of a greater project video. I will keep you posted. All of the aforementioned will surely need some technical assistance with Joomla. Until next time................

Returning to Desgin

After an evening of pure frustration (see previous post), I returned to Joomla. Luckily for my cohorts in this Snow Snakes adventure, I am not one to take defeat and wanted immediate retribution on this evil CMS. This time I avoided the html and page style procedures in favor of the design of the site. I found that this was much more satisfying in many aspects, yet frustrating as hell on other tasks.

My successes included getting the Chat and Forum components to launch (see two posts ago) and I switched the Links menu item to a "Content" sub-menu item. These tasks were successfully completed through manipulation of miles of checklists and drop-down menus within each Content item. I discovered that the Components needed to also be listed among the Content to be included in the lists that appear when the main menu items are pressed. I completed this feature for the "Content" button on the main menu.

My failures included not being able to duplicate the same procedure, as described above for the "Content" button, for the "Collaboration" button. I'm not sure why I couldn't do the same for this button, but I either lost some path in the procedure previously used or this is its own dilemma totally disjoint from the other success. I'm going away for the weekend and when I return on Sunday, I'll attempt to make this all good. My goal is to get everything on the site to a point where people can start adding the actual content. I'm fearful of returning back to the design side of the site, but, knowing my tenacity, I'll be jumping back into that horrid pool of discontent soon as well.

I just don't get it.

Last night I ventured into Joomla land, attempting to make our page prettier with HTML. I've used HTML before and it was pretty straight forward code and the preview of the updated front page looked great. The problem came when I actually viewed the results of my wokr and found nothing has changed. For some reason, nothing was changed on the page. After going back and forth from editor to viewing the site about a dozen times, I ave up and started a new front page from a different link in the menu. Same thing. Looks great in the preview, but now there's nothing on the front page. WHEN WILL JOOMLA RETURN ALL OF THESE HOURS IT IS STEALING FROM ME! I'll try again today. I'm just glad that Joomla isn't some kind of tangible item that I could smash against a wall or there would be some cleaning to do.

Components

Today I learned how to upload and install components. I uploaded a chatroom and a forum discussion tool. It was really a pretty simple procedure. Find these components on the web (I Googled "Joomla" and there were many links for these types of sites containing components). These components download to your computer in a .zip format. Next, go to the installer and choose the component installer and upload the .zip file from your computer. The Joomla site will do the rest. Now my next goal is to learn how to apply these components to our page. If we're going to use an online expert chat, this will come in handy. Another problem I am having is that the chatroom component that I down loaded is in French, so I'll probably trash it and get a different chat component (there were many on the afore mentioned site, I just chose the highest rated one).

Progress

We had a fruitful meeting in lieu of class Tuesday night. I will try and capture what we accomplished to follow. We discussed the dynamic or our Snow Snake idea/model with the PolarHusky model. This led to looking closely at some of the components of the PolarHusky curriculum and thinking and discussing what that might look like for our purposes. The result was the game plan of preparing a draft "Program Overview" and "Alert" to set the stage. We also plan on creating lesson plans using the PolarHusky template, each group member initially being responsible for one lesson in their chosen content area.

This led to discussions about AL ingredients that should be considered. Jim emailed us a list that we worked from and the results follow:
Landing page - This will come later as our Joomla page evolves.
Trail Reports - There are a couple AL pieces that we are not sure how to integrate or address because of the nature of our project. We don't have a third party team out in the field so a continuous trail report poses a problem. We left this with a question mark for now.
Scrapbook - In the short term we thought we could upload some existing pictures of snow snakes from the project I am working on with the White Earth schools. We could also find pertinent Ojibwe legends and read them aloud posting the audio file on Joomla for each story.
Blog updates - This component we see as really taking off when and if our AL project takes flight. We envision for our four week project we would identify one class per week that would be our showcase class and they would post to the blog daily about there progress.
Our Hook - The Snow Snake game in general and the status of students as contributors to the AL collaborative environment.
Collaborative Opp. - Each class would post photos and video of progress through the snow snake project.
Support content - ?
Team Communication - Again, not sure what this would look like since we don't have an expedition team in the field. So for now N/A.
Q and A - Structurally in Joomla we would have a place for questions and then answers can be given individually or put into our FAQ section

A few of the components we were thinking about putting into an "assistance hub" section. Such as the Q and A, Tech Support, Pedagogical assistance, help, etc. We would streamline this to the needs of our users.
Quiz - We thought this would develop later
Meet the Team - N/A
Expert Chat - This would occur during the project. Our ideas would be for Tribal Elder, Content Specialists and other Tribal figureheads to participate. We are thinking 4 chats total, one per week.
Spatial Rep. - Using Google Maps we thought that those participating school could place a marker on there geographical location. Similar (same) to how PolarHusky does it.
Online game - not sure what this would look like. Talked about a couple of ideas but maybe lower on the priority list, Same with "A to Z" as far as priority goes.
Curr. Access - did not think this was necessary

Once we get some of the curricular pieces together we feel like this will drive the Joomla development. We were all encouraged by the game plan and progress. Until next time! B

Grrr

This program drives me nuts! I can't figure out the hierarchy they're got going on. I keep thinking I am putting categories (or sections...not really sure) in the right spots, but apparently they don't work the way I want them too. Please take a look at it and tell me how you'd like it to be different and then Jim will take care of that. :-) Kidding. Sort of.

Jim, we decided a lot this afternoon and Brant is going to recap for us, but for next week please be thinking of some lesson ideas for the following areas: History/geography/culture; math; science (climate and physics, etc); art; construction; technique. We're going to decide on them and then each take one or two to write up.

Allison

Another Joomla Experience

Yesterday (3/1/08), I had quite a day with Joomla. I wanted to get a front page up on the site and ended up screwing up the whole site. I went directly into the HTML of the template and found the main frame and replaced it with a front page. This was obviously a mistake since every link was then sending me to the same frame with my new front page. Since I was unaware of how to get the site to what I wanted, I thought that it would best to return the page to it's original state, but alas, I had erased all of that code and had no idea how to repair it. After much grief and many experiments, my solution was to download the template that was used from its original source and extract the missing code and pasting it back into the template we are currently using. This took me hours to do and the results were that the site was back to its original state, but in the process of trying to find solutions to my dilemma, I learned so much more about Joomla and it's functions. So in retrospect, I would warn: Do not mess with the html code for the template! But I would also encourage everyone to dive in and make mistakes because you will learn a great deal about Joomla that way.

Happy Leap Day!

Today I found that the template was changed to a more accessible format (no Flash). Good job to whoever did that. This will make it possible for us to began adding content and making the site ours. I added links to other sites that contain Snow Snakes information and deleted the Joomla links that were already in that folder. I'm going to continue manipulating the site till someone tells me to slow down. I think next is to get all of the categories we want on the site decided. I'm going to create a list this weekend and send it out to the team for their ideas.

Another Joomla Romp

Joomla isn't that scary anymore. I'm now eager to begin the project. I hope I am not alone in my excitement.

Content

I have three historical articles and one book with another on the way concerning American Indian games and snow snakes. I will bring them on Tuesday. I think another step is to dig up the MN K-12 standards documents so that we can begin to align what we are doing. National Standards would be another resource to find. I will be honest and say that I am not sure where to start with Joomla. On Tuesday I would like to begin to assign specific tasks for each of us so that we can proceed in a more focused manner. Nice work so far with wrestling with Joomla.

Joomla is weird, but I'm getting to like Snowsnake

This week I put some time into learning some Joomla. I was not the one who changed the header to "Company Name", but I like it. I think it ties in well with our theme. Most of what I did was experiment in uploading content. I erased all of this stuff (because it wasnt really relevent to the project), but I did accomplish embedding a You Tube video onto the site. Check it out. I'm not sure if the game depicted in the video is equivalent with the one being used in Northern Minnesota (I'm sure there are variations), but it does a good job in describing the game and showing people playing it.

A few questions did arise:
1. Are we going to call the game "Snow Snakes", "Snow Snake", or "Snowsnakes". I've seen the game entitled all three ways on the net and it would probably be good for our project if we all use the same term. I noticed this blog is entitled "Snow Snakes", so maybe we should just stick with that.
2. Everything I've posted goes into the Blog section on our Joomla site. Even if I assign the sections News or Newsflash, it lands in the Blog section. It might be because I begin with the content manager each time. I'm not sure on that one yet.
3. Joomla Explorer does not run on my computer. Each time I fire it up, it sends me to the logon page. I then logon, but then it takes me back to the Home page of the Administrator sitean d I still can't use Explorer. Anyone have success with this?

That's all I got thus far. I can see many mathematical possibilities for our curriculum and will probably get started on that soon.

Class

I won't be in class this week - I have to go coach my Knowledge Bowl teams to...mediocrity in the conference tournament? Don't tell them I said that.

Jim, does the fancy header that I assume you put in count as some type of media? It's animated! That may be a stretch, but otherwise we need to come up with something.

Snow Snake update and Joomla

Hey crew,
I dug up some gems from around 1909 - 1920 in the American Anthropologist about snow snakes. I will synthesize and report soon (hopefully). On a Joomla note, Aaron mentioned finding some way of presenting media in Joomla. Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on this? I need to find a remedial Joomla class somewhere.

Beginning

Joomla is frustrating!