Saturday, November 17, 2007

Webpage designers - COLOR helpers

A few fun pages to help you pick your colors for your website... The following plus a few more can be found on my website's Color Resources page.

Website Color Picker: "...will help you evaluate color combinations quickly and easily. It works equally well on MacOS or Windows. ...You can experiment with different colors for BGCOLOR, TEXT color, LINK color and VLINK color. ...click a color swatch in the appropriate section of the left window and see the color applied immediately to the chosen attribute in the right window."

Color Blender: Another visual color-code-producing site. This one lets you select 2 colors from color swatches, then blend the two in however many steps you specify. It's a Creative Commons share site, so you can copy the source code to have the Color Blender page handy on your own hard drive.

Color Schemer / Design in Harmony: My recent LVSOnline teacher says, "This is one of my favorites. You can use it on the web for free and you download any of the hundreds of color schemes posted there. The software available for purchase is really nice in terms of flexibility and power. It has a 15 day free trial."

Monday, November 12, 2007

Instructional design resources

From U. of Texas, a page of commented links to resource sites.

Teaching With Technology Tutorials

Examining Technology from an Educator's Perspective: "Tips for making the most of technology in your classroom, school, and district. We show you constructive and practical applications of technology."

Integrating Technology | Scholastic.com

Sections on the site include integrating technology, best practices, and links to additional technology resources. Topics are for K-12 and include Arts, Early Learning, Foreign Language & ESL, Health & Safety, Math, Professional Development, Reading & Language Arts, Research Skills, Science, Social Studies.

CSS Type.com

Generate CSS code visually. Create a box of type using their online element selectors, including font, size, color, etc. See your selection results right on screen. Then click to generate the CSS code for it.

Friday, November 2, 2007

ETUG 2007 Fall workshop

I attended the ETUG 2007 fall workshop on November The theme this year was "Web 2.0 – Educational Whats, Whys & Hows" As always, it was great to meet up with people from around the province who are involved in education technology. There was plenty of time for networking which is often the best part.

Gina Bennett, ETUG Steering Committee chair, gave an interesting presentation that forced everyone to think back to the pre WWW days. It was a great example of interactive presentation. I'll see if I can get my hands on it.

Steve Dotto was, as always, very entertaining. He pointed out that what can technology do for us is pretty obvious. But what will it do TO us? He told a story about fishing for trout at Dragon Lake, and being able to take some time out from catching to the big biologically enhanced trout to do a quick web conference with some folks in the east. It was a nice illustration how it's really about how we decide to allow it to change our lives. If he didn't have the blackberry would be sitting at the office instead of fishing.

Steve also asked: Are social networking tools making a difference? Don't look at statistics, look at diversity and the numbers for what they are. YouTube for example has HUGE numbers of people sharing work. That has to be good.

He also told us that if we didn't have a Facebook account we should get one. So I took that as a cue to create an ETUG group in Facebook, to see how it might help us to stay connected.

John Maxwell from Simon Fraser University did an excellent presentation: Wiki: Software for Communities of Inquiry. His main take home message is that this form of publishing places less emphasis on content and more on participation.

If I didn't spend so much time yakking at ETUG I probably would have taken more notes!