2015-16 #3) Thing 7: DIY - You pick

This is my first year as a full time system administrator for our school district's eLearning online learning platform.  There are two of us who manage it, one is a teacher (me) and the other is a project administrator with no teaching experience, so between the 2 of us we cover all the needs from teaching to data reporting, etc.  We use a Learning Management System (LMS) from a company called Agilix.  We have previously used their product called BrainHoney, but are in the process of moving to their newer product called Buzz.  Apparently they like bees! :)

We use the platform for many programs - Online Credit Recovery (OCR), Virtual AP (VAP), Virtual Initial Credit (VC),  Online Professional Development (PD) for staff, and an online district resource area for staff.  We have created all of our own PD courses and resources for staff, but purchase courses from various companies to use for our VAP and OCR courses.  Last year we developed our own initial credit courses for American Sign Language (ASL) I and II as well as a SS elective called Abnormal Psychology through Film.  At the time that those 3 courses were developed we had a different system administrator, so I was not the one who worked on developing these courses with the teachers.  

This year we were approved to develop 2 additional VC courses - Literature through Film and Computer Programming I.  Since I am now the teacher system administrator, it is up to me to work with the two teachers who were approved to create them; they bring the content, I bring the technology!  We have learned from experience that the best way to develop the courses it to mirror what the companies do - they create web-based content housed on our own servers and then embed links to that content. This way, if we were to ever change our LMS, there would be nothing lost as everything for the course would still be on our servers and we could easily recreate the links in any LMS we have.  

This involves writing entire courses in HTML code and this is not something I have ever done.  A good amount of managing our LMS involves code, but it is really just editing code that is already there, so in this past year I have learned to read and make small edits to HTML code, but I have never created it all from scratch!  In my “previous life” I was a math teacher, so I never took any courses in college related to anything like this!  This was all new territory for me, but something I really looked forward to doing!  

At first I thought I could just copy the code from the previous courses that we already had, but in working with them this year we have realized that there are several errors in the code that we have had had to find and fix throughout the year so I decided we should start from scratch and make better/cleaner code that wouldn’t have issues all the time.  

I knew I need to take some time to learn much more than I already know about code, so I came to my Cool Tools to see if there was a lesson that would help me.  Last year, I completed the lesson 11 about coding, and what I did for that lesson really helped me in learning to read and edit code, but it was nowhere near advanced enough for what I was about to take on.  I needed to learn more and fast!  I didn’t see another lesson that I thought would fit the bill, so I decided to conquer it on my own with a DIY lesson.  I love DIY home decorating projects, so why not here, right?!

To get started, I did use what I learned from my coding lesson last year and went to check out some Lynda.com courses through the NYPL for free!  That and I hit the internet hard to research this.  I also spent some time reading material form the companies we have purchased pre-packaged courses from.  This all took a lot of time, but luckily I was able to get a base knowledge.  I started creating some template lesson pages and a custom CSS file to go along with them to provide style to our websites.  Once I started I then reached out to a friend in our IT department who deals with code everyday to ask him to take a look at what I had created and he told me I shouldn’t be starting from scratch.  He pointed me in the direction of Twitter!  Apparently the people who developed twitter also developed a website, http://getbootstrap.com/, and it helps you write HTML code and create the CSS style sheets to go along with it. You can download templates to start with, then customize from there.  

Bootstrap has been amazing!  I have since worked with him to develop some basic templates and then we started meeting with the the teacher developing the Literature to Film class.  We met with him for a few hours, and now we are off and running!  We are by NO means experts, but with his help, the use of the bootstrap website, and honestly Google (I can’t tell you how many time I have googled “how to ___ in HTML” or “how to ___ in CSS”), we are beginning to get the hang of this!  We have currently developed the first 2 modules for her course that will eventually have 11.  While she continues to work on her course, I am now working to take some of her pages to create templates for other teachers who can then use them, but edit the content as well as basics of the style, such as color and font.  We will make templates for a variety of pages - 2 tabs, 3 tabs, pages with tables, pages with bulleted lists; pretty much everything we can think of that teachers would want to have.  Before we did this, I verified with our friend from IT that what we had created was well written, clean HTML code so that we would not run into problems in the future.  

I have really enjoyed doing all of this.  I love to learn new things, and this was by far one of the most fun yet difficult things I have learned in a long time!

Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think!   Here is the link to the first “lesson” of her course.  The first module is obviously an introductory module.  

http://elearning.rcsdk12.org/Courses/LitFilm/Lessons/01.00Lesson.html