Jesse Cravens

Building Modern Web Applications and Teams that Deliver

Teaching and Learning TechForum: Austin, Tx - October 27th, 2006

Some of the highlights from my recent visit with educators at the Texas Tech Forum included:

David Warlick:  An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0

:: Pax home page :: || :: Pax Warrior ::

Pax Warrior is a Hybrid New Media product for the educational and training markets that extends the nascent “Interactive Documentary” form to incorporate decision based simulation and collaborative learning tools. It is at the lead of the new genre of “Serious Games”.

There was also quite a bit of a buzz over Linux, primariliy edubuntu. I recently installed edubuntu in my classroom and used it to begin a lesson on operating systems. I would be very excited about an opportunity to use older pcs to build a linux learning lab.

I’m using moodle to manage the Boerne Virtual School, so I took a little time to share my experience with other educators and to invite progrmaming teachers to join our class online.   


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Digett Pays My BCP Class a Visit

Boerne Schools Test the Waters with New Web-based Learning Environment | Digett

My business computer programming class was fortunate to have Mark Figart of Digett as a guest speaker, yesterday. The students are preparing a podcast from the audio recording of the question and answer sessions. The students asked great questions and documented their responses as assignement entries in our Boerne Virtual School Moodle course. We are looking forward to having other speakers from the local Boerne business community.


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iBoerne.com: An Interactive Online Game for Programming Students

iBoerne.com is a mashup of Google maps and Drupal using the drupal gmap module to create virtual competition between teams of students. The teams are: Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. The rules of the game were created to encourage the six member teams to discuss concepts such as project management, virtual teams, workflow, efficiency, and collaboration tools.

Sites Updated With Google Maps

Both sessionswest.com and bajioranch.com received embedded google maps this weekend courtesy of the great drupal gmap module. I’m looking forward to taking this module and getting really creative – the possibilities are endless.

For community websites this module gets really exciting by allowing users that have lat,long information entered to be displayed on a single map so that you can see where in the world all of your users are coming from. The gmap.module also includes functionality to allow users to set their latitude and longitude on a gmap in an interactive fashion.

I am speaking with some of my other clients about incorporating more complex maps such as a historical map of the Tuscarawas River Band’s ‘Full Circle’ tour. For other band’s this may be expressed in a ‘Places we have played” Interactive Map. For non-profits, such as the findingmyvoice.org project – this could be beneficial in providing individuals with disabilites an interactive map of local colleges and universities Disability Services departments.

campustechnology.org

I am beginning to make educators aware of my launch of campustechnology.org .

What is the goal of campustechnology.org?

Campustechnology.org focuses on everything related to 'open education, open content, open systems thinking, open virtual learning environments, and open source instructional tools, and the hardware that promotes an 'open schools' philosophy.

green.campustechnology.org

I also have plans for green.campustechnology.org - which will promote sustainable schools, environmental education initiatives, and all eco-friendly services, products, and programs related to learning environments.