Beyond School

I get a good number of emails from people asking me to plug their book, blog, project, etc, and normally I just delete them (okay, I save the doozies like, “I’d like to give you the opportunity to let me guest-post on your blog” for laughs on blue days).

But this one was hard to delete:

Hi. My name’s Joe Solomon & I’m a blogger and social media consultant for nonprofits (EngageJoe.com). I’m currently helping to spearhead Social Actions Labs (a grant funded, not-for-profit initiative) – where we’re building web applications that help people connect to actionable opportunities across the web.

More specifically, we’re about to launch a revolutionary DonorsChoose.org Wordpress Plugin. You know the WP feature - “Possibly Related Blog Posts”? Imagine “Possibly Related Classroom Projects.” Our plugin will match relevant classroom projects from the DonorsChoose database of 10,000+ projects – and enable you to share them with your readers below your posts.

As a leading education blogger who uses the Wordpress platform, would you be interested in test-driving this Plug-in? We would really appreciate your feedback and are eager to share your blog as one of the first to raise awareness for DonorsChoose projects using this new technology.

We set up a campaign on ThePoint – It would be awesome if you could pledge to test out the plug-in upon launch.

We think this could be *huge* and I hope you’ll make the pledge and help raise awareness of classroom projects that need help across the US.

I checked it out, expressed tentative interest, and then Joe sent me a screenshot of how the plugin would generate causes based on a McCain post I did recently.  Check out the “oops” factor:

Hi Joe,

It’s an interesting idea. I looked at the screenshot, and blast the luck, saw that I would be promoting Abstinence Education donation requests with that post you sampled.

That’s a red flag. Is there a way I can delete any causes for which I’m unsupportive? If so, I’m willing to play.

(Regular readers might remember my Friday Funny post about Abstinence-Only Sex “Education,” and its hilarious tendency to make sodomites of our virginity-obsessed teens - and let’s not even start to talk about the creepiness factor in the incest-tinged “Purity Balls” - no pun intended - these smarmy dads take their daughters to, complete with Hymen Pledges and other whacked insanities. So, um, support Abstinence-Only? Over my dead body.)

But Joe replied:

Hah.  Yes, our algorithm still needs some tweaking.  Many posts we’ve tested have had impressively spot-on results –  from political posts that then recommend projects that help students develop critical thinking skill for the election — to a post about Steve Jobs bout with cancer that then recommends classroom projects that cover the tough issues surrounding cancer.

Currently, though, our developer has added a feature that lets you add “%NORELATED%” and this will remove the classroom projects from your post. [emphasis added]

I hope this answers your question…

It did.

So, without further ado, I’m happy to help classroom projects find funding by matching donors and causes with this plugin. Check this bottom of this post to see how it works.

Oh. My. God. With all the scandalous words on this post, we might get some whacked results. But it’ll be an interesting experiment, and I should be able to delete the links if I don’t like them. We’ll see.

(And for the record, Joe allayed my reservations about any profit motive on his part with this info:

I totally understand about the making money.  Social Actions is a not-for-profit initiative and DonorsChoose.org (which supports this project) is a non-profit as well.  Check out my website to learn more about my work — engagejoe.com.

Finally, the method of using The Point website to encourage the “Collective Action” that Shirky mentions (and many of us have discovered) is so difficult is worth noting itself.  The idea is, you announce a cause campaign there, invite people to commit, and promise not to launch this campaign until X number of people do commit, giving you a “tipping point.”  (I notice Alan Levine of CogDogBlog is the only other e’blogger I know who’s also supporting this particular campaign.)

For more info about the plugin, this is from the WP Plugin page:

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” enables you to share relevant classroom projects from DonorsChoose.org based on the content of your posts.

DonorsChoose.org is where teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn and succeed. Anyone can then choose projects to help bring to life. DonorsChoose.org usually has over 14,000 active proposals.

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” makes it super easy to connect your readers to relevant classroom projects in need of help.

You’ll be amazed at the relevancy of many of these classroom projects to your posts (as well as the awesome and imaginative projects that are happening in classrooms around the US).

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” is a project of Social Actions Labs.

For more info about the WordPress plugin, please see our project page.

For more info. about DonorsChoose.org, please see their Help section.

Okay. I promised, I waited, I tipped. I hope some of you will consider joining the cause.

(Now let’s see if any kinky links turn up about hymens, sodomites, or other whacked “classroom projects.” :P)

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A quickie: A couple weeks ago, I posted about the fatal weakness of RSS readers - their exclusion of a feed’s comments. Derrick Kwa replied with an offer to send me a no longer available WordPress plugin that shows a post’s comments underneath it. Derrick was kind enough to follow through (and by the way, check this post for an amazing example of how hyper-linking saved Derrick from the Singaporean Army and got him an internship with Seth Godin, if I understand it correctly - a literal case of how life-changing writing online can be).

I’ve installed the plugin, and noticed that it works in Google Reader, but not in and Bloglines. I don’t know about other readers.

Here’s how it looks on one of my posts in Google Reader:

–I’m ambivalent about the plugin right now. Is it too inconvenient for readers when the rare post generates 50 or 75 comments? Or is that a price worth paying for elevating the conversations to the higher status they deserve? I lean toward the latter right now.

If you want me to send you the php file, just comment below, and I’ll shoot you the plugin file in an email.

Another option is AideRSS, a Firefox extension that modifies Google Reader in a number of ways. John Larkin was kind enough to share it in the same comment thread. It’s invitation-only, beta, right now, and I haven’t looked into it. But I share the link anyway.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Making the move from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress is one more example of the life-long learning that is the sine qua non of the geek world.

I only add this note for anybody considering doing the same: If you have consolidated your Blogger feeds under Feedburner, you do not need to create a new feed for your new URL (like this beyond-school.org one). Instead, you simply edit your Feedburner feed for your old blog, and past your new URL’s info in one text box. That’s it (I think).

So far, my old Blogger Beyond School still has 220 subscribers or so, while only 70 or so people have subscribed to this new site in the last 12 days or so (and a big thanks to those 70).

So if changing the old Feedburner feed did indeed work, my posts here should pop up in the readers of people who only subscribed to the old “BS.”

Now here’s the rub: I now have two Feedburner feeds for this blog. *Sigh.* Anybody else gone down this road want to suggest a way to gently consolidate everything without losing any new or old subscribers?

Here’s the next issue, for those interested in these complications: redirecting the hyper-links to your old Blogger blog to your new one.

Apparently, Google and other search engines “penalize” people like me who simply imported content from one site to another. “Double-posting” or something like that is a no-no. So I’ve been trying to put a permanent 301 redirect in the Blogger template. It worked on the homepage, but links to any permalink articles cause a minor nuclear meltdown for Firefox browsers, so I undid it.

I’m all ears if anyone knows the trick for a 301 Redirect from Blogger to here that also redirects individual post permalinks.

I’ll stop there. And say (if it worked), “Welcome, old Blogger BS readers.”

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Every week is interesting when you’re launching an all-Apple Laptop high school. This week was no exception.

I run a 40-minute Web 2.0 activity club every Thursday. (That experience, by the way, makes me weep for teachers who teach classes of less than an hour’s duration. I have time for almost nothing in 40 minutes and will, I swear, have a heart attack from the adrenal rush of trying to reach my objectives in that eyeblink of instructional time. We have 77 minute class blocks at my school, which feels just right.)

Last week, our IT Manager configured a Mac Server for class drop-box folders, shared resource folders, and private student folders. We needed to get all 240 students registered on the server - and, oh yeah, their teachers too.

Then some other teachers started asking for a way to train the students in iMovie - everybody and their dog is suddenly using iMovie in the classroom, which raises its own issues. A couple asked me to pull that off.

But the question was, how? How train an entire faculty and student body in the server network, iLife software, and more?

The answer seems wonderful: My Thursday Web 2.0 Club has 23 students. We have our weekly Homeroom during each Friday’s club time - and we have 22 homerooms. You see it: one student is available to teach each homeroom in a weekly cycle. Here’s how it looks on Bubbl.us* (thanks to Patrick Higgins for the Twitter tip about this tool):

[bubbl]http://bubbl.us/view.php?sid=49550&pw=yaVWC.w6Lr12UMzJlY3ladE5ZSFBQLg;500;400;Tech Training;100[/bubbl]

Today was our first run-through, and by all accounts, the students did a great job. Next week they’ll walk through the first “Cutting the Crap from Student Movies” video.

I think we’ve found our system here. And a way to give students experience as presenters and trainers. Pretty cool.

*WordPress users: Bubbl.us requires a WordPress Plugin. I installed it here on WP 2.3, and it works fine.

For more on staff technology development, see these articles:

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S’rite. I be stylin’ my thang.

I’ve been adding plugins to my new self-hosted WordPress site like a drunk three-year old. Some work, some don’t, some gum up the whole works and inspire flights of colorful cursing. But it’s all fun, and very powerful, what the WordPress open development community enables with their many plugins (and if you’re using 2.3, this list of compatible plugins for it is a life-saver). I’m loving it.

So here’s an update of new features: an “archives by tags” page (see top navigation bar) that lists every post I’ve written (including all of the old Blogger posts, which I imported with a single button-push on WordPress 2.3) and, get this: organizes them by tags, in ascending order. That’s powerful. (You can get the plugin yourself via the link at the bottom of that page.)

I’ve also added a page called “hosting wordpress” that has four screencast tutorials that drag any masochists out there down the brambly path of my own trial-and-error (but ultimately successful) install of WordPress 2.3 on Powweb. You can do it too, for a few dollars a month. Then you’re free to add your own plugins, new themes (and see this list of 2.3-compatible WP themes to save yourself heartache), and all that to your heart’s content. It feels incredibly creative. Beware addiction.

The last page, so far, is a “Teaching Gallery” page. It has short descriptions, movies, and links to my own attempts to create 21st century projects in my school. So far, an overview of Project Global Cooling, the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki and blog, the Broken World wiki history textbook (student-created) and blog, and our current modern translation of King Lear, mafia style, on a wiki at King Lear Street Talk.

I’ll be adding more. Hope some of you feed-readers will drop in and poke around, leave comments and suggestions, questions, whatever.

Thanks to all who have stuck with me as I’ve switched horses.

For more posts on creativity, see

Photo Credit: “Pink is his color” by stgermh

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)