Now that you’ve had some experience using the blogging systems along with installing plug-ins and features, it is time to start blogging with more of a purpose.

Your job will be to develop a professional blog. Keep in mind the difference from a professional blog and a regular blog as we have discussed in class. This blog should be focused on providing value to your readers and providing a service to them. In exchange for their loyalty they would support you by taking action on your recomendations.

In your blog I am expecting that you produce the following:

1) Produce at least 2 reviews of services or products related to the interests of your users.

2) Produce at least 2 educational posts for your users where you either instruct them on how to do something of value or provide them with addittional information related to your topic or the users interests

3) Produce at least 2 Opinion Posts where you are voicing your unique opinion on current issues in your chosen field of topics.

4) Produce at least 2 News related posts where you are sharing a story or information on current events, products, or issues related to your topic.

5) Additional you will need to include at least 3 articles related to your topic from external sources, be sure to properly reference your source by providing a direct link to the original article.

6) At least 3 Videos discussing various topics related to your blog.

Throughout the development of your site we will also be disscussing various marketing strategies, as these come up you will also need to complete some of the tasks to advertise your blog to the world. More information on this will be posted as we discuss it.

Addittionally we will also developing a means in which to hook your users, or have them call to action with your site. I will be showing you throughout this course how to set up a newletter to collect emails of your visitors.

[Read more →]

Time to harness your abilities in photoshop to develop magnificent pieces of art. For this assignment you will be working with an absolutely beautiful subject in photography, yourselves. In this project you wil be producing your very own modelling head shots. You can use this opportunity to accent your best physical features, or create a complete alteration of yourself. You can sharpen the colours in your eyes, change your hair colour, apply awesome make up, add years to your image, add a tatoo or a crazy scar.

To accomplish this assignment there are a number of steps you will need to follow. It will be important to save various versions of your assignment so that you can demonstrate your modifications and track your progress.

1) FIrst we will need the images to work with. On Tuesday and wednesday of this week will be doing the photoshoot. Come prepared with your smiles and glowing personailities. For these images we will be taking extreme close ups in high resolution under a controlled lighting environment.

2) Once you get your hands on the image the first thing to do is perform opperations on the whole image to correct for things like lighting, focus, dust, skratches, and minor imperfections. After you have completed the global corrections save an extra copy of the file named verions 1 and continue working on the original file.

3) Now that you have a decent high quality image to work with it is time to decide which parts of the image you would like to improve. There are all kinds of pieces you can enhance you just have to decide how indepth you want to commit to your image. The more effort you put in the better a result you will get. Here you can enhance your eyes, soften your skin, apply makup, put on lipstick, change your hair colour, add facial, or any other of collection of features that we will be discussing in class. Your are only limited by your creativity. After each feature that you work save a new version of your file (2,3,4…52) so you can track your progress.

4) Once you have complete all your modification you will need to produce a story board explaining the steps of your complete tranformation complete with each version of the file you created. You may choose to use your blog for this, photoshop, or a word processing application. As the assigments progress I will be giving more information on what I am expecting for this step.

Glad to have all of you back with the New Year.

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

After our discussion and demonstration yesterday on improving skin inperfections I thought I would investigate more methods of enhance an image with respect to photographs of people.

Bellow I found  a site that offers complete tutorials on every aspect of a applying digital make up to a persons image and even some really cool special effects that can be added.

If you have access to a computer with photoshop over the holiday break you might consider trying these out as I am thinking of turing these tutorials into our next photography assignment.

So check this link out and try out some of the tutorials :http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-blog/2007/05/15/a-complete-guide-to-digital-makeover-in-photoshop/

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

On the Internet right now there are literally thousands upon thousands of photoshop tutorials, I would go so far as to even say millions of tutorials. The tutorials on the internet range in difficulty from very basic to very very difficult. Some can take you just a few minutes others can take hours and hours and still not have the right results.  I’ve outlined a few tutorials here for you to try some even relate to the holiday cards we are currently designing in class.

This tutorial shows you completely how to use the pen tool to draw shapes and curves then transform them into a greeting card http://www.pstut.com/tutorial-christmas-card.html

The following site claims to be for beginners, they genuninely have some easy tutorials to get you started in all areas of design, these are particularly nice as some of them even have videos stepping you through the process. http://psdtuts.com/articles/web/50-great-photoshop-tutorials-for-clever-beginners/

Addittionally if you are looking specifically for text effects check this one out. Most are pretty easy but some are a little difficult or for older versions of photoshop. http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-blog/2007/07/22/the-best-80-photoshop-text-effects-on-the-web/ I had trouble however loading the page in IE6 on the schools computer so this might be one to try from home rather then school.

If your looking for cool backgrounds to go with your flashy text check this site out for a decent collection of background tutorials. http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-tutorials/Textures-and-backgrounds/Most-popular/1/

If you find any other interesting tutorials that are great for beginers feel free to post them here aswell.

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

Students in the afternoon section of TTI 1O1 will begin creating their blogs today!!!! Please have your blog plans and diagrams finished before you begin your blog. You can start by creating a post and choosing a theme, then you may also try and create a page describing your blog to the world and what topics you will be discussing.

I’m very eager to read your blogs.

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

Upon completion of your keyboards, please submit to me a written reflection of your project.

Things to include in your reflection:

Describe your keyboard and what you did to achieve your result, explain its features and flaws.

What where the challenges of this project?

How did you overcome these challenges?

What would you do differently if doing this assignment again?

How could you have improved your project?

Write this up as a one page summary of your keyboard and hand it to me so that it can contribute to your mark for this project.

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

I hate to discriminate against all forms of communication but due to a high number of blog sign ups and comments that are completely bogus, I had to make MrVaughan.com an exclusive site for humans only, my appologies to all the computers bots, programs, and aliens out there who were accessing my site quite frequently however the amount of garbage they were sending was absurd and taking away from the site. With that being said if you are a computer bot and would like to crawl my site for information you are more then welcome to however you are not permitted to post anything or sign up for an account.

To resolve this issue there were a number of steps I took, first I tightened up my commenting policy now users have to be logged in and registers to post a comment. Second I added a plugin to add a picture file of text that users have to type in  before logging in, this is know as a captcha. Previously I was just banning all IPs that post garbage accept then they would just jump to a new IP via proxy and continue to cause a disruption.

If anyone has any additional advice they can give, I’d be very interested in hearing it.

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

New at MrVaughan.com is the ability for students to receive sms text message updates on classroom activities directly to their cell phones. Students, parents, and individuals interested in following the courses can opt in for updates directly to their phones by subscribing to the mailing list. It should be noted that standard text messaging rates do apply as standard with your carrier, check with your carrier if you have any concerns on the price. By no means will any content delivered to your cell phone be mandatory for success in any of the courses, there will however be many messages to provide more resourses and value for all users.

Basically I plan on using the sms network to send you cool stuff you would probably be interested in anyways or quick little updates about the site or courses that I am teaching.

Over the next month I will be adding more canadian carrier networks that users might have, for now I just added Bell and Roges. I really believe as educators that we need to find ways to integrate newer technologies into our classroom rather then shut them out. Specifically for the time being no messages will be sent during school time as to not conflict with current cell phone policies.

There once was a time when calculators were band from schools, now their required.

Mr. Vaughan

[Read more →]

Despite my many efforts to educate students on respectfull and appropriate ways of blogging and what can and can’t be put online it continues to be a reaccurring problem. I decided to make a video post concerning the issue.

[Read more →]

It’s been about a month now since I installed and converted to Wordpress Mu on my server. I thought I would take this opportunity to document my progress and to give people a bit of an insight into what is required to get a site up and running. Hopefully if you are considering developing a site with Mu, this will help ease any worries you might have.

In January of 2008 I decided that I was going to start a website. I’ve picked up a few contracts before in the past to design other peoples’ website but it’s hard to be credible in web development without a website. As a high school computer science teacher, I decided that I would make a blog that all my students could interact with and access all the information they would need to stay up to date with all my courses. Simple enough - Wordpress was the obvious choice. I went out and found a web hosting company with Cpanel and Wordpress support (not necessary but really helpful). My only advice is to shop around for one with the best support and service.

The first six months went really well; my students were posting comments and checking the site daily. Engaged students - what more could I want? This year in September however, I decided that I wanted to up the ante; I decided that I wanted to teach students some internet and web development techniques through blogging. They would each need their own blogs. My options were to either give them each an ftp account on my server (and some DB access), have them each install Wordpress, or investigate Mu.

In September I installed Mu on my server, in addition to my existing Wordpress install. I was effectively running two blogs, one for myself on Wordpress where my students could login to post comments, and another I called the students section where they had to use a separate login to access and create their blogs. Mu was pretty easy to install, I had it up and running in a couple hours. I quickly installed over 100 themes and a whole whack of plug-ins to satisfy my students’ needs for individuality (of course, at least 10 of them all chose the same theme with the flames on the side).  

Problems

1)The main landing page for the students section was my first problem.  The only theme that is really available (that I could find) with Mu functions is the basic Wordpress theme that everyone starts Wordpress with. This theme was modified to display a list of all the blogs on the system in order of the most recently updated blog. 

2)My second problem was that users had to keep two different user names and passwords in order to effectively use the site. What I really wanted was to integrate these two systems into one landing page for my site that would show my blog and still be able to showcase my students’ blogs.

How I Resolved These Problems

1)My first step was to install my selected (and customized) Wordpress theme on Mu and select it for my students’ section blog.

2)I also had to export all the posts from my Wordpress blog and bring them into my Mu students’ section blog (this is actually really easy and painless to do from the manage section of the blog). After setting up the widgets and plug-ins the same as the other site, I essentially took over the students section with my Wordpress blog.  This resolved students having to use two separate logins.

3)To showcase my students blogs on my landing page, I had to customize my theme some more to get the students content on it. Wordpress Mu produces a couple site-wide feeds that combine all blog posts/comments/ etc.  To get this on my page I used the already installed RSS widget that comes with Wordpress to display the most recent 5 post on one of my sidebars displaying the side-wide feed. Side-note: as a teacher I also monitor the comments feed pretty regularly.

4)I also wanted to display a list of most of the blogs on my site. To do this I took a basic search widget and gutted it and pasted in the code from the original Mu theme that had the list of the most recently updated blogs.

Benefits of Mu

For me, Wordpress Mu has given me ways to educate my students on a wide range of topics online in a more controlled environment. Mu is excellent for any group of people or organization to collaborate on a small or large scale. It enables the creation of a social network of bloggers focused very narrowly on a specific topic or broadly on a wide range of fields. As an administrator, Wordpress Mu’s tools provide me with a valuable reach into all facets of the network. I can easily login to any of my students’ blogs and edit comments or posts, reset passwords, blog spam. I even installed a custom widget that swaps inappropriate words with more school appropriate terms.

Future

As my blog develops I am always looking for ways to create more value for my users (students). Part of this plan involves how my users will interact with Mu; for me this means developing more ways for them to interact with each other and the rest of the internet through my website. As the blog progresses I plan on researching / developing new applications of Mu.  I would love to see some plug-ins designed specifically for the Mu main landing page that highlight and showcase all the blogs and users on the system. Website visitors should be able to quickly and effortlessly navigate through the whole collection of blogs, vote and peer review each others’ blogs, communicate and share ideas on a network wide level. If you are already using or know of any such plug-ins that work with Mu be sure to share them with the rest of us, as I develop more programs I’ll do the same.

Is it right for you?

I would say that if you’ve been comfortable modifying or customizing themes in Wordpress at all, you’re probably qualified enough to try customizing Mu. From my experience, most all of the API is pretty much the same, with the exception that there are some extra functions for Mu that I still have to discover more of. If you are concerned that Mu might be too complex to manage with your experience at this time then my advice would be to stick with Wordpress for a bit longer and install Mu on a testing server or in another directory on your web server just to play around with it for a bit.  There is no cost to try it out, and in the meantime try and learn more about the Wordpress API by building your own plug-ins or customizing the themes.

I think it would be great if as a community we could work to customize and develop some more themes that are designed to take full advantage of the capabilities of Mu. I’ve looked all over and haven’t really been able to find any. Over-time if we could do this it would be easier for more people to get started with Mu.

[Read more →]