Teach42

There’s a few blogs that I consider the ‘dessert’ of every bloglines session. If I find that there’s new posts there, I save them until the end of the visit. Alan’s Cogdogblog is one of those. Today he posted up a DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker. Basically, it’s a way to kill two birds with one stone. I created my own custom bookmarklet based on his original article on the subject. Since I didn’t need all four of his tools, I took a look at his code and chopped it up for my own purposes. I blogged about it to spread the word. I think I may have even mentioned it in a Podcast. However, the reality is taking a look at a piece of code and customizing it appropriately is beyond the scope of most teachers’ knowledge. What I should have done was make some easy instructions for teachers on how to do it themselves, maybe even posted up my code so that they could just copy and paste it. A few screenshots, perhaps a video, and I would have had a real service for teachers instead of something to brag about.

In today’s post Alan created a little web form that will actually create the bookmarklet for you. I don’t know how he created it, but that’s a skill that I need to learn. It’s not enough to simply point out things to people, because the reality is that most teachers I’m hoping to help out and support aren’t geeks. They don’t want to look at code. They want results. And who can blame them? Certainly not I. One of my priorities here is to make things easier for people. To make it so that they can take advantage of what’s out there without a huge learning curve.

So I think it’s time that I start teaching myself some PHP, or SQL, or ASP or whatever it is that people use to create pages like that. And particularly for this blog, to try to keep the end user in mind. I want this site to be more than a journal for me, I want it to be an asset to the reader. Hopefully in time it will be. Gotta have goals, right?

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI