The trials, tribulations, successes & epic fails of a North Devon Schools Web Designer.

Posts in category News

App V2.1 Pt 2 Beta Testing

Apr19
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

Now got a working version of the ‘News App’ available for Beta Testing which some of our staff have very kindly volunteered to do for me.
If you would like to help with feedback or ideas just follow the links below & then let me know about the ‘experience’.

iPhone/iPad -
http://ibuildapp.com/app-227424-BCO+News
(Browse to the link on your device & follow the instructions)

Android -
https://ibuildapp.com/projects.php?action=info&projectid=400830
(Browse to the link & click the download app button)

More soon – Happy Blogging!

Posted in Android, Beta Testing, Design, Developments, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, Mobile Devices, Staff Feedback

Well….That Was Interesting…NOT

Mar06
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

Crikey! Some weeks circumstances just seem to conspire to make things…..tricky shall we say.
Came into work first thing Monday morning, switched on my very carefully cared for &  loved PC and was startled to discover everything and I mean EVERYTHING that was stored on the machine locally had vanished!
Gone.
Disappeared.
Existent no more.
Deceased.
Deleted.
Thank heavens for backups & recovery software that’s all I can say. (Check out the fantastic ‘Recuva‘ program if you’re interested – Thanks Mr T for the tip)
Investigations are still underway as to why it actually happened and malicious/viral infection were quickly ruled out.

Strange how ghosts in the machine suddenly chuck even the most carefully looked after kit a curve ball once in a while. Still baffled as to the cause but suffice to say it wasn’t the start to the week I was hoping for!

Posted in Erm...Umm..., Stress

RSS Powered Blast Of Inspiration

Sep14
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

For quite sometime it’s been our intention to bring our student morning sheet online & out from the cold of being trapped in a word document.
(We’ve been running an online submission form for ages but the end result has been firmly locked in the dark ages.)
The other morning I was walking down a corridor & saw that the tutor was displaying the word doc on their whiteboard. (I think I’d previously subconsciously assumed that they would just read it out to students when it landed in their inbox as an attachment to a mail) Good idea I thought but then was struck with a painfully obvious hammer blow that surely there was a better way to do just that.

The trouble as I saw it was that in order for the member of staff to do that simple task they had to click a link on their homepage, log into their mail, find the morning sheet e-mail amongst everything else, open the attachment in word and then show it on the I.W. whiteboard. They then had to find the relevant section amongst all the other info for their tutor group.

The solution came in a rush of inspiration over a few hours yesterday morning & I’ve developed a solution appears in the guise of a dynamically tabbed Frog page that displays a series of RSS feeds generated via Jitbit’s excellent RSS Feed Creator (A major bargain for only £20)
Each tab just shows the relevant info for that specific year group as well as having tabs that display feeds from some of our WordPress powered blogs. Now the staff member will only have to click on a single link on their homepage to get to the information. For me the fundamentally important thing is that the info is now dynamic and can also be pushed in a wide range of directions to things like the Student Homepage, Year group specific Frog Home Pages, Digital Signage, Parent Portals etc etc etc. If you want a sneaky peek there’s a Beta test demo running here.

We’ll be running some full trials shortly & I’ll post an update as & when but I’m confident that finally we’ve come up with a solution that works and is a big step forward in the right direction.
initial feedback from those managing the current system has been extremely positive and I’m looking forward to presenting it to staff soon.

Posted in Amazing, Design, Developments, Kinda Cool, Online Tools, Resources

New Newsletter News

Mar29
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

The online version of the College newsletter has always been a bit of a pain for me (in terms of it’s just re-inventing the wheel each time it’s published)
Rather than having an uber dull pdf download I’ve always, up until today that is, hand cranked an HTML version. In an effort to streamline my heavy work flow it’s now been WordPress ganged into a new, quicker to publish format. Check it out right here

Posted in Blogs & Blogging, Design, Developments, WordPress

September Preview

Jul01
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

september_09

First off let me say I am NOT wishing the summer away not now that we actually seem to be having one, I just wanted to give the heads up about some significant changes to our online presence starting  in September. Those of you with memories the size of a planet may well remember the ‘Is Black the new Purple’ post from way back in March, well since then I’ve been beavering away on the project to regenerate the three key areas of web access. Kick started by the desire of SMT to have a less news heavy front page the simple face-lift became an opportunity to do a lot of things I’d been mulling over for quite some time. So jumping to the finishing line & bypassing all the dull detail, come September, we now have a new look Bideford College Online Homepage, a brand new dedicated news blog & an entirely new WordPress powered student homepage. For me the key factor in the development of all three is the ability to share their respective RSS news feeds, a bit of joined up thinking & connectivity. The big bonus (I hope & pray anyway) will be the ability for the majorityof staff to contribute to these areas rather than use me as the conduit for all content as has been the way for a lot of things since the beginning of BCO. Anyway, there is still more testing to be done & the all important promotion & enthusing about but I’m confident I’m heading in the right direction. Talking of heading in the right direction I’m just about to head off to the beach with the Junior Surf Academy. It’s a rotten job sometimes.

Posted in Blogs & Blogging, Developments, Future Dev, WordPress

Summer Science & Family Fun Day

Jun23
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

summer science day

As a Specialist Science College one of our annual community events is the Summer Science & Family Funday.
This year I was there with staff & students from the STEMNET  ‘Skateboard Project’. Having been closely involved with the project since last year it was a great opportunity to show off all the students hard work. They designed, built & decorated,  from scratch, longboard skateboards but also looked very closely at the science & engineering  behind the technology that we used during the course of the project. The great crowd pleaser turned out to be not the skateboards themselves but the ‘Magic Levitating Beach Ball’. It’s a brilliant way to demonstrate the venturi effect, a scientific principle that all spray paint guns utilise. Once again my perennial favorite, informal learning, was a big part of the project & feedback from the public was extremely positive. We are currently planning to run another project for the next cohort starting in October this year.

Happy Blogging

Stu

Posted in General, Presentations

My Kind Of Classroom

Jun19
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

classroom
History in action @ Tintagel Castle

It was my pleasure this week to be asked to accompany staff from the History department on a trip with Year 7 students to Tintagel as official photographer.
The visit comprised of two sessions with the first looking at how the village of  Tintagel currently utilises the myth & legend to it’s advantage.
With the second exploring the myths, legends & archaeological evidence that support the story of King Arthur’s involvement with Tintagel Castle.
Once again the informal learning environment came up trumps with the help of an excellent guide & story teller plus some good weather. I even learnt loads I didn’t know.
It’s been a while since I’d been down to “Tinnytangel” & it struck me that the castle is still a fascinating place to visit full of powerful & evocative imagery. I almost felt 12 again!
Hopefully we might be able to put together a resource similar to the one we created for Okehampton Castle a couple of years ago.

Happy blogging
Stu

New Hearing Support Homepages & Blog

Jun15
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

hsc

Just about to go live are the new site pages & blog for the Hearing Support Center at the College.
Working closely with the HSC team we have come up with a pair of new, bright &  visually linked web homes that tick all the right boxes.
Just waiting on the HSC team photos & we should be able to get this particular bird of the ground PDQ .
The biggest developmental problem was wanting to use the ‘lightbox’ script  as well as our site-wide menu, coupled with Dreamweaver templates throwing their toys out of the cot.
Our slightly ageing  javascripts that power the site-wide menus get all grumpy with current Doc types & refuse to play ball. Firefox was also being a bit of a mardy teenager when it came to running lightbox from a hotspot without the doctype. (Unusual for FF as it’s normally impeccably well behaved)
After an entire day of frustrating trial & error I finally cracked it, but I’m willing to admit  it’s not 100% pretty, coding wise, but ….hey! It does the job.
Anyhoo will keep you posted as to when it goes live.

Happy blogging.
Stu

Posted in Blogs & Blogging, Developments, WordPress

Yum

Jun04
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

heab

Hot off the press today the ‘Healthy Eating @ Bideford’ Blog. A new project to allow our Catering Manager to publicise new Menu’s, Recipes, Specials, Offers etc.
Rolling out as part of the larger Healthy Schools Initiative.   It was hard trying to think up a title for the blog that didn’t include words like ‘Canteen’ or ‘Kitchen’ which have that slightly ‘Greasy spoon’ feel about them. Between Rosie, the catering manager, & myself we hit upon ‘Healthy Eating @ Bideford’ idea so that’s what it’s become. (The more astute observers will notice that I’d thoughtlessly named the root directory ‘Canteen’ a couple of dayss before I did the install. DOH!) As usual had fun tweaking the theme and making it look a bit funkier.  It will link directly from the Students Homepages & will hopefully be a focus for a growing range of healthy eating/living issues. I’ll let you know when it’s live & ready to rumble.

Posted in Blogs & Blogging, Developments, Future Dev

Certificate Presentations

May20
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Stuart

dscf9755

It’s not everyday that I get the opportunity to fill in for a member of SMT but today I was more than happy to present certificates for the successful completion of the first STEMNET club that we have run at the college this past term. The Science Technology Engineering & Maths initiative is a country wide scheme to encourage students to take part in after school clubs with a Science & Technology bias. After a trip last week up to Bristol to meet up with project co-ordinators & other schools taking part in STEMNET, we were really chuffed with the very positive feedback we received. Ten of our students built Skateboards from scratch over a period of 14 weeks. You can find out loads more about the project here on the club blog. Students will displaying the fruits of their labours at the forthcoming Goldcoast Oceanfest in June.

Posted in Blogs & Blogging, Inspirational
« Older Entries

Subscribe


 

About BCO WebDev

BCO WebDev
I've worked at the College for 15 years now, initially as a music dept' techie & then as a resource technician.
A significant amount of time since then was spent as an I.T Techie then 5 years or so ago I was promoted to the dizzy heights of "Web Developer & Curriculum Resources Technician".
Currently I design, develop & manage virtually all of the College's web presence, am closely involved in the continued development of our Frog powered learning platform as well as creating mountains of stuff in Photoshop/Dreamweaver for all sorts of departmental resources.
I'm a commited blogger, surf & skate fanatic & groove loving bass player.
When not doing all that I still find time to run 10K once in a while, take photos, make Skateboards in an after school club & then collapse in a heap @ the end of the day.
I harboured ambitions to be a helicopter pilot when I was young.
Check the About Page for more stuff & nonsense.

A peek inside my mind

Instagrams

Lucky you…

you are blog visitor number: Currently there are: visitors reading this blog.

My Right Eye

My Right Eye

Spiders Eye View

Macroscoping

Random Visions

Stupix (18).jpg

Archive

Posts by date:

June 2013
M T W T F S S
« May    
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Disclaimer

BCO WebDev The views expressed on this blog are strictly those of the author and no other. Devon County Council & Bideford College cannot be held responsible for any comments, statements or views expressed by author. Every effort is made to ensure that the information provided on these pages is accurate and up to date, but no legal responsibility is accepted for any errors, omissions or misleading statements. Please have a nice, peaceful & non confrontational day.
Back to Top