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

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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

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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.

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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.

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Today we are going to start planning and designing our custom keyboard and mouse mods. In this project we will be transforming regular run of the mill keyboards and mice into customized works of art. Bellow I will out line the resources at your disposal, then you will be expected to plan and design you project.

Here are the basic resources we will start with in planning our keyboard:

Keyboard: Basic computer keyboard, these will have to be cleaned to remove all built up dust and dirt. Some of the keyboards we have also have media controls and additional buttons that may factor into your design.

Mice: Basic track ball serial mice, some have scroll wheel, some have three buttons, most don’t.

Paint: I will be providing primary colors of spray paint to coat your project with, the paint that I am buying is the paint used to cover plastic patio furniture and is only available in darker colour tones. If you plan on doing any detail work with your keyboard you might need to pick up some modelling paint from a hobby supllier. You can always add the detail paint later if you want.

LED’s: I’ve ordered a couple hundred LED’s of various colours, I think we have Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Purple, white, UV, etc. It breaks down to about 8 per person, I might have extras if you mess any up or overload them but be careful with them

Dremels: The school has a few dremels to use, so you can plan on carving in either an engraving into your device or a relief or emboss. Why have someone elses logo on your product when you can have your own. 

Glue guns, saulder, sauldering iron, wire, sand paper: All provided, I’ll have enough to satisfy most resonable needs.

Extras you might want: Its easy to encorporate objects from real life into your models, I’ll show you a couple examples in class. Things like lego, toy cars, ornaments, all make great ideas for potential mods.

What is required of you.

Design Description: Description of your project and outlining all the features.

Design Plan: What are the steps involved in designing your device. List the steps you will use to design your project and the estimated time required for each task.

Supply List: List all required materials you we need an quantity each item (some may just be estimates).

Design Diagram: You will also be required to submit a design drawing of your device. I’m not looking for amazing artwork however being able to read all the features from the diagram is key.

Hope this helps you get started in your planning. I’m very excited to get started on this project.

Mr. Vaughan

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Well I finally got the videos to embed properly on this site, it was fine for embeding youtube videos before but now I have it working so you can embed any video directly into your page. After doing all this I was able to make a tutorial on how to create an video animation out of your sketch up models. Monday in class I will be going through how to embed your sketch up video into your blog, Its really quite easy there are only two steps to consider. Anyways, here is my first of hopefully many new video tutorials. There is a slight clitch in this video,  aparently my computer dosen’t like rendering 3d with sketch up, screen capturing video, and playing a divx movie at the same time, just be patient at the end and you will see the full video it just lagged a bit while I was making it.

Enjoy, 

Mr. Vaughan

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In online communities there are many unexplained customs that are just part of being a good person. Particularly in the blogging and social networking communities, there are many unwritten rules of the Internet. Well I wrote some down.

1. If someone writes an interesting, fun, or educational blog post that you enjoyed take the time to post a comment, they did after all take the time to write it. Even better still, link to their blog or write a post about how much you enjoyed it.
2. If someone writes a meaningful comment on your wall/blog/or site, the proper etiquette is to make an effort to reply to their comment. This rule has various degrees and depends on the comment written, a simple “lol” comment doesn’t need a replay, a “Happy birthday” gets a “thanks,” and information of value or discussion should get a more thought out response. Match your response to the comment given, when in doubt write more.
3. If someone you know pokes you, poke back.  Repeat until one of you dies or gets a “serious” boyfriend/girlfriend and the flirtatious nature of poking could be considered an attempt to home-wreck.
4. If someone you don’t know pokes you, your response is based on how you rank their profile, hot and cool gets an IM, decent gets a poke back (let them come to you), creepy and scary: block sender, ignore all, mark as spam, report abuse; all of the forementioned are fair responses.
5. If you get an invite to a friend’s party or birthday and you can’t make it, be sure to send an elaborate message as to why you can’t make it so they at least know you care enough to send a message and don’t forget to wishing them well on the actual day.
6. Anyone can write “happy birthday” on a wall, people who really care take the extra time to write at least one more personalized sentence. When in doubt make fun of them for getting older.
7. If you use someones plug-in, widget, theme or code the least you can do is give them the credit by leaving the links intact. Afterall, they did go through a lot of effort to bring the function to you.
8. If you find a dead link/photo/error/ or virus on someones site do the right thing and let them know so they can fix the error. Really nice people also suggest possible solutions.
9. If you log on to a public access computer and someone else automatically logged in on a site by mistake, the polite thing to do is log them out and make sure you change the Internet settings so it doesn’t save your password.
10. Check your emails more then once a week, in some industries everyday is ideal but don’t do it too frequently as people will begin to expect that your checking it every second.
11. Tone, body language, expression, and sarcasm are very difficult to read from emails and websites. Mix it up by trying to communicate through webcams, podcasts, telephone, or I don’t know… maybe in person face to face! There is still a lot of value in an actual conversation with someone.
12. Text messages are great!  Sometimes  a phone call can save 30 text messages. Sometimes one text message can save a phone call. Know which to use.

Mr. Vaughan
 Http://www.MrVaughan.com

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For those of you who have incomplete assignments on your progress reports and are wondering exactly which assignments are missing I compiled a list of the assignments and described where you can find the original requirements.

1)Computer Shopper - see post http://mrvaughan.com/mu/blog/2008/09/08/what-computer-should-i-buy/ submit printed report

2) Parts of a Computer (Inside PC) - see post - http://mrvaughan.com/mu/articles/inside-your-pc/ respond in comment section of that page

3)Post - Online Safety see post http://mrvaughan.com/mu/blog/2008/09/17/online-safety/ respond with a post on your site.

4)Post - Sketch Up Description see post http://mrvaughan.com/mu/blog/2008/10/02/sketch-up-votes-are-in/ answer questions on a post on your blog

5)Blog- Installed Plugins - Marks earned for activating and installing additional word press plugins (2 or 3)

6)Post - Inbound Links - Visit another blog or site and leave a comment on their site, your goal is to promote your site and get an inbound link to your site. Make a post on your blog describing your success/failure

7) Alexa - How big is the internet? see post http://mrvaughan.com/mu/blog/2008/09/25/how-big-is-the-internet/ and respond to questions in a blog post on your site.

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On Wednesday Coutice will host the Ajax football team for a home game. As the game is at 1pm, my period 4 class will be covered by a supply or two on call teacher.

Here is what you will need to be working on.

1) At the start of the class the teacher will hand out the your progress reports. For this mark will be somewhat of a shock to most of you as I put the incomplete assignments in as a zero which drags down your mark alot with so few entries in.

2) If you would rather take home a higher mark home with you before parents night, then I will give you out another progress report on thursday with any corrections on it. What you need to do in class is complete some of the assignments that are listed as imcomplete. If the responses are completed and posted on your blog I will see that your blog is updated then I will mark them wednesday night.

3) Students who do not have any imcomplete assignments can be working on their sketch up design projects. (In this assignment students are using a 3d design program to design either a skatepark, their dream home, or a fortress)

There is plenty of work for all the students to be working on, there shouldn’t be any students on youtube or playing any games.

Have a great day.

Mr. Vaughan

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To all of you who didn’t get a chance to be at Clarington Fields on friday night you missed an awesome game for the Cougars Football team. The team celebrated their first win this season (and in a few seasons) against the St. Stevens Royals. The final score was 32 for the Cougars and 15 for the Royals. Points were scored by Tyler Cook with 3 touch downs and a 2 point conversion, Troy Jowitt with a touch down, and Alex Boatman with a touch down.  Awesome efforts were made by the whole team to earn this victory, everyone really stepped up to their positions.

Thanks sooo much to all the parents and fans for their continued support all season.

Come see the Cougars at home to battle a strong Ajax team at 1pm wednesday this week for their fourth game.

Mr. Vaughan

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