This week, I’ve been updating and changing some of the software that makes OEKS work. If anyone is curious about the guts that make this work, I’ll be happy to show you. But, I think most people just want to know what works differently.

So….

First, the site looks different. The color up at the top is to match Obirin logo colors. The fonts are a bit different. Some things are larger or smaller to try and fit a lot of information on one screen. There is a little pencil image, just like on Moodle, to click for editing. If you think the font is too small, just use the “increase font size” on your browser. In Firefox, click View — Text Size — Increase. I hope the new design is a bit less drab.

Second, The old page called Tags has been moved and is called Archives. There is still a Tag cloud with more popular Tags bigger and less commonly used Tags smaller. there is also a Search box there.

Third, when you Write a post, there is now a drop down menu to select Tags that have already been used. You can still type in Tags directly, but if you want some help, just click the menu and choose some Tags that are already on the site.

That is all for now. There will not be anymore changes during the next month or so. If you have any suggestions for things you would like to see on the site in the future, please just comment below, or send me an email message.

Thanks,

Ted

It is never a good time to make changes or updates to a website that people use. You may just feel like you are getting used to things as they are, but OEKS could be much more useful and simpler. Especially, look for easier to use Tags and Search coming soon.

Now that the term is over and nobody needs to rely on this site for daily downloads of curriculum materials, I’m going to try to spruce things up a bit. There may be a bit of Internet jiggery-pokery going on here during the next week, but I hope it won’t throw anyone for a loop.

As always, send me an email if you have trouble.

Thanks,

Ted

UPDATE: If you are looking at this, you can see that some changes are already in effect. The Tags page has now been replaced with a page called Archives. Click on any tag and you’ll see excerpts of all the posts.

This is simple guide on the procedures for submitting content for the elpweb.com sites.

Please don’t email files to me!

Please make sure all files you drop in the Drop Box are clearly labelled! I will be deleting things with no clear purpose.

Please keep the originals of any documents or files you submit, as after I have added the content to the web sites I will delete the files from my computer.

I will add the content to the sites as soon as I can!

Just remember that I will do all the behind-the-scenes stuff to get it online.

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The better your search, the better the results you will get. If you try searching for something like Level 2, you will get way too much stuff. How can you find only what you really want? Use logic, specifically, boolean logic.

This logic isn’t hard, and once you learn it, it will help you to use sites like Yahoo and Google much better.

For the basics, you just need to know 3 things: +, -, and ” “. Those will do the job.

• + makes a word in the search mandatory
• - means the result cannot have that word
• “some words” means the result must have the exact phrase some words in it.

If you type reading writing in the search box, you will get anything with reading or writing in it. That’s not very helpful.

If you type +reading +writing in the search box, you will get anything with both reading and writing in it. That’s more useful.

If you type +reading -writing in the search box, you will get everything with reading and not writing in it. That’s more specific.

Try +”Level 3″ +reading to get all the Level 3 reading activities, but nothing from Levels 1 or 2.

OEKS may be offline from time to time today and tomorrow as I put the site behind password protection and work on a few other items.

Some people have been asking about how to find raw materials to use for writing lessons. Nice photos or other artwork go a long way to making materials look professional and appealing to students. I’m a horrible artist, so I have to copy. In the past, I used to use Google Image Search, but these days I use the Flickr photo sharing site to find photos that look good and are free to use.

Why are they free? Flickr makes it easy for photographers to license their photos for very liberal use and reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Try the Creative Commons Search Page on Flickr to find most anything you might need a photo of. You are pretty much free to copy, alter, and re-publish the photos (and there were a couple of million last time I looked) as long as you aren’t making money (and sometimes even if you are).

How can that work? Flickr has a very simple outline of your rights to use images under Creative Commons (CC). Or, if you really want to know the nitty-gritty, go direct to Creative Commons for more information.

By Premshree Pillai

By Snowy’s Good Things

By Slice

It took me all of a minute to find these three photgraphs, another minute to download them, but several minutes of cutting and pasting to give the authors due credit for their work. That’s the price of free photos that don’t violate intellectual property policies (even if your school has not yet mandated one). Well worth it in this case. You, me, and anyone else are free to use these images as we like, as long as we give the artists credit, pass the resulting work along under the same terms, and don’t charge for them.

You never know what people will be interested in. When presenting this site to the ELP meeting last week, the last thing I thought anyone would be interested in was the little webpage I had stuck in the footer of all of my pdfs.

Well, I tried my hand at a few for the ELP, and here they are:

And, finally my quicky attempt to match the Obirin logo colors

Just copy and pste anywhere you like. They are .png files, but use them just the way you would use .jpg files. If you don’t care for my rather uninspired color selections, actually that is one reason this site is so monochrome, make your own at Adam Kalsey’s World Famous Button Maker.