Hi All,
I thought I would utilize your collective expertise once again! What are your current favorite software applications for wysiwyg webpage creation? I’ve lately been working with websites that have built-in web-based page editing, so I feel a bit out of touch. When you want to make a page from scratch, what do you prefer? Dreamweaver? FrontPage? BBEdit? Coffee Cup? Something else? Low-priced would be a definite bonus.
Thanks in advance,
Barbara

The overwhelming majority of folks from BAISNet seem to be voting for Dreamweaver, with many of us moving toward CMS technology and web-based page creation tools. Here’s my original email and a summary of responses:

I have used DreamWeaver in conjunction with BBEdit for about 7 years now. I love the wysiwyg, PHP, SQL integration in DreamWeaver and I wouldn’t part with BBEdit as my baseline text/html editor ever. I have used quite a few others (GoLive, Front Page…) but have always ended up back here.
~Chris

Ditto from me!
~Kathryn, Nueva

Go with the gold standard — Dreamweaver. Easy to understand, powerful. I have not had good experiences with FrontPage…MS adds to much fat to the html code.
-Matt

Barbara,
I still like the Macromedia tools, Dreamweaver, etc. You will probably qualify for a lab pack, about $500 for a lab set of the entire suite. Good deal.
Shelly, Hillbrook School

I use Dreamweaver, but I am really a novice. It came as a suite with flash etc.
Anne Marie Schar, Technology Director
Mid-Peninsula High School

Hi Barbara,
I like Taco HTML Edit, and it is free! It is made for the Mac OS (if that is what you have). I use it because I want my student to learn how to make basic HTML etc, etc.
http://tacosw.com/main.php
Best of luck,
Barney, The Carey School

We use the Macromedia Suite, which for a commercial product is very affordable as they charge a flat fee based on school enrollment. If you have lots of people who are doing web site development, it’s hard to beat since there are so many training resources available and you can get in deep or just wade in the shallow end of the pool.
iWeb is hard to beat in terms of ease-of-use, it’s free with new Macs, and will get better with time. Downside is that it really likes to publish to .Mac accounts and makes you jump through hoops for anything else. I’ve heard that the HTML it creates is not the most elegant.
~Steve, Castilleja

Hi Barbara,
I use Dreamweaver because it’s so simple. I have 4th grade students create a “my first web page” in Dreamweaver and if they can do it it’s gotta be Easy. Also, I use iPhoto all the time to create web pages of kids work beacause it is FAST! In the information box you can add a title and add text in the comments box. Then have it appear where you want it to appear. I can take these instant iPhoto pages into Dreamweaver and doctor them up. Here is an example where the photos and captions were done in iPhoto and
the page enhanced in Dreamweaver:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/05-06/third/milly/milly.html
Scanned work with text:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/05-06/third/3bpuppets/3bpuppets.html
KidPix:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/04-05/second/2astories/2astories.html
~Peggy, KDBS

We have given up on complete web site creation tools and moved to web-based content editors instead: blogs, CMS’s, and wikis (Wordpress, Nucleus, Plone, Drupal, Mambo, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, etc.). When instructing a class to post subject-related work or a program director to maintain his program web site, these systems allow the user to get directly to the content, usually the most important part. Web-based systems also provide functional tools that most WYSIWYG coders can’t build — comments, tags, subscriptions, and more. If you are seeking to teach design, you can teach how to modify the templates of such systems or create one’s own. Creating a solid
template and a concise CSS file are more authentic tasks for today’s web world than creating a static design from scratch.
Richard

re: CMS’s vs Web development tools
I agree wholeheartedly with the distinction that Richard brings up. What’s the goal of the lesson? The content or the tools to create vessel for the content? Or both? CMS’s allow you to focus entirely on the content without having to worry too much about the mechanics of producing a Web presentation.
Hoover, Schools of the Sacred Heart

RE: Hoover’s and Richard’s points:
I’d actually say CMS’s allow you the flexibility to learn css/html, or concentrate on content — content creation is much easier using any of the CMS options in this thread, and once you have the app up and running, creating a web page is as easy as typing and hitting submit –
However, if you want to learn html/css, you can dig into the theming engine of the app — this is a pretty safe and effective way to learn design, as you can create test/experimental themes to work with, while retaining the original (aka pretty/functional) theme as a point of reference. Also, on a tangential note, the Xinha firefox extension puts a WYSIWYG editor into your firefox browser — this gives you WYSIWYG editing on any textarea, on any web page — it can come in handy. — http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/
Cheers, Bill F.

Blogs We’re Reading, Podcasts We’re Listening To and Tools We’re Playing With:
As an informal mixer/warm-up to the topic, I asked everyone at the beginning of the meeting to introduce themselves, the schools they were from, and if appropriate, a favorite Web 2.0 resource they are currently using. This is the list of resources mentioned (be sure to add others as a comment below!):

1. Jon Udell’s Weblog
2. Knitting Blog
3. Moodle
4. Plone
5. Home Brewing podcasts
6. Daily Kos
7. Flickr
8. del.icio.us
9. Psychology podcasts
10. NY Times podcasts
11. eHub
12. Mozilla Sunbird
13. SF Chronicle Tech Talk Podcast
14. Poker podcasts
15. Blue Frontier
16. boingboing.net
17. Edublogs
18. Learnerblogs
19. ESLBlogs
20. Class Blogmeister
21. How to set up a student centered classroom blog

Visual Search Engines:
Our first presenter was Angela Neff, Director of Technology at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, who gave us a brief overview of what Web 2.0 is, with comparisons to various Web 1.0 tools and websites. She then presented a host of visual search engines and challenged us to break (or at least examine) the Google habit by experimenting with some of the cool tools listed below:

1. KarTOO
2. Mooter
3. Clusty
4. Grokker
5. Ujiko
6. Ditto.com

Podcasting:
The next presenter was Jason Stone, Director of Technology at San Francisco Day School, who spoke about how his 5th grade Spanish teachers and students have been experimenting with podcasting as a wonderful extension of the Spanish curriculum. While SFDS have been able to post MP3s to the website for years, they are excited about how podcasting lets users subscribe through aggregator (most students use iTunes). By using a stand-alone MP3 recorder, recording becomes really easy and not dependent on having a laptop handy. With the newest version of iLife, GarageBand makes podcasting really simple and Apple has a really good tutorial on creating and posting a podcast.

Plone Content Management Software for School Websites:
Next up was Preston Tucker from The College Preparatory School in Oakland. He took us through the stages of growth and development their school’s website has gone through over the years. As their original website grew, it slowly became un-navigable and untenable with over 600 separate pages, until finally his school asked him to move the website from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 structure. After studying and analyzing many other school websites, they decided to use Plone, an open-source CMS, to develop their new site. Some of the key advantages to their new site include:

1. Calendars, pictures, and news are now easily brought to the front of the site
2. If the school changes it’s branding, logo, colors, etc. it is easy to change
3. Searching and using the site mirrors an analogy of the simplicity of Google, rather than the drilling down through the links like Yahoo
4. Non-technical users put their information, documents, photos, etc. into forms that are controlled centrally and viewable by any browser
5. Students now beginning to be webmasters
6. Plone has a number of out-of-the-box import/export features for various document types

Using Moodle Course Management for a School Website:
Richard Kassissieh from San Francsico University High School was up next to talk about how UHS has moved from using WebCT to Moodle for many of their course listings and teacher interactions with students. He has made it easy for us to review his presentation by posting an outline of it here. I also mentioned the Moodle that is being built by the New York Consortium of Independent School Technologists (NY’s equivalent of BAISNET) and how it might be an interesting model for us to consider as well. Richard also spoke eloquently about the importance of teacher blogging, how it changes writing, how we ought to visit and support each other’s blogs, and how the voices of those of us who work directly in schools need to be added to the edublogosphere (which is already well represented by ed tech consultants.) Visit (and leave a comment on) Richard’s blog when you have a minute! If you have a blog of your own, please leave the URL in a comment below or email the info to BAISNet.

Talking to Students About MySpace:
We ended the BAISNet portion of the meeting with a presentation by Brad Lakritz from Marin Academy. He recreated a presentation he recently delivered to 9th and 10th graders at his school as part of a larger panel (including older MA students) on the topic of MySpace. One especially salient point was that he equated Web 2.0 technologies as being the “reality internet” outcropping of the reality TV shows, including many very real dangers and pitfalls. His school consciously made the decision to arm students with information and statistics about web usage and the public nature of MySpace, rather than using scare tactics. He gave the example of how his 16-year old daughter felt that giving him access to her MySpace account felt as though he was listening in on her private phone calls, yet she failed to understand just how very public her online communication was indeed.

At Least They Brought Yummy Food…
MCDS has been experimenting with inviting various vendors to school to deliver some of our professional development to teachers. Following the meeting we invited a vendor to present to BAISNet and some of our own faculty and…well…let’s just say that it was not a very effective presentation. Thanks for those of you who managed to sit there for what felt (to me) like an eternity. Personally, I vote for keeping BAISNet meetings BAISNet meetings. ‘Nuff said.

Conclusion:
Thanks to the wonderful presenters and to all of you who braved the rainy weather this afternoon! If you weren’t able to attend or are reading this entry from parts unknown, please feel free to add to our lists of resources, ask questions, leave comments, etc.

For a long time, I’ve been arguing that the days of the “computer teacher” are over, and that teachers will never become comfortable, self-sufficient or see the computer lab as anything more than another “specialty class” (like P.E., music or world languages) until tech coordinators stop enabling classroom teachers by enouraging the “come to the lab and I’ll put on a show” technique. And yet…sigh…I’m deep into my second year at MCDS and I fear that I’m guilty of setting up that exact dynamic. The majority of our weekly Mac Lab classes are planned on the fly in the cafeteria, then I scramble back to the Lab to set up a template or launch a website, and the teacher spends the first half of class in the role of another student while I teach the lesson. Stand and deliver. Despite every bone in my body telling me that it’s exactly the way NOT to teach this stuff. Sigh…

The conundrum, of course, is time. Time to meet ahead with teachers and grade level teams to plan out our projects properly. Time to work with individual teachers to help them explore, experiment and become more self-sufficient. Time to unshackle myself from the Lab and head into the classrooms with a projector, a mobile lab, a digital camera, to be where the authentic learning and natural fit for technology truly comes.

Yes…I know…there are computer skills to learn. Technology standards we want our students to meet. But when/where/how and by whom should these skills and standards be taught? How is your school doing it?