EdTech @ ADW

Here’s an article that claims that voicemail is dead. The writer cites the following reasons:

“It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.”

The writer warns you to think before you voicemail, because more and more people just find it annoying - and prefer to be emailed instead, especially if the message is important.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I was commissioned by Ed Tech to come up with a small Flash Application that reads the RSS feeds being generated from the college web site.
The specifications for this application were the following:

• It must be 230px x 110px in size.
• It must be built using Action Script 3.
• It must be able to display RSS feeds of the 10 most recent posts related to college events on the currently-being-developed Abu Dhabi Women’s College Web Site.
• It must enable display of 3 feeds at one time.

• Each feed being displayed must have active links: That is, be clickable and take the user to the appropriate web page associated with the RSS title being displayed.
• In addition, 3 invisible buttons were used, and links dynamically set for each of these buttons by referencing the link nodes in the RSS xml.

Below is a picture of the resulting feed. An XML parser class was used, and the XML nodes referenced to produce html output in each of the three text areas on the application.

A timer event is encoded on the main timeline of the application to trigger a change event every 8 seconds, causing a wipe transition to occur on current feeds, followed by loading of the next 3 events listed in the RSS XML.

This resulting application will not go online until the college web site goes live. When it does, it will be placed in the SharePoint college webpage, and alert all faculty to recent and current events within the college.

We’ll be launching an ADWC SharePoint Advanced User Certification in week 10 of semester 2.  Modules will include:

• working with web parts
• content type document libraries
• linking Outlook meetings and SharePoint meeting workspaces
• creating and working with views
• using surveys
• discussion boards
• advanced document libraries

This will be a competency based qualification, candidates will demonstrate competency on a live SharePoint site.

More details from Jean (498) or Tom (489).

This morning, the EdTech Department designed a number of posters for the Health Science Department to be used on a campus event next week.

You know we run this site with Wordpress, I guess. I’ve been looking at Wordpress Multi User for another site I’m working on and it’s pretty cool. It’s the stuff they run at Wordpress.com.

With Wordpress Multi User we could set up blogs for all students in the college, so they could all have their own blog.

Welcome to our new web site. We are the Educational Technology Department at Abu Dhabi Women’s College (ADW) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. We hope to be able to bring you news about issue sin educational technology and updated about what we’re working on.